Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Illinois art professor receives United States Artists Fellowship

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign art professor Kira Dominguez Hultgren has received a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship.

Dominguez Hultgren is one of 50 USA Fellows for 2024 and one of six fellows in the craft field. The competitive fellowships are awarded to artists in 10 creative disciplines in recognition of their contributions to the cultural fabric of the country. USA Fellows are selected based on their groundbreaking artistic visions, unique perspectives within their fields and the potential for the award to make a significant impact in their practices. Each fellow receives an unrestricted $50,000 cash award.

Fellows are selected through a nomination, application and review process by discipline-specific panels.

Dominguez Hultgren is an artist, weaver and educator whose work considers family stories and the lost language, culture and traditions of a multiethnic family, as well as questions of cultural appropriation, codeswitching and cultural misrecognitions.

As a weaver, Dominguez Hultgren uses a variety of looms, including building their own backstrap looms, which are connected to the body. They use a variety of materials in their weavings, mixing yarn with unconventional fibers from gym climbing ropes or hair. The tension of the loom interacts with different types of fibers in different ways, they said.

“This collision of materials makes the cloth very unstable,” Dominguez Hultgren said, adding that the work performs how institutional pressures and categorizations have played out in their own family’s life across generations.

“To me, material language is communicative in a different way than words, especially written language that has been used to exclude Indigenous and immigrant peoples and narratives,” they said.

Dominguez Hultgren said the fellowship will allow them to purchase a digital jacquard loom – a specialized type of loom available only in art schools and at a limited number of universities and art residencies. They said they are interested in the interactions between human, computer and loom. The loom’s user can design on a computer and send the design to the loom, which is then operated by hand. Dominguez Hultgren is interested in how the digital information is rematerialized and changed during the weaving process.

They also are experimenting with biomaterials and creating yarn from agricultural byproducts.

Dominguez Hultgren’s work has been exhibited at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York City; Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas; the San Jose Museum of Quilt and Textile; and the Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. It has been reviewed by The New York Times and Architectural Digest, and is included in the de Young Museum of Fine Art’s permanent collection.

United States Artists is a Chicago-based national arts funding organization that provides direct support to artists across the country.

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