Threads of Identity at Scarab Club
This winter, The Scarab Club turns its focus to fiber art with Threads of Identity, an exhibition that celebrates textiles as vessels for storytelling, resistance, memory, and heritage. Woven, stitched, dyed, and layered, the works in this show explore how fabric holds history, both personal and collective, and how making can become a way of naming who we are and where we come from.
From hand-dyed patterns to embroidered symbols and woven narratives, Threads of Identity highlights the deeply personal expressions embedded in textiles. These works speak quietly and insistently, reminding us that cloth is never just cloth. It absorbs touch, time, and emotion. It remembers.
I’m honored to be showing two pieces displayed at the bottom of this post from my ongoing All Shook Up.
The All Shook Up series centers on fragmented memory, domestic inheritance, and the uneasy ways the past echoes through the present. Using fiber as both material and metaphor, these pieces grapple with recognition—of self, of family, of the stories we carry long after we think we’ve outgrown them. In the context of Threads of Identity, the work feels especially at home, in conversation with other artists using textiles to examine lineage, protection, loss, and belonging.
Exhibition Details
Opening Reception:
Friday, February 6, 2026
5:30–8:30 pm EST
On View:
Through Sunday, March 8, 2026
Location:
The Scarab Club
Detroit, Michigan
If you’re local, or passing through, this is a beautiful opportunity to experience fiber art that asks you to slow down and look closely. These are works that reward intimacy, that reveal themselves stitch by stitch, much like identity itself.
I hope to see you at the opening!
After all these years who is that staring back at me?
Medium: Digital thermal print scans printed on velvet, cotton thread, vinyl, batting. Handsewn.
Title Origin: A distorted quote from a family member’s social media account.
Image Origins: Hunting photographs from the color slide film archive of my grandfather-in-law, Ted; cellphone image of my hand.
Size: 63” x 105” x 2”
Year: 2023
because you're safe
Medium: Digital thermal print scans printed on velvet, cotton thread, vinyl, batting. Handsewn.
Title Origin: A distorted transcription of an interview my paternal grandmother, Carol, gave during an interview she gave on the day of my wedding.
Image Origins: Film photographs from my paternal grandmother’s first wedding; my grandmother’s reflection in the dressing room mirror; her hand clasped in the hand of her new husband’s, my grandfather Normand Blanchette; cellphone photo of my hand.
Size: 35” x 33” x1”
Year: 2023
