Opening: Saturday October 24, 2026 | 6-8pm
On view: October 24 – November 21, 2026
Gallery Hours: Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm; or by appointment
Email: mixedmediaspace@gmail.com | Phone: 646-496-3614
Location: Mixed Media Space, 1 Canal Street, North Adams, MA (map)
Mixed Media Space, in collaboration with Residency Unlimited, is pleased to present Threads and Traces, a group exhibition of installation, sculpture, and painting by RU alumni artists Katya Grokhovsky, Lin Qiqing, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Aida Sulova, and María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez, curated by RU alum Zeljka Himbele. The exhibition brings together five artists whose practices converge around a shared understanding of fabric as memory in motion. Presenting emerging and established artists across disciplines and geographies, Mixed Media Space engages in both local and global conversations. While contributing to the growing cultural energy of the Berkshires, the gallery maintains a curatorial and production base in New York City that serves as a vital channel for international exchange and global cultural influx. Following this mission, the gallery is excited to bring the works from alumni of Residency Unlimited in New York City to North Adams’ audiences.
Though shaped by distinct geographies (Ukraine, China, South Asia, Kyrgyzstan, and Cuba), the artists in the exhibition approach art-making as an act of excavation, repair, and reimagining. In the artists’ respective practices, abstraction becomes a vital strategy. Forms dissolve into biomorphic silhouettes, layered surfaces resist fixed narratives, and gestures replace direct representation, allowing memory and identity to remain fluid rather than illustrated.
Labor is central throughout these artists’ practices. Weaving, felting, sewing, binding, dyeing, layering and salvaging, in combination with more established art techniques such as painting, printing and sculpting, unfold through repetition and endurance. As such, time is recorded not as linear progression but as accumulation—of touch, of gesture, of inherited memory. The works engage the viewer through a combination of visual perception and material experience. Their textures, layered fabrics, and juxtaposition of materials foreground the physical properties of the work. These elements encourage an attentive, embodied encounter in which material and sensory experience become central to the process of interpretation.
Grokhovsky’s layered fabric paintings and installations draw from inherited and found family clothing and textiles, exploring and transforming loss through tender and playful assemblages. Moving between humor, intimacy, and introspection, the works attend to the shifting dynamics of familial relationships and the ongoing negotiation of identity, memory, and selfhood. Lin’s woven tapestries translate her background in journalism into a new language founded in thread, where storytelling is embedded row by row. Employing plant-dyed fibers and repurposed paper inscribed with fragments of text, she treats art making as a tactile, durational process. Jeyaveeran’s felt and silk sculptural forms appear as vessels, tree forms or discarded skin unearthed from an archaeological site, bearing scars that speak to rupture and ritual repair. Sulova’s biomorphic wool and metal structures stage encounters between organic softness and architectural tension, evoking the social and political histories of Kyrgyzstan and the Soviet built environment. María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez’s quilt paintings gather worn clothing, recycled fabrics, beads and other found materials into living vessels of ashé, channeling Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions through abstraction, gesture, and embodied movement.
Historically associated with the domestic sphere and labor, the textiles used by these artists are sites of emotional charge. They map borders and crossings, hold the warmth of absent bodies, and absorb stories of social divisions and expectations, and cultural translation. By repurposing found and familial materials, each artist resists disposability and foregrounds lived experience.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Katya Grokhovsky (2014 RU alum) is a Ukrainian-born, New York City–based artist and Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. She has participated in numerous residencies and fellowships, including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Printshop, The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Residency, Columbus State University Visiting AIR, Padnos Distinguished AIR at Grand Valley State University, Windgate AIR at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith, California Studio: Manetti Shrem Visiting AIR at UC Davis, Ekard AIR at Bucknell University, Sculpture Space, Museum of Arts and Design Studio Residency, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, SVA MFA AIR, Pratt Fine Arts AIR, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NYC STAR Residency, Muhlenberg College AIR, BRIC Workspace, Residency Unlimited, Ox-Bow School of Art Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts AIR, Wassaic Project Residency, Saltonstall Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, NARS Residency, Santa Fe Art Institute AIR and Watermill Center among others. She is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, the New American Fellowship, FST StudioProjects Fund, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant Prize and the Australia Council for the Arts ArtStart Grant to name a few. Grokhovsky’s work has been widely exhibited at institutions and galleries such as the Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, PS122 Gallery, AIR Gallery Biennial, NADA East Broadway, Romanian Cultural Institute, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Ceysson & Bénétière, Smack Mellon, BRIC Biennial, Hudson Valley MOCA, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Flux Factory, and many more. Grokhovsky holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, and a BA in Fashion Honors from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia.
Lin Qiqing (林绮晴) (2024 RU alum), pronounced Lin Chi-Ching, is a textile artist born in Guangdong, China and based in New York City. As a former award-winning journalist from China, she tells stories about migration, memory, identity, and language through her distinctive figurative weaving, made with natural fibers, paper and fabric. She graduated with an MFA in Textiles at Parsons School Design in 2023 and a BA in journalism in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues such as The Brooklyn Museum, Art League Houston, Wassaic Project, Ceres Gallery, Field Projects, Surface Design Association, and New York Textile Month. She has received grants from Brooklyn Arts Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, and participated in residencies at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2023), Residency Unlimited (2024), New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2025) and Manhattan Graphics Center (2026).
Ruth Jeyaveeran (2024 RU alum) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is rooted in traditional material practices and shaped by her experience as part of the South Asian diaspora. Jeyaveeran’s first solo exhibition was presented at Field Projects in 2023. Other notable exhibitions include a two-person show at Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) and a solo installation at Main Window Dumbo. Her work has been featured at Transmitter Gallery, Smack Mellon, Fridman Gallery, Kapow, 81Leonard, the Brattleboro Museum, Queens Botanical Garden, All Street Gallery, ABC No Rio, Westbeth Gallery, and Bronx Art Space, among others. Jeyaveeran has been awarded residencies from the Siena Art Institute, Ucross Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Residency Unlimited, Lighthouse Works, Marble House Project, Willapa Bay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, PADA Studios, and La Napoule Art Foundation. She has taught textiles and fibers at Parsons School of Design and frequently leads workshops on felting and the therapeutic potential of craft. She is currently an Associate Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Aida Sulova (2024 RU alum) is Kyrgyzstan-born, New York-based artist and educator. Working across sculpture, fiber art, and painting, her practice is centered on material intelligence of wool, metal, wood, and found domestic objects. At the core of Aida’s practice is a deep engagement with vibrancy and agency of materials that carry histories of resilience. Her artistic practice weaves together the threads of her heritage, reinterpreting objects, archives, and materials through contemporary lens. Alongside her studio practice, Sulova is a teaching artist working with youth and community organizations in New York, where pedagogy and making remain inseparable from her artistic work. Aida holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design, with minors in anthropology and design and BS from New York University. Sulova was a Fellow of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. During her fellowship, she was a resident at Residency Unlimited and the Artistic Freedom Initiative in New York City. She has exhibited her work internationally, and select exhibitions including Art Bazaar at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (2022), Artistic Freedom Initiative’s Revolutions & Movements at Dupont Underground, Washington, DC (2018); Song of Felt at Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea (2018). Sulova curated News from Central Asia at The Jewelry Library, New York, USA (2021). Sulova has curated exhibits including Asphalt: Lines & Lives with the University of Fribourg, News from Central Asia at the Jewelry Library for Jewelry Week 2021, and Topografica for HMA2’s AUCA Public Art Program. She has been featured in The Huffington Post, Make Art with Purpose, Calvert Journal, Central Asia Forum, and Artsper Magazine.
María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez (2020 RU alum) is a visual artist born in Holguín, Cuba. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2015, and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2020. Maria has participated in residencies such as the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture (2016), Fountainhead Residency (2021) and Pivô Arte e Pesquisa (2023). Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX), The Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Barrett Art Center (Hudson, NY), and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires, Argentina), among others. She was a recipient of The Fulbright Research Fellowship (2021) and the NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Fellowship (2022). Maria is currently an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago.
Zeljka Himbele (2021 RU curator alum) is a curator based in New York City. Originally from Croatia, she graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, US. In 2021, Zeljka presented Stirring Glows at UrbanGlass Brooklyn, a group exhibition featuring neon-based works by artists engaged with urgent ecological, social and political topics. Until 2023, she was a Curator-at-Large at Urban Glass, Brooklyn. She also worked at the Contemporary Art Department of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (working on a series of solo and group exhibitions for New Media Gallery), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia. She frequently collaborated with G-MK Gallery in Zagreb, where she curated the exhibitions by Mark Tribe, Duncan Campbell, Eve K. Tremblay and, most recently, eteam. She was a guest critic, lecturer, panelist or exhibition juror for the institutions The ISCP, NY; NARS Foundation, NY; CUNY, NY; The New School, NY; The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY; Wave Hill, NY; Art OMI International Art Center, Ghent; Dumbo Arts Center, NY; Residency Unlimited, NY; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; Flux Factory, NY; Chester College, NH; Cambridge Art Association, MA; Parsons The New School for Design, NY; and Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, RI, among others. Additionally, Zeljka was a Curatorial Fellow at Art in General, and also curated exhibitions at Plexus Projects, Residency Unlimited and NURTUREart in Brooklyn, NY; Big Medium Gallery in Austin, TX; Lafayette College, PA; Cuchifritos, NY; Illuminated Metropolis, NY; Occurrence, Montreal, Canada; Futura Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; and Strand Center for the Arts, Plattsburgh, NY.
ABOUT MIXED MEDIA SPACE
Mixed Media Space is a contemporary art gallery founded for sustained attention and direct encounter. It was founded by Ivan Stojakovic, an artist whose practice informs the gallery’s focus on ambitious mixed-media work; the program operates independently, supporting a range of artists working across disciplines.
The gallery is located in downtown North Adams, Massachusetts, a ten-minute walk from MASS MoCA. Housed in a remodeled 1890s mill building, Mixed Media Space offers 2,200 square feet of exhibition space with 14-foot ceilings, an ideal setting for ambitious, immersive installations.
Mixed Media Space was founded in response to a global cultural climate shaped by hierarchical power structures, politicized agendas, and delegated institutional art, alongside a saturation of décor, commerce, and positioning. In contrast, the gallery cultivates an autonomous platform that empowers artists to bring work to audiences directly and unfiltered. It shows visual art that is independently driven, grounded in shared conditions of existence, and reflective in the fullest sense.
