With works by Aheneah, Ariana Swei, Elodie Blanchard, Hammad Abid, Jessica Elena Aquino, Melika Abikenari, Nature Shankar, Rigo Flores, Sally Kong, Vanessa Nieto Romero, Wendy Cohen

Opening Reception: Friday, October 17, 6-9pm

NARS Main Gallery

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NARS Foundation is pleased to present Beauty & Splendor, a group exhibition featuring textile work from artists based in Southwest Brooklyn, curated by Joyous R. Pierce.

‍Beauty & Splendor gathers South Brooklyn virtuosos of this moment—each raising harmonies of their own through fiber and firmament. Across the exhibition, fiber is less a category than a method for thinking: a way to translate feeling into form and to bind dispersed histories, rumination's, and memories into present touch. For many artists here, textile is lineage, sensation, and a vessel of memory. These works connect the weight of a message with the matter that carries it.

Beauty & Splendor is a relational project: one where beauty, memory, and materiality converge to celebrate textile practice and posits––How do we actively reroute the inherited patterns, gendered, colonial, institutional, industrial within textile arts? How do we weave kinship across communities, histories, and emergent futures? Additionally, intentionally timed to take place during Indigenous Peoples’ Month, the exhibition extends a special invitation to artists from ALAANA communities, African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American, as well as those who identify as queer, trans, nonbinary, and/or from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds.

Since 2016, the NARS South-West Brooklyn Exhibition Program has recognized the flourishing artist communities in South-West Brooklyn, offering local artists a platform to engage in dialogue and showcase the diversity of their experiences and artistic practices. In 2025, the open call expands to include the entirety of South Brooklyn, reflecting NARS’s commitment to celebrating the vibrant and growing network of artists across the region. This exhibition offers a platform for artists who live and/or work in South Brooklyn and who work primarily in textile or fiber-based practices. The artists in this exhibition were chosen through an open call by a jury of NARS Staff members and curator Joyous R. Pierce.

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About the Curator:

Joyous R. Pierce (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary curator/space shaper, artist, and researcher whose practice re-envisions ceremonies of creation and collaboration through intrinsic relationality and care. Her work as an arts and cultural producer engages creative and cultural spaces as liberatory sites for transformation, reflection, connection, expansion, and joy.

She has collaborated with artists internationally and with institutions such as the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, the Guggenheim, the African Artists Foundation, the Apollo, Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Barnard, Burning Man, and Google. She was a fellow in Cycle IV of the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship with the Caribbean Cultural African Diaspora Institute (Harlem) and Nafasi Artspace (Dar es Salaam).

Joyous holds a Bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College in International Relations with a concentration in Peace and Conflict Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a Master of Science in International Relations and the Politics of Africa from SOAS, University of London. Some areas of interest include contemporary afro-indigenous migration, seabed mapping & ecosystems in the marine water column, immersive technology, and having way too many tabs open at any given moment.

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About the artists:

Aheneah is Ana Martins, a Portuguese textile artist, researcher, and material maker who is currently based in New York. Her work explores the intersection of traditional textile and contemporary art, innovating with fiber, bioplastics and creating new textile structures. Fascinated with dualities, soft versus hard, structured versus fluid, delicate versus robust, Aheneah explores materials, scale, and movement, seeking the perfect balance between opposing forces. Her journey has led her to create public art installations across Europe, exhibit at the United Nations in New York, collaborate with brands such as Tous and Taguspark, and participate in collective exhibitions. Her work has been featured in publications like Unravelling Women's Art book, Designboom, and This is Colossal. Currently, Aheneah is pursuing a MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She is committed to challenging the boundaries of textile art by creating a dialogue between craft and innovation.

Ariana Swei is an artist whose work queers space by blurring boundaries and disrupting power structures. their work interrogates how systems such as racism, imperialism, and the patriarchy converge to impede and complicate what could be beautiful intimate connections. drawn to highly tactile materials and playful processes, Ariana often works experimentally with fabric, food scraps, found objects, and handmade paper. Ariana’s practice is motivated by their grief and rage for lost connections, as well as their desire for a softer, more interconnected world. In addition to their visual arts practice, Ariana is an educator, production worker for live performance, and organizer based in New York.

Elodie Blanchard is a French-American artist and designer based in Brooklyn, whose textile-based practice transforms discarded materials into sculptures, wall hangings, vessels, and immersive installations. Working primarily with used clothing and textile remnants, she reclaims these forgotten or overlooked materials through layering, stitching, and embroidery. Blanchard’s work is both intuitive and intentional, balancing technical experimentation with emotional resonance. Her process often begins with accumulation and sorting—collecting fabric like a painter builds a palette—before deconstructing and reassembling it in unexpected ways. Through repetition, fabric manipulation, and exploration, she constructs new forms that embody resilience, imperfection, and playful reinvention. While vibrant and whimsical on the surface, her work also explores themes of time, and personal and collective memory. Blanchard describes her aesthetic as “joyful, with a tint of gloom, melancholy, and weirdness”—stitching remnants into a new narrative.

From a lineage of Indian weavers steeped in textile traditions, Hammad Abid is a fifth generational weaver descended form Ansaris, a weaving community in India. He is an award-winning textile designer textile designer with extensive experience working and designing in the textile industry. Graduated with MFA in Textiles at RISD in 2021, Hammad specializes in weaving. His Textiles degree is augmented by a Bachelor's degree in Commerce and Finance, which has informed his perspective on sustainable design and approach to independent craft economies. He is motivated to translate the philosophies learned in his fine arts education at RISD into a holistic economic model that supports and centers textile artists, artisans, and other creators in the textile industry.

Jessica Elena Aquino is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and horticulturist from Santa Ana, California, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (VA), Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI), Creative Alliance (MD), and Anna Zorina Gallery (NYC), among others. Aquino was recently an Artist-in-Residence and Windgate Fellow at the University of Arkansas–Fort Smith, and she is currently a Printmaking Fellow at Manhattan Graphics Center (Summer 2025). Her past residencies include the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, Chautauqua School of Art, Textile Arts Center, and the Chrysalis Institute. She is a recipient of the Murray Dessner Travel Grant, which supported her research in natural dyeing and tapestry weaving in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Melika Abikenari is a Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and community organizer. She holds a BA from UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture (2017) and an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2021). She has participated in the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program and completed residencies at Cerámica Suro, Art Cake, and Textile Arts Center. Abikenari is a recipient of the Creatives Rebuild New York grant, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center 2020 Scholarship Partnership Program, and the Meredith Beau CAA ’97 and Scott Beau Materials Fund. Her work has been exhibited at Riverfront Art Gallery (Yonkers, NY), Bronx Council on the Arts (Bronx, NY), New York Live Arts (New York, NY), M. David & Co (Brooklyn, NY), Art Cake (Brooklyn, NY), Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH), and The Main Museum (Los Angeles, CA), among others. She is a teaching artist at LEAP NYC and has taught at Pratt’s Center for Art, Design, and Community Engagement K-12, Creative Arts Work, and NY Enrichment Group.

Nature Shankar is a mixed-media artist informed by craft sensibilities. Her practice explores the body as a site of emotional memory (personal, generational, communal, and political), and the act of making as a means of reclaiming embodied knowledge. Shaped by a bi-cultural upbringing, and an adult life lived between Southeast Asia and the West, her work engages questions of belonging, womanhood and its daily resistance, and the multiplicity of the felt self in relation to those who came before. She has exhibited internationally such as at Gajah Gallery (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), The Esplanade (Singapore), Art Fair Philippines and Singapore Art Week. She has participated in residencies internationally such as: ChaNorth (NY), OH!Open House (Singapore), Studio Batur (Indonesia) and The LMCC Arts Center Residency (NYC). Shankar holds a Diploma in Fine Art from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), a BFA from Loughborough University (UK), and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY). Based in Brooklyn, Shankar is currently preparing for her first solo show in New Delhi, India.

Rigo Flores was born in Guerrero, Mexico. Flores received a BFA from Arizona State University and a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. Flores has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Sally Kong is a textile artist and software engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. After studying computer graphics and robotics, she has built software for artists at Blue Sky Studios, Netflix and Rockstar Games. Inspired by the shared mathematical foundation of linear algebra in computer graphics, robotics, and weaving, her practice focuses on computation, craft, and non-human scale systems.

Vanessa Nieto Romero is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in print, sculpture and installation. She has exhibited widely since 2012 in a number of group exhibitions in Bogotá, New York, Rhode Island, France, Japan and Spain. Vanessa holds an MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2017), and a BFA in Visual Arts from the National University of Colombia (2012). She has been the recipient of awards including the Fulbright Fellowship (2015), the 98th ANNUAL International Competition of The Print Center, Philadelphia (2023-2024), the first prize at the VII Visual Arts Biennial, Fundación Gilberto Alzate in Bogotá (2024), ArteCámara Award in Bogotá (2024). She has taught at National University of Colombia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design.

Wendy Cohen is a sculptural textile artist, educator, and exhibitions manager based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work is currently on view in Sacred Threads, curated by Haifa Bint-Kadi, at the Riverfront Art Gallery (Yonkers Public Library, August-October 2025). Her piece Gram's Door was recently on view at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition (October 2024 - January 2025). She was featured in Fiber in 3D in Fiber Art Now magazine (Spring 2024), and was awarded a residency in sculpture at the Vermont Studio Center (January 2020). They earned a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University in 2019. Wendy’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at spaces including: Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (NY), Chashama Matawan Gallery (NJ), List Art Center (RI), Sarah Doyle Gallery (RI), Temple Rome Gallery (Italy), Riverfront Art Gallery (Yonkers), Granoff Center (RI), Kimmel Galleries (NY), and Greenpoint Gallery (NY).

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