Raw. Imperfect. Gestural. Emotional. These are words Megumi Shauna Arai uses to describe textiles that inspire her—whether traditional Japanese boro, 19th-century American crazy quilts, or patchwork marvels by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. But this self-taught artist could just as well be describing her own make-do confections, hand-stitched in her Brooklyn studio using vintage fabrics, rough-edged scraps, and colorful silks. (She dyes them herself with natural agents like logwood, indigo, and cochineal, jars of which fill her shelves.) Arai’s intuitive, pieceworked technique turned heads last fall at the 1955 Eliot Noyes House in New Canaan, Connecticut, where one of her tapestries was spread across the bed as part of an exhibition by Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM, and Object & Thing. This spring, she’ll infiltrate our imaginations and Instagram feeds again when she unveils her nuanced take on noren, Japanese textiles hung in windows or doorways, for her solo show at the roving art-and-design purveyor TIWA Select, which represents Arai’s work.
Growing up between Tokyo and the Pacific Northwest—her father is Japanese; her mother is Jewish-American—Arai credits her love of textiles to noren. “They’re very ordinary, but there’s something so special about that,” she explains. “It’s amazing when something reminds you of what you’re doing in the moment, even if it’s just stepping through a doorway.” In line with that thinking, she and TIWA Select will open the show (likely in an upstate New York space commissioned for the occasion) on May Day, originally a pagan holiday that celebrates another ordinary transition—the shift from winter to spring. megumi-arai.com
