Project Space Exhibitions Opening

Valaria Tatera is a Wisconsin based visual artist, activist, lecturer, curator and an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Valaria graduated with a MFA in 3-D from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Her work explores the impact of colonization on Indigenous erasure, visibility and resilience. The
intention is “for the work to indigenize and hold space for statistics that often erase the individual”. She is a recipient of the 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Art micro grant and the 2022 Mary Nohl fellowship for the established artist category. Recently, her work has been exhibited at the Haggerty Museum, Mitchell Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Madeline Island Museum, Trout Museum, Wyoming Museum, All My Relations Gallery, Truax Gallery Madison College and Sweet Briar College. She is a co-curator of No More Stolen Sisters. Her work can be found on instagram valariatatera_art or at valariatatera.com

Rachel Eng is a Pennsylvania-based artist working in a variety of materials. She earned her MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder and her BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Eng has shown her work at The Springfield Museum of Art (Springfield, OH; 2023), Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ; 2022), The Clay Studio (Philadelphia, PA; 2020), and Flecker Gallery (Long Island, NY; 2020). She has held residencies at McColl Center (Charlotte, NC), Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan), and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Newcastle, ME), among others. Eng was selected as a NCECA Emerging Artist in 2017. She currently lives in Carlisle, PA with her husband and son, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Dickinson College.

Greg Climer’s textile work has been shown in the Museum of Art and Design (NYC), The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NYC), The DeYoung Museum (San Francisco, CA), The Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC), The Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco, CA), the International Fibre Art Triennial 2019, and many galleries.

In addition to working as an artist, he also works as a fashion designer. He has worked on the design teams for Victoria’s Secret Runway Show, Karl Lagerfeld, Imitation of Christ, John Bartlett, and on many broadway shows and movies. After 13 years on the faculty at Parsons School of Design, he relocated to San Francisco to join the faculty of California College of the Arts.

IG: gregoryclimer

Erika Diamond is a textile-focused artist, curator, and educator based in Asheville, NC. Born in Germany to two ballet dancers, she grew up backstage and touring across Europe in her adolescence. This gave her early insight into the ephemeral nature of touch, the expressive qualities of the body, and the transformative capabilities of costume. In 2000, she earned a degree in Sculpture at RISD, experimenting with bronze, honey, performance, and chocolate. For the next 12 years she maintained a studio practice while working as a freelance artist assistant and art preparator in NYC, Los Angeles, and Charlotte. She was the sole proprietor of a specialty chocolate company from 2004-2010.

Diamond received her MFA in Fibers from the Craft/Material Studies department at VCU where she learned how to weave tapestry, commemorate her physical encounters through objects, and identified her preoccupation with mortality. Since then, she has lived nomadically, making her own work and teaching textile classes in Richmond, Milwaukee, Denver, NYC, and Penland. Several residencies and grants have facilitated her recent projects focusing on the politics of queer safety and visibility. Most recently, she has exhibited at Dinner Gallery, Form & Concept Gallery, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh. She has been reviewed in Metalsmith Magazine, Glasstire, and Whitehot Magazine. In the summers, as Associate Director of Galleries at Chautauqua Institution, she curates and manages exhibitions that blur distinctions between the genres of art, design, and craft.