2025 Year in Review!

January to May, 2025.

The Year Starts Small

Micro shows were the big thing at the start of the year – I had a show at Jill Narhstedt’s Far Northside Gallery and then I organized a group micro show at the Oak Park Art League in May.

Spring and Summer, 2025.  

Quilts, Travel and Inspiration

I finished making most of these quilt tops last year, in the fall of 2024. And I even quilted one or two of them, but by February of this year, all of them were really, really finished, binding and all, and ready to be in my solo show.

Fall 2025. Solo show at Art Reach of Mid Michigan, studio work and Terrain Biennial.

Solo Show!

This was the highlight of the year – solo show at Art Reach of Mid Michigan! My largest solo show to date and the debut of The Healing Quilts! The quilts – you walk into them – a motion sensor senses you and then the audioscape begins. The audio was contributed by people from all over the world. One quilt is “Things I Need to Hear You Say,” and the other is, “Things I Need to Say to You.”

Read more about Terrain and the scrolls in this Studio News – November 2025 blog post.

All year, plus October. Teaching at libraries and presenting at the Maker Summit in Chicago.

Teaching

I absolutely love all my teaching gigs, and it is truly rewarding to help people get over their fears of the sewing machine, learn to use it, and make their first project. I kind of wish I’d kept count, but I know I’ve helped dozens and dozens of people make a French seams tote bag and scrunchies. Maker Labs in libraries are an amazing resource. Students have said things as they sew such as, “This is exhilarating!” and I’ve been thanked for helping people not be afraid of the machine.  (I don’t post about my library workshops on social media in advance because they fill really quickly without my help!  Plus, if you live in district for the library, you’re already getting the information.)

September to October 2025.  The amazing, gorgeous and huge public art installation at the Orland Park Public Library!

Public Art and More

Speaking of libraries, I was thrilled to work with the terrific staff at the Orland Park Public Library to install this public art piece on the outside of the windows, and the show of regular sized work on the inside, images above. This is my largest work to date. Hmm, I guess that’s the theme for the year, Micro and Huge.

More cool things! I was in UPPERCASE Magazine, issue 61! And I’m in training to be a Singing Mamas Group Leader!

If you only know me as an artist, you don’t know that I’ve always sung, I was in choir, I was in musicals, I took voice lessons. Singing Mamas is a U.K. thing, it’s singing for well-being, not a concept that we really have here much in the U.S. Singing Mamas is like a B-Corp, the U.K. equivalent, and over there, postpartum mums can get a referral from their doctor to go to a Singing Mamas group. It’s been shown to be as effective as one-on-one therapy! (Therapy is also great!) Imagine getting a scrip to go sing!

In a Singing Mamas group, women who are pregnant, or have babies and/or toddlers, come together to sing songs that they learn by ear. No sheet music, no performances, it’s singing for the joy of it! Plus, new mums can meet each other and make connections in their communities!

I’m in the final weeks of my training and hope to launch Chicago-area groups early next year. There will be a new website just for that, but here’s my first public announcement!

Inspiration

The inspiration for my Year in Review posts are the annual questions from Alyson Stanfield of the Art Biz Success. She emails the list out to subscribers each December and I’ve been doing them for years. One of the things she asks is what art shows did you go see?

I visited at least 9 museums, 15 galleries and saw 2 plays. It feels like we usually see more plays than that, but we’ve been busy. We did a big family trip last year to a major city and walked our feet off being tourists and going to museums. After that, it made me want to make more of an effort to see all the great art we have here at home. This year I hit all the big Chicago museums: Art Institute Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and the Chicago History Museum. (Next year, I’ll go visit some of the smaller museums I’ve never been to.)

I also visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Chazen Art Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, and the National Button Museum in Muscatine, Iowa! All three of those were excellent.  I stopped at the Button Museum as part of my Residency Road Trip.

View of a work in progress, sewing the hanging sleeve on to the back of a quilt by hand. This is the back of “We Can’t Afford to Live on Love,” which is about 40″ wide.

Learning

I don’t take many classes or workshops, because well, I already know how to make the art I want to make. But I did take a very fun class in dyeing with Buckthorn, which is an invasive tree. That was at The Waste Shed. I studied block carving and silkscreening with Alexandra Blom. And I attended conferences in women’s history, feminist art history, the business of art and that Maker Summit where I presented. (I do love conferences, learning, and giving speeches.)

The other big thing I learned this year was how to hand-stitch hanging sleeves on to the back of quilts.  I also learned that I can sew at least the top edge on by machine, if I plan ahead and sew that on before I add the binding.

Betsy Zacsek at The Cabinet of Secret Art performance and show at the Oak Park Art League; Marea Cordero and I after installing my show at Orland Park Public Library; Alexandra Blom with her show at AKG @ OPAL.

Terrain host and Elaine; Christina Cornier; Lynn Carson Harris, the hand of the artist and my lantern at the Berwyn Lantern Parade to stand in for new friends who I don’t have pictures of!

Connections

I’m not a big selfie-taker, so when I have photos that I am also in, it’s usually because the other person took it! Thank you, friends who always take photos! These are just some of the wonderful people I’ve worked with this year! Many more wonderful artists, friends and family not pictured.

I enjoyed collaborating with all these folks, and my teens, Dulce Rodriguez, who has documented so many of my projects, including still photos and drone videos, and all the artists in the group micro show at OPAL and all the AKG micro shows throughout the year!  Thanks to the wonderful staffers at the Orland Park Public Library, Art Reach of Mid Michigan and the Oak Park Art League.  Thanks to friends who show up for art openings!  And drag me out to galleries when I’d just as soon stay home and make stuff in my studio.

Being an artist can feel like a crazy endeavor sometimes.  It’s essential to have artist friends!