Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Textiles, a group exhibition featuring the work of six artists from four states including MK Guth, Elizabeth Hohimer, Ellen Lesperance, Mary Ann Peters, Vo Vo, and Anna Von Mertens. The gallery exhibition coincides with Portland Textile Month and each artist brings their unique backgrounds, skills, and ideas to offer distinct perspectives on this year’s theme: Layers of Resilience.
These six artists weave, knot, knit, and stitch together their memories, experiences, and communities. This exhibition pulls their selected works into a rich conversation, illuminating each artist's distinct voice while revealing the common threads that bind the group together.
MK Guth builds textile media into her participatory installations and performances, asking her audience to collaborate in braiding or sewing fabric into sculptures and tapestries. By choreographing these shared rituals, the artist invites a thoughtful consideration of our systems of interaction and interconnection, and produces material webs of familiarity and engagement. Guth has exhibited internationally over the past several decades at festivals, galleries, and museums including the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. She was the first artist from the region for several decades to exhibit in the Whitney Biennial in 2008.
Elizabeth Hohimer translates the visual languages of Minimalism, the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field movements through her loom. Wielding her sixteen-harness European floor loom and unique double-cloth technique, Hohimer weaves a path home, memorializing the history and extant possibilities she finds in Texas Hill Country. The Austin-based artist has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the country.
Ellen Lesperance draws inspiration from the relationship between historic protest movements and hand-made textiles, translating intricate knit patterns into meticulous works on paper rendered with pencil, ink, and paint. Through her investigation of written and photographic archives, Lesperance demonstrates a profound respect for the legacy of women-led movements including environmental, non-proliferation, and civil rights movements. She pays homage to female protestors and cultural figures, immortalizing their hand-made attire, as seen in historic photographs, by illustrating the intricate patterns of their knit garments into two-dimensional artworks. Though she depicts no bodies, the presence of her subjects are felt viscerally in their material traces. Lesperance has exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Modern Art, and her work can be found at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Walker Art Center.
Mary Ann Peters appropriates the style of antiquated political cartoons to challenge hegemonic (mis)representations of Arab immigrants. As a second-generation Lebanese American artist, Peters probes past misconceptions of her heritage and honors the present-day craftsmanship and labor of female silk workers in Lebanon. Her work has been exhibited at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham and Jack Shainman’s The School in upstate New York, and her work is featured in collections of the Portland Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, and Seattle Art Museum.
Vo Vo uses textiles to draw attention to processes of production, interrogate structures of oppression, and offer gestures of care and possibilities for healing. The artist draws and weaves symbols of violence, nature, discovery, and social change into large-scale tapestries. Their images imitate the etched style of mass-produced media, co-opting a graphic style more often associated with colonialist and imperialist imagery. In their artwork, Vo counters with critique and offers an alternative world view. A multidisciplinary artist, Vo has toured numerous sites around the world as a writer, educator, curator, speaker, and musician, and their work can be found in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum. In 2025, Vo was a recipient of the prestigious Hallie Ford Fellowship for the Visual Arts.
Born in Boston and based in New Hampshire, Anna Von Mertens works at the intersection of art and science, synthesizing the often-contraposed disciplines in her quilted and stitched textile artworks. Exploring the gravity of the stars on our terrestrial world, the artist materializes the act of stargazing. She represents notable and mundane astronomical dates and events and their concurrent connection to events in human history by hand-stitching star patterns onto hand-dyed swathes of cotton. Her work is featured in numerous museums including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Tang Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
