Saturday, May 18 | 3pm - 5pm (come and go as you please)
Outside in the MMAM Gardens | Free
Admission required for gallery visits. The workshop will be moved indoors in case of inclement weather.
MMAM will host a public Weaving Water Workshop on Saturday May 18 from 3:00-5:00pm (come and go as you please). Registration is preferred, but not required. Drop in and become a part of a pop-up public indigo and fiber art studio designed by Minneapolis artist Sarah Nassif. Sarah and her Weaving Water Workshops create space for people to gather, play with natural dye and fiber, and share personal connections to textile traditions, water bodies and the Mississippi River. Water is integral to every stage of cloth production, and our shared past, present and future hinges on our collective care for it.
You will transform plain cloth through a series of steps: folding and binding, wetting it in water collected from the Mississippi River, dipping the bundle in an organic indigo dye vat, and unfolding it to reveal the pattern made. These dyed materials are transformed once more as you weave them into new cloth on a SAORI loom, obscuring the patterns as they become part of a new whole. The resulting community-created fabric will become part of Karen Goulet and Monique Verdin’s exhibition Aabijijiwan / Ukeyat yanalleh.
There is also a longer workshop May 17 - 18, 9am - 5pm, Weaving Water Workshop: Natural Plant Dyes. Registration is required for the Weaving Water Workshop.
About the artist
Sarah Nassif
Sarah Nassif is a self-taught social-practice artist living in Minneapolis, MN. Born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1973, she grew up near Portland, Oregon, and lived in Colorado, Ireland and around the Pacific Northwest through her 20’s. She received her B.S. in Botany from the University of Washington in 1997 and worked in environmental education, forestry and data analysis before moving to the Twin Cities in 2000. She began her art practice in 2005 in earnest, integrating her botany expertise with her love of all kinds of handcraft.
In her community-engaged art projects, Sarah Nassif connects people, plants and place through sensory exploration of natural and human-built environments, hands-on skills practice, and person-to-person sharing. Her work incorporates media across the fiber art spectrum, natural dyes and inks, mapping, sound and video. She has been the recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Metro Regional Arts Council, and Jerome Foundation.
Website:sarahnassif.com/. Instagram:@sarahjnassif
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.