SDA 2025: A Year in Review

December 19, 2025

Thank you to everyone who made this year at SDA possible! We are fortunate to have such passionate staff, board, volunteers, committees, and members who continually help us grow, learn, and expand. Here’s a look back at some highlights from SDA for 2025, and we can’t wait to see what comes next in 2026! 

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All Hands: Crafting Connections

SDA 2025 CONFERENCE

The relationship between artist and community is symbiotic. The artist needs an audience to interact with their art, and the community benefits from the experience art offers. Some projects forge new paths through community participation. Others are inextricably bound to specific places, peoples, or things. And for many projects, all of these elements culminate in the work of art. Community Art brings people together and highlights what we share in common. SDA’s 2025 Symposium, All Hands: Crafting Connections explored some of the many models that community art can take and how we can continue to forge new approaches.

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Felting: Wet & Dry

SPRING 2025 SURFACE DESIGN JOURNAL

“This issue of Surface Design Journal highlights the material and cultural qualities of wool and the practice of felting across the world…It would seem that no matter where you are located in the world, wool and the practice of felting continue to be celebrated as both cultural heritage and part of a sustainable future.” –Elizabeth Kozlowski, Surface Design Journal Editor

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Classics Reimagined

ONLINE EXHIBITION

Classics Reimagined explores the endurance of fiber art over centuries and the ways that contemporary artists reimagine, reinvent, or update “classics” for our contemporary moment. It asks: What makes something classic? Is it a pattern, colorway, technique, form, concept, or another aspect of artistic practice? Thirty artists bring their unique perspectives to this exhibition, with themes including the environment, democracy, and humanity. Some artists reimagine traditional forms like quilts and samplers, while others deconstruct techniques or stitch new life and meaning into found materials. Pattern, fragility, dynamic interplays of positive and negative space, abstraction, and figuration are just some of the elements reimagining classic forms. Classics Reimagined offers insight into how contemporary artists use age-old techniques and materials mixed with new, creative concepts to look to the past, present, and future of fiber art. –Helen Adams, Guest Curator

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SDA Workshops

SPRING & FALL SESSIONS

SDA offered 16 amazing workshops in 2025! Split between Spring and Fall sessions, we offered a wide range of skills from Textile Sensors and Soft Switches (with Victoria Manganiello) and Soft Sculpture (with Natalie Baxter) to Introductory Bojagi (with Youngmin Lee) and more! Spanning Saturday to Saturday, learn, grow, and meet like-minded textile enthusiasts in our workshops featuring 2 hour instruction sessions on the weekends and a midweek meetup to troubleshoot, share progress, and gather in community with other participants. We have more workshops available in 2026, so check them out! 

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Spaces Between

ONLINE EXHIBITION

Held in partnership with Florida CraftArt, Spaces Between explores edges, thresholds, and borders, whether cultural, environmental, psychological, or physical. Highlighting work made with a fibers sensibility—including traditional and cross-disciplinary materials, techniques, and practices, as well as experimental processes and material innovation—juror Akiko Kotani selected 30 artworks from more than 385 submissions that cultivate a deeper understanding of in-between spaces and what it can mean to navigate through and reside within them.

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Modern Weavers / New Spirit

SUMMER 2025 SURFACE DESIGN JOURNAL

“This issue takes a deep dive into contemporary weaving while acknowledging a long list of modern innovators whose threads can be located in contemporary approaches. As Patricia Malarcher points out, ‘textile art produced since the mid-20th century is being re-examined as an integral part of recent art history.’ Whether Wall Hangings has stood the test of time or rather marks a point in our history, albeit an incomplete one, the influence of the artists represented including Sekimachi, Amaral and others cannot be contested.” –Elizabeth Kozlowski, Surface Design Journal Editor

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FUTURE TENSE 2025

STUDENT EXHIBITION

FUTURE TENSE 2025 celebrates the creative work of student artists, designers, and makers working with or inspired by fiber or textile materials or techniques, and offers a glimpse into the future of contemporary fibers by presenting the very best work being made by students in the field today. Juried by Ann Morton and on view at The University of Arizona’s Joseph Gross Gallery (Tucson, AZ) this exhibition featured 28 works by 22 artists who are eligible for awards recognizing excellence in artistic practice. Joseph Gross Gallery hosts exhibitions intended to bring the vastness of contemporary art from outside the region to our students in the school of art to advance critical connections within their education, and to promote public discourse among University of Arizona students and faculty as well as the larger Tucson and Southern Arizona communities and beyond. The Gallery prioritizes co-created and experimental approaches to exhibitions.

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Meetups

CONNECT WITH OTHER SDA MEMBERS

SDA Meetups connected individuals from around the globe in virtual groups based on disciplines and/or shared interests. Whether you’re looking to be in conversation with other makers about studio practices, interdisciplinary approaches, working with different materials, exploring a regenerative practice within your work, just to name a few. SDA hosted over 20 meetups this year and we can’t wait to offer more in 2026! 

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Emulate, Recreate, Translate, SDA International Exhibition in Print

FALL 2026 SURFACE DESIGN JOURNAL

“This year’s Exhibition in Print challenged artists to think about the ways fiber can be emulated, recreated and translated into other qualities and contexts. Whether that’s through metaphor or materiality, culture, language and more, this year’s EIP pushes what forms fiber can become from many different perspectives.” –Lauren Sinner, SDA Managing Editor & Co-Juror

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Crafting Tomorrow

SMALL GROUP EXHIBITION

Art can be a portal to other worlds. It can offer us glimpses into the future and ways to shape the present. Crafting Tomorrow featured five artists whose work explores what our lives, communities, and environment could look like in many possible futures. A day, a year, or a hundred years from now, how will visions of tomorrow trace back to today and reach even further into the past? How can our current engagement with urgent issues influence these trajectories? Whether an artist’s vision is utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in between, these creative projections offer us ways to understand where we are now as much as where we are going tomorrow. Held in partnership with SDA, LA Artcore, Textile Arts LA, and juried by Fafnir Adamite, this exhibition highlighted fiber and textile-based materials and techniques, including traditional and cross-disciplinary practices, experimental processes, and material innovation, this exhibition showcases artists who are “crafting tomorrow”.

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Textile Talks

ONLINE EVENTS

SDA hosted 10 Textile Talks in partnership with the International Quilt Museum, Quilt Alliance, and the Studio Art Quilt Associates that featured presentations and panel discussions from SDA and our wider fiber art community! Textile Talks are presented free of charge. If you enjoy these talks, help ensure they continue with a gift today.

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Traditions and Persistence – coming soon! 

WINTER 2025 SURFACE DESIGN JOURNAL

“This issue of Surface Design Journal is dedicated to Latinx writers and artists from the Americas or, as it conventionally referred to: Latin America, which is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the planet. Uneasily, the term Latin America suggests a homogeneous group of people and attempts to bind together a diverse, multiethnic and multicultural peoples into one vast geographical region, while also underlining colonization from Europe. This couldn’t be further from the truth. With a spirit of inclusivity and cultural equity, I invited an international mix of historians, curators, art critics and artists to share their unique perspectives and powerful stories. These amazing and diverse contributors bring viewpoints from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the U.S., Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, and beyond. Their discussions of contemporary art practices explore culture, heritage, history, natural resources and political geography, offering visibility and representation that deepen our understanding of textile art’s enduring legacy across time and locales.” –Giannina Coppiano Dwin, Guest Editor

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Call to Action

COMMUNITY SUPPORT

As a small, member-supported organization, we’re proud of all that we’ve accomplished this year. Your membership and support has cultivated a community where innovation, exploration, and artistic growth has flourished for nearly 50 years. Thank you!

This year has not come without challenges. The National Endowment for the Arts was hit by the fallout from federal government changes. Previously awarded funds were rescinded, and future grants—including ours—were dead on arrival. SDA was expecting news of $20,000 to support our special Winter 2025 guest editor issue, Traditions and Persistence. This grant was important funding for an ambitious journal to highlight Latinx writers and artists from the Americas as they explore the complexity of indigeneity, migration, and persistence in the face of environmental change. This unexpected blow comes at a particularly difficult time as costs are continually rising, and we work hard to ensure we’re paying writers and artists fairly.

We continue to fight—advocating for equity, standing firm in our values of speech and artistic freedom, and building partnerships that strengthen our community. Critically important, we want to let you know that in the face of the national cultural landscape here in the US, we stand firmly in support of all of our members, especially those in underserved and targeted populations. Our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility is unwavering. While others have been shying away, we’re doubling down.

The reality is difficult, however, and working together as we move forward is vital. We are calling on our community to stand with us during this critical time. We have the goal to raise $20,000, to cover the loss of our NEA grant, by the end of the year so that we can bring the vision of our winter journal to life. As a member-supported, member-driven organization, this support is essential to SDA. Please consider making a gift to SDA today to help us reach our goal. Collectively, we can make a difference.

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Exciting things coming up in 2026:

• Surface Design Journal 2026 Submissions: Are you interested in submitting an article for Surface Design Journal? We truly value the work, viewpoints, and perspectives of our members and fiber community and would love to hear from you.
• SDA Workshops 2026: Learn new skills and techniques, get inspired, and find ways to apply what you learn to your current studio practice, all while connecting and creating within SDA’s community.
• SDA’S 2026 Online Symposium – Fiber & Form: Tactile Acts of Threading Space: February 7–12. Fiber artists are no longer confined to the wall. They are weaving, knotting, binding, and constructing works that refuse to be flattened or silenced. As artists across disciplines reach for the language of fiber, to speak of memory, justice, and belonging, fiber artists are stepping boldly into three dimensions. 

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Have something that you’re thankful for and want to celebrate and share with SDA’s community? Comment below to let people know!

Cheers to 2025, I hope everyone’s holidays are filled with warmth and joy.

–Lauren Sinner, SDA Managing Editor