Social Threads: Making, Mending, and Maintaining Community

Social Threads Online Exhibit

Through design and creation, textile making practices have the capacity to build community, reconcile trauma, share history, and carry cultural heritage and knowledge across generations. It is the practice of making and mending that allows space for listening, growth, and even change. Social Threads: Making, Mending and Maintaining Community brings together objects from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection that exemplify how textiles constitute and sustain communities. Through three central themes, making, mending, and maintaining, Social Threads emphasizes how, through textiles, communities around the globe can share stories and create change.

Social Threads is curated by 19 students from the UW-Madison Art History seminar, Curatorial Studies Exhibition Practice. This exhibition was made possible with generous support from the Anonymous Fund.

This exhibition was on view in the Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery from September 13-December 3, 2023.