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Join us for the opening reception and program for two special exhibitions of new work by fiber artists Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard. Lindberg, the Academy’s 2025 Artist in Residence, has produced a site-specific sculptural installation, seen and unseen, made from fine, colored threads for the Museum’s atrium. The adjacent Healy Gallery will feature Shepard’s “ethereal textiles” –works on fabric and paper inspired by the complex patterns of cutwork, lace, and botanical imagery for an exhibition called Fields, Voids, and Translations.

In a conversation moderated by Mary Savig, the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, Lindberg and Shepard–longtime friends and colleagues– will reflect on their recent work, the current resurgence of fiber art, and its place in art history. 

The Artist in Residence program is supported by a generous gift from Mary Ann Schindler.

About the speakers:

Anne Lindberg’s multimedia work has been shown widely, including exhibitions at the Textile Museum at George Washington University, the Drawing Center in NYC, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boson. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Lindberg earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art,and she currently lives and works in Ancramdale, New York. She is the Academy Art Museum’s 20205 Artist in Residence.

Piper Shepard earned an MFA in Fiber from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been widely shown across the US and overseas, and has been collected by multiple major museums. She has received four Individual Artists Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council in Crafts, a 2016 Japan-US Friendship Commission, an NEA grant, a Creative Arts Exchange Program grant, and was 2016 US Artists Distinguished Fellow in Crafts. She has been a MacDowell Fellow and a Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Resident. She began teaching in the Fiber Department at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in 1994, where she is now Professor Emerita.

Mary Savig is the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she recently curated Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women. Prior to joining SAAM in 2019, she was Curator of Manuscripts at the Archives of American Art, where she curated exhibitions including Ephemeral and Eternal: The Archive of Lenore Tawney” and What is Feminist Art? and pursued collections documenting the history of American studio craft and conducted oral history interviews. Savig earned a doctorate in American studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, where her dissertation was titled “Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures.”