My published work takes multiple forms spanning research, critical writing, and art. These include book chapters and long-form essays, short form essays and reviews, visual essays and hybrid forms, and collaboratively authored texts and bibliographies. I publish across a wide range of platforms, in academic books and edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, print and online arts and culture publications._
Themes of labor justice, collective action, and community are recurring themes in my work. More recently, my work has examined connections between exploitative working conditions in the garment industry, the gig economy, and academia. My projects are often conceptually informed by research into working conditions and collective organizing in the garment and textile industries. History and the politics of history—how histories are written and by whom—is another thread that runs through much of this body of work. These investigations manifest in and across multiple forms of dissemination that may be written, visual, or a combination of both.
I often write about how and why contemporary artists are using fiber materials and techniques as part of individual and collective efforts to educate, foster community, and advocate for change. These critical writings are grounded in research into historical uses of textiles as part of social justice movements, and contextualized with reference to textiles' past and present connections to empire, conquest, trade, capital, labor exploitation, migration, and resistance.
I am co-editor of the book On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival, collaboratively edited with Isaac Facio, Nneka Kai and Anne Wilson. The publication is the first to explore the role of textiles in helping humans across cultures negotiate loss and grief.
Selected works:
LONG FORM ESSAYS and BOOK CHAPTERS
"Publish/Perish", Counter Signals Vol. 5, 2024
"Whitework Textiles, White Supremacy, and 'Whitework' as a Call to Action", Dilettante Army, Winter 2023
"The Subversive Stitch Revisited", in A Companion to Textile Culture, edited by Jennifer Harris. Wiley Companions to Art History. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020
"Outside the White Cube". In Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm 1930-present, edited by Alla Myzelev. London and New York: Routledge, 2017
"Victoria Stanton: Performance and the Art of Transaction". In Caught in the Act: Anthology of Performance by Canadian Women, Volume II, edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder. Toronto, Canada: YYZ Books, 2016
"Performing Globalization in the Textile Industry: Anne Wilson and Mandy Cano Villalobos". In The Handbook of Textile Culture, edited by Janis Jefferies, Hazel Clark, And Diana Wood Conroy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
VISUAL ESSAYS and HYBRID FORMS
"New Demands? Part I", Counter Signals 2, 2017
"New Demands? Part II",Counter Signals 4, 2021
SHORT FORM ESSAYS and REVIEWS
"SITE VISIT: Anne Wilson, Davis Street Drawing Room", Bridge Magazine, December 19, 2022
"Unsettling 'Women's Work". Catalog essay for Through Her Eye. Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2019
"Weaving Lab: Social + Science", Surface Design Journal, Summer 2019
COLLABORATIVELY AUTHORED WORKS
"Introduction: Textiles of Mourning and Survival". In On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago Press, 2025. Co-authored with Isaac Facio, Nneka Kai and Anne Wilson.
unsettling coloniality: a critical and radical fiber/textile bibliography, 2018. Distributed by Critical Craft Forum. Co-authored with Aram Han Sifuentes and Namita Gupta Wiggers.
"Crafting Community", Introduction to Crafting Community, a special issue of Textile: Cloth and Culture Vol.14 no.1, 2016. Co-Authored with Kirsty Robertson, PhD.