Weave In, Weave Out: Disability as Social Sculpture and Radical Textile Activism

By Amanda Cachia

Combining performance, installation, and live social sculpture, Weave In, Weave Out is a major exhibition of site-specific textile work developed over a three-month period from January to March 2026 at Positive Exposure Gallery in New York City. The exhibition is conceived as a durational, process-based environment in which contemporary disabled artists create work in real time, foregrounding weaving as both material practice and social methodology. The project brings together artists who participate in Intertwine Arts programming across New York’s five boroughs, activating the gallery as a living site of production, exchange, and collective care.

Intertwine Arts was co-founded as a non-profit organization in 2015 by Brandy Godsil, fashion designer, couturier, on-set tailor, and weaver; Ria Hawks, pediatric nurse practitioner and weaver; and Yukako Satone, owner of Loop of the Loom and a weaving artist. The organization is inspired by the Japanese weaving philosophy of SAORI, a practice that resists perfectionism, hierarchy, and standardization in favor of individuality and embodied expression. The term SAORI combines the word sai, which loosely translates to “the dignity of the individual,” and ori, meaning “weaving.” Together, these concepts form a philosophy that privileges difference, improvisation, and the creative potential of every bodymind.

Intertwine Arts brings free-form weaving to people of all ages with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities, as well as chronic illness. The organization facilitates art-weaving workshops with partner organizations that include AHRC, Visions, HeartShare Human Services of New York, Lenox Hill, and the YAI Without Walls program. These workshops are led by approximately fifteen art instructors who guide participants through a wide range of weaving projects, including tapestries, circular and triangular looms, seasonal weavings, and works incorporating found objects. The diversity of formats reflects an intentional resistance to a single aesthetic outcome, instead valuing multiplicity, experimentation, and non-normative approaches to making.

At the core of Intertwine Arts’ mission is the belief that weaving is for everyone, and that fiber arts must be accessible. This commitment aligns closely with the principles of disability justice, a movement developed in 2005 by the Disability Justice Collective, including Patty Berne, Stacey Milbern, and Leroy Moore. Disability justice centers intersectionality, collective access, and the recognition that disabled people possess unique knowledge systems shaped by lived experience. Many of the looms used by Intertwine Arts artists are designed with accessible modifications that respond to diverse physical and cognitive capacities. These adaptations also honor crip time, allowing participants to work at variable paces and rhythms that challenge normative expectations of productivity and efficiency.

This collaborative exhibition is grounded in the belief that art can function as a form of mediation between people, between bodies, and between different ways of knowing. While the work of Intertwine Arts is not clinically driven, as in art therapy-based interventions, there is a shared understanding of the holistic and generative benefits of weaving. The practice fosters creativity and independence, builds confidence and self-worth, and offers a tactile language through which memories, lived experiences, and imaginative worlds can be expressed. Importantly, these benefits do not arise from instrumentalizing art as a tool for “improvement,” but from honoring weaving as a meaningful practice in its own right.

Beyond its individual benefits, weaving is deeply communal. Across generations, cultures, and geographies, textile practices have functioned as social spaces of gathering, storytelling, and interdependence. Weaving has historically taken place in domestic, familial, and collective contexts, often outside the institutional frameworks that have defined Western art history. Feminist scholars and artists have long emphasized how textile labor, which has frequently been dismissed as craft or women’s work, embodies alternative economies of value rooted in care, repetition, and relationality. Weave In, Weave Out builds on this lineage by reclaiming weaving as a site of disabled knowledge production and social connection.

The exhibition is constructed as an immersive environment in which visitors are invited to observe, participate, and dwell. At the center of the gallery, a large circular formation of looms creates both a physical and symbolic gathering space. Contemporary disabled artists work at these looms during regular workshop sessions, transforming the gallery into a shared studio rather than a static display. Program artists who typically run workshops at partner organizations will use the gallery in place of their usual classrooms, effectively collapsing distinctions between education, exhibition, and social space.

As works are completed, they are shorn from the looms and hung on the surrounding walls, allowing the visual landscape of the gallery to shift and evolve over time. No single moment represents the exhibition in its entirety; instead, the project exists as an accumulation of gestures, encounters, and material traces. Visitors are also encouraged to sit at available looms and, if they wish, receive instruction from teaching artists and volunteers. This invitation reframes spectatorship as participation and positions learning as reciprocal rather than top-down. Positive Exposure Gallery is a critical partner in realizing the accessibility and ethical commitments of the project. Founded by celebrated photographer Rick Guidotti, the gallery has become a renowned space for showcasing work by disabled artists. Guidotti’s own trajectory from commercial fashion photography to disability-centered portraiture reflects a broader shift toward valuing diverse forms of embodiment and representation. Under his leadership, Positive Exposure has prioritized access as an integral component of curatorial practice rather than an afterthought.

The gallery offers a range of accessible features to accommodate disabled visitors, including live-streaming options for those who wish to observe or participate remotely, a dedicated webpage for at-home audiences, and performative image descriptions delivered as works are created in situ. The use of audio description ensures a permanent, accessible digital record of the exhibition and enables audiences to access image descriptions of the weavings as they are produced. These features extend the exhibition beyond the physical site, acknowledging that access is both spatial and temporal.

The title Weave In, Weave Out gestures toward multiple registers of meaning. On a practical level, it reflects the spatial openness of the exhibition: visitors are welcome to enter, exit, linger, or return over the course of the three-month duration. The gallery becomes a living social sculpture, and an artwork constituted through human interaction, duration, and collective presence. This framing draws from traditions of socially engaged art while resisting the extractive or instrumental tendencies that can accompany such practices.

Weave In, Weave Out therefore engages directly with the concept of social sculpture prominently articulated by Joseph Beuys, who proposed that society itself could be shaped as a work of art through collective creativity, participation, and responsibility. For Beuys, social sculpture expanded artistic practice beyond discrete objects toward processes of social transformation, education, and lived experience, famously encapsulated in his assertion that “everyone is an artist.” While Beuys’ formulation emerged from postwar European avant-garde politics and has since been critiqued for its universalizing claims and artist-centered authority, the framework remains generative when rethought through disability culture. In this exhibition, social sculpture is not enacted through symbolic gestures or charismatic authorship, but through the slow, repetitive, and relational labor of weaving undertaken by disabled artists and their communities. Here, the “sculptural” material consists of time, care, access, and interdependence, positioning disability not as an object of inclusion within social sculpture, but as a methodology that fundamentally reshapes how collective artistic and social forms are made. Materially, the title references the fundamental mechanics of weaving itself. The process of threading in and out of warp and weft creates tension, structure, and pattern through repetition and variation. These intersecting threads form a fabric that is stronger and more complex than any individual strand. As such, weaving offers a potent metaphor for interdependence, collaboration, and mutual support, all of which are values that sit at the heart of disability culture.

Crucially, Weave In, Weave Out also speaks to the social and political conditions of the present moment. In an era marked by global instability, austerity politics, and the erosion of social safety nets, disabled communities are often among the most impacted. Drawing on Marxist sociologist John Holloway’s concept of “crack capitalism,” the exhibition positions weaving as a form of everyday resistance. Within these cracks, dominant systems falter or fail, and alternative forms of sociality can emerge. In the context of this exhibition, these cracks resemble the intersections of threads on a loom: small, precise points where new structures take shape. For Holloway, the “we” in “weaving” signifies collective action, and the refusal to accept capitalism as an inevitable or totalizing force. Weaving, in this sense, becomes a practice of making otherwise. The slow, repetitive labor of weaving stands in stark contrast to the speed, efficiency, and profit-driven logic of capitalist production. It demands attention, patience, and care, privileging process over outcome.

This framing also resonates with feminist and disability-centered critiques of political economy that foreground care, dependency, and relational labor as sites of both vulnerability and resistance. Scholars such as Silvia Federici have argued that forms of reproductive and domestic labor, which were historically feminized, racialized, and devalued under capitalism, contain radical potential precisely because they operate outside dominant regimes of productivity and exchange. Similarly, disability studies scholars including Alison Kafer and Jasbir Puar have emphasized how disabled lives expose the violence of austerity and neoliberal governance while simultaneously generating alternative imaginaries grounded in access, interdependence, and collective survival. Within this context, weaving functions not only as metaphor but as material praxis: a slow, embodied labor that resists acceleration, abstraction, and disposability. As a socially engaged artwork, Weave In, Weave Out aligns with what theorist Shannon Jackson has described as the “infrastructural” dimensions of social practice, wherein the conditions that sustain participation, inclusive of time, space, support, and care, are themselves integral to the work. By foregrounding these often-invisible structures, the exhibition positions disability-led textile practice as a mode of political refusal and world-making that persists within, against, and beyond the cracks of capitalism.

By centering disabled artists and accessible making, Weave In, Weave Out asserts that disability is not a site of lack but a generative force. Disabled ways of moving, sensing, and relating produce knowledge that challenges normative assumptions about time, labor, and value. The exhibition does not seek to “include” disability within existing frameworks of art and culture; rather, it proposes disability as a foundational logic through which new institutional possibilities might be imagined.

For this reason, the exhibition critically contributes to a crip socially engaged art practice by reconfiguring participation, duration, and authorship through the lived realities of disabled embodiment. Rather than treating access as a set of accommodations layered onto an otherwise normative framework, the exhibition is structured around crip logics of time, care, and relationality from the outset. The project’s durational format, open entry and exit, variable rhythms of making, and emphasis on process over completion reflect crip time as an organizing principle rather than a constraint. Participation is understood as fluctuating and contingent, allowing for rest, absence, repetition, and return without penalty or loss of value. In this context, socially engaged art is not measured by scale, visibility, or impact metrics, but by the quality of sustained relationships and the capacity to hold difference. By centering disabled artists as producers of social form, rather than subjects of inclusion, Weave In, Weave Out advances a crip methodology of social practice that resists extractive participation, destabilizes normative expectations of productivity, and foregrounds interdependence as an aesthetic and political strategy.

Ultimately, Weave In, Weave Out envisions the gallery as a place of collective becoming. Through the shared act of weaving, with threads crossing, bodies gathering, stories unfolding, the project offers a microcosm of a more just and interconnected world. It is within these intimate, tactile encounters that radical futures are quietly, persistently woven into being.

Reference List:

Holloway, John. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2010.

Acknowledements:

I wanted to thank all the individuals at Intertwine Arts and Positive Exposure gallery for making this exhibition possible, including Anna-Maie Southern, Ria Hawks, Maurine Packard, Danaleah Schoenfuss, Claire Mysko, Rick Guidotti, Ian Burto, and Alison Graham. I am also grateful to the instructors at the partnering organizations for assisting with the artwork and facilitating the workshops in the gallery, including Vandana Jain, Qiqing Lin, Damali Abrams, and Naomi Lawrence. Lastly, I am grateful to Becky Curran and Faye Ginsburg for their support.

This exhibition is made possible in part through the Regional Arts Discretionary Fund of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the Wallace Foundation.

Biography:

Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Cachia is the author of Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025), and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024). She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. Cachia has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. She has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada.