Prisma Andrade, "Maria Romero Andrade" (detail)
Future Tense 2026
August 25 – October 31, 2026
Grunwald Gallery of Art
Indiana University
1201 E. Seventh Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
Join us for the reception on Friday, September 4, 6 to 8pm.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
JUROR
ONLINE GALLERY
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
FUTURE TENSE 2026, held in partnership with Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery of Art, celebrates the creative work of student artists, designers, and makers working with or inspired by fiber or textile materials or techniques. This annual exhibition offers a glimpse into the future of contemporary fibers by presenting the very best work being made by students in the field today
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
The present is (in)tense and uncertain. It feels overwhelming and disorienting. So much so that envisioning a future for a field of artistic practice (let alone a future for planetary life) may seem like a futile endeavor. Another strained uncertainty.
Nevertheless, the student artists in FUTURE TENSE 2026 remind us that worldmaking is a creative act that is collective, multifaceted, and crafted with care. Its expressive labors carry the expanding field of fiber art onward to unknown tomorrows. Their work – from across the U.S. and Canada, and in proximity to global migrations – celebrates and experiments with traditions and innovations in practices that center fiber and textiles with skill, generosity, and courage.
In the Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, digital jacquard weaving, hand quilting, and knitting become architectural and archival structures. The additive logic of needlework stitches poetic language and anxious syntax. Text becomes pulpy substrate and image. The haptic nature of crafted objects form nostalgic talismans and invitations for relationality. Material culture is repurposed, reused, and recontextualized on and off the picture plane. Facets of lived experience, identity, the spatialized complexities of belonging, and inter-generational bonds are materialized into imagery, pattern, surface, structure, and volume. Formal, technical, and material inquiries generate threads for further investigation. Mediums mesh and merge. Things are re-membered. Selves are (re)made. Embodied knowledge is carried on. As it has before. As it will again. And again.
Together, the works in this exhibition offer propositions for imagining fiber futures that are rooted in tactile technologies operating in the present; that move between tradition and experimentation, reach across disciplines, and hold (complicated) connections with honesty and tenderness. In this gathering of student artists, fiber-based and textile-informed practices are fiercely futuring under/over/around/ through/with-in unprecedented structural tensions. They are crafting possible horizons we can sense here and (almost) touch now. José Santiago Pérez
Juror Bio
José Santiago Pérez is an artist and educator who crafts sculptural series in varying scales that consider the formal and conceptual spaciousness of containers as a category of object and field of experimentation. José has presented solo and group exhibitions across the country. Features and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Basketry+ Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, Newcity Art, and the Archives + Futures Podcast. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an Teaching Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Pittsburgh. Residencies and awards include Regional Artist Residency at Contemporary Craft, Surf Point Foundation Artist Residency, Fiber Fellowship at Colorado College, Illinois Arts Council Agency Artist Fellowship Finalist in Craft, Lunder Institute for American Art Residential Residency, and HATCH Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition.
