Kira Dominguez Hultgren: Open Studio Pop-up! @ Eleanor Harwood Gallery

Kira Dominguez Hultgren takes over the gallery August 4-8th to do an open studio pop-up! You can weave with her in the gallery (there are backstrap looms set up) or just come say hi while she picks up patterns in interactive altars and within oddly shaped frame looms.

Punjabi dhurrie weaving, Swedish linens, and other slantwise Indian zigzag stripes play across the gallery. Kira also has work in Video Craft at the Museum of Craft and Design on 3rd Street until August 16th.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren (b. 1980, she/they, Oakland, CA) is a 2024 Center for Craft Research Fund recipient, 2024 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship recipient, and a 2024 United States Artists Fellow.

They studied postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and studio arts and visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts. Their research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, re-storying material culture, and weaving as a performative critique of the visual. Dominguez Hultgren weaves with the material afterlife of a so-called multiracial family: Chicanx-Indigenous-Indian-Hollywood Hawaiian-Brown-Black. Instead of being passed down, weaving and textile processes are brought up, resurrected from family stories and fabrics. Questions about cultural appropriation and codeswitching, exoticism, and performing cultural misrecognitions occupy their practice.

Dominguez Hultgren has exhibited their work broadly including shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Ballroom Marfa, the San Jose Museum of Quilt and Textile, the Roswell Museum, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. Their public art projects include installations with the city of Berkeley, the city of Phoenix, and an upcoming installation at Stanford University’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies. 

When not in the studio, Dominguez Hultgren teaches weaving as an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies.