Fiber Fellowship
The Fiber Fellowship is a collaboration between Arts & Crafts and the Art Department that supports a Visiting Artist to join 91Â鶹ӳ» each semester. This Fellowship continues the long history of Fiber education within the Arts and Crafts program and at 91Â鶹ӳ». In 2023 a newly renovated fibers studio was completed and offers opportunities for students and staff across the College to learn about the history and contemporary practices within the field. This program will introduce students to contemporary artists working in the field and provide a unique opportunity to build a wide range of fiber knowledge based on the interests and work of individual artists.
During their time on campus the Visiting Artists will be in residence and create new work, which will be exhibited and shared at the culmination of the program. In addition, they will teach a block class in fibers, and design co-curricular workshops for Arts and Crafts. This unique partnership intends to build deep connections with the artists and 91Â鶹ӳ» community and connect them to the many resources available.
Each year we will host two visiting artists (Fall/Spring), and applications for the upcoming academic year will be available each Spring.
Fiber Fellows
Jesse Satterfield, 2025 Fall Visiting Artist
Jesse Satterfield was raised in a tourist trap on the Jersey Shore and spent his adolescence working as a carnival barker and boardwalk game-operator, handing out fuzzy, stuffed prizes to sunburnt New Yorkers with bad attitudes. He suffered for several years as a fine art framer, production seamster, upholsterer, and workroom manager in the commercial interior design industry before returning to Fine Art and Academia. He holds an MFA in Textiles from Kent State University, as well as an MA in Critical Studies and BFA in Fibers from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
As an artist and writer, Satterfield creates work to explore his complicated identification and dis-identification with Queer aesthetics, experiences, and environments through conceptual and physical processes. The word queer is also a verb: To queer is to upset hetero-normative structures by drawing attention to unique identities, by interrogating monocultures, and by celebrating social / sexual divergence. Weaving and sewing are the primary techniques used in the creation of his queered objects and spaces. His work is a meditation on gay loneliness in the current age of digital gay-male sociality made material in a series of dye-painted and handwoven tapestries. He abstracts form, amplifies saturation, and alters compositions of images sourced from digital cruising grounds to create weavings of an otherworldly environment. Each tapestry embodies a sense of self-inflicted ennui, a self-defeating act of seeking connection while simultaneously hiding oneself behind banal and insipid landscapes. Through the remediation of photographs of sunrises and sunsets posted by gay men as placeholders for their own portraits on social media apps, he creates queer textiles, that whisper seductively hushed desires while screaming “look at me, see how I shine”.
Satterfield was recently invited to show his works in two group shows, at the Anton Art Center and Irwin Art Center, as part of I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections of the Contemporary Queer, a Biennial Exhibition presented by Mighty Real Queer Detroit in the Summer of 2024. His works have also been included as part of: Common Threads: National Juried Exhibition 2024 at Gallery 130 at the University of Mississippi; New & Now: Emerging Ohio Artists 2023 at the Ohio Designer Craftsmen Museum in Columbus, OH; Praxis & Practice: Digital Weaving Exhibition 2023 in conjunction with the first International Praxis & Practice: Digital Weaving Conference in Cleveland, OH. His solo exhibition, Cruising Dystopia: Wallflowers of the Week was on view March 8th – April 19th, 2024 at Curated Storefront’s Avant Garden Gallery in Akron, OH and his interactive installation, Oh, Susannah: A Carpet Quilt for Grandma Sue and You was on view at INSIDE at OUTSIDE THE BOX in Akron, OH from June 22nd – August 24th, 2024. Jesse Satterfield received a 2025 Finalist Award from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts.
Malavika Rao, 2025 Spring Visiting Artist
malavika rao is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working across painting, ceramics, fiber, video, and installation. malavika’s practice explores homemaking as a method of worldmaking, drawing on ancestral knowledge, inherited materials, and the temporal powers of crafting to construct portals to the past and imagine alternative narratives for the future. Through their work, malavika collaborates with their community to build and sustain spaces of healing, care, and liberation, and articulate resistance to dominant familial and social power structures.
malavika received their BA from Kalamazoo College and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. They have taught at Otis College of Art and Design, California Institute of the Arts, Craft Contemporary, and Heavy Manners Library. Their work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Richmond, as well as internationally in Bangalore, India. Most recently, malavika was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center. malavikacurrently resides in Los Angeles, where they organize and facilitate free educational workshops across the city.
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Naomi Falk, Fall 2024 Visiting Artist
Naomi grew up in the wilds of Michigan and, from an early age, planned to be an archaeologist, a brain surgeon, a heart surgeon, a meteorologist, and travel the world with Jacques Cousteau (He was an underwater explorer and conservationist and made films for tv about his adventures). Those didn’t work out, but she did study sculpture and ceramics at Michigan State and Portland State Universities and receive an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Falk’s work considers grief, loss, and communal and environmental survival. How might foraged materials be gathered and reframed to build objects and experiences that comfort, support, challenge, and sustain us? Falk has exhibited at well-respected regional and national venues and done residencies in Iceland, Vermont, the Faroe Islands, and most recently, at Hambidge Center and The Residency Project. An Associate Professor of Studio Art in Sculpture at the University of South Carolina, she is Co-Creator of and a new local art collective, .
José Santiago Pérez, Spring 2024 Visiting Artist
José Santiago Pérez is an artist and educator based in Chicago who weaves containers of time, vessels of transformation, speculative portals, and spaces of belonging. José is a 2022 Resident Fellow at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Art Museum, and a 2019-2020 HATCH resident at Chicago Artists Coalition. His work has been supported by an Illinois Arts Council Agency grant, a DCASE Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago, and a Chicago Artists Coalition SPARK grant. Recent solo exhibitions include Portalisms at Boundary in Chicago and Shimmerings of the Not Yet (T)Here at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. José has presented craft and performance based work in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, South Bend, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rockland, Maine. Features and reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Basketry+ Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, Newcity Art, Art Intercepts, and the Archives + Futures Podcast. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies department.
John Fifield-Perez, Fall 2023 Visiting Artist
John Fifield-Perez is a textile artist and educator with a material-based conceptual practice. His work centers themes of queerness, intimacy, and the romantic ideal through the formal language of abstraction. He has spent the past seven years teaching at Kent State University, the University of Missouri—Columbia, and The University of Iowa in his capacities as a Special Collections librarian and as a graduate student.
John has recently been recognized for his artistic achievements through the Surface Design Association, American Tapestry Alliance, and the Ohio Craft Museum. He holds an M.F.A. in Studio Arts from Kent State University, an M.A. in Library and Information Science with a certificate in Book Arts from The University of Iowa, and a B.M. in French horn performance from Oklahoma State University.