Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and educator. She is founder of The Lace Archive, The Crit Lab graduate-level critical seminars for artists, and MAPSpace project space and residency program.
statement
Can an object embody an act of resistance, without replicating the modes of repression?
The female body is a center of creation and a space of continual occupation. My large-scale textile works are purposefully feminine, resilient, with a small ecological footprint, a response to the intensely anti-female culture of this moment. The machismo of big installations- hard, heavy, resource hungry, motivates me to create objects that are responsive, adaptable, collapsable, able to grow in scale without a corresponding destructive use of resources. I use a binary to disrupt a binary; strength and softness are equally undeniable, in a beautiful almost monstrous femininity. A body that refuses to comply.
Textile touches our bodies from birth to death, it records visceral histories in its fibers. The work is comprised of textiles found and donated to the Lace Archive, an ongoing community archive of donated lace and histories from women around the world. The aggregation of tiny stitches of lace into room-size works is a tangible document of women’s labor, evidence of the hidden economy of care that circulates inside the domestic sphere and outside commodified masculine spaces. The work is alternately dyed with historic natural colors such as cochineal, a material that carries a long history of trade and conquest, then hand sewn into large sculptures and wall works. Clothing is identity-forming architecture for the body, it alters it in repressive and liberatory ways. The oversize skirt sculptures are erotic metaphors for women’s lives, they shelter and nurture, conceal and reveal, resist and liberate, care and love. The ties of aprons read as forlorn arms in search of a body to wrap around. The sculptures contain slits that open to the interior without possibility of entry; inside hangs ghostly clothing or bibles hand-dyed red in lace girdle books.
Making this work is an act of mending, remembering, collecting, and preserving. My work is a feminist manifesto of softness.
bio
Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, educator, and founder of the artist-run orgs The Crit Lab and MAPSpace, where she developed residencies in Port Chester, Peekskill, and Italy. In 2021 she founded the Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of donated lace works and family histories. She has been awarded residencies at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, I-Park, Weir Farm, Vermont Studio Center, and Julio Valdez Printmaking Studio, and been Visiting Artist at Vermont Studio Center, the Heckscher Museum, and University of Utah. She has received grants from Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (2021); two artist grants from ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts (2014/21); an Anonymous Was a Woman Covid19 Relief Grant (2021), and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth (2004-5). Miranda has developed education programs for K-12, museums, and institutions, including Franklin Furnace, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution. She is a noted expert on the history and use of natural dyes and pigments, and teaches about environmentally sustainable art practices. As faculty at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts (2005-19) she led the first study abroad program in Prato, Italy (2017). Her work has been exhibited at 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, NH), Jane Street Art Center, Garrison Art Center (Hudson Vallery, NY) ODETTA Gallery, Williamsburg Art+Historical Center, The Clemente Center, ABC No Rio, and Wave Hill (NYC); The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery at UConn Avery Point, (Groton, CT); the Cape Museum of Fine Art, (Cape Cod MA); and the Belvedere Museum, (Vienna Austria). Her solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center (2021) was featured in the Brooklyn Rail.