“Bearing Witness” Solo Exhibition at Museum of Art and History Lancaster

The exhibition at MOAH will open on January 31, 2026 and will run through April 19, 2026.

Artist Statement

Bearing Witness, a retrospective, examines over 20 years of my work using knitting as a metaphor. 

My multimedia work explores compassion, forgiveness, and resilience through the practice of storytelling. The intention is to move the viewer to imagine a more just, diverse, and inclusive world. I invite participation; transformation occurs within community. 

From my earliest cut drawings to my recent performances, I have used knitting as both material and metaphor. Yarn evokes comfort, waxed twine represents entrapment, elastic stands for an open mind. 

I knit and unravel knitted forms to explore how I can construct something elaborate and time-consuming. Whether knitting is used to create functional or sculptural forms, if it is cut at any point the whole thing will fall apart. It is a metaphor for how we as communities small and large impact each others’ lives; how an experience can trap or free us, or at least start the process of unraveling. My work insists on freedom, forgiveness, and compassion not just for one, but for all, and asks something of the viewer: to question, to receive, to open their hearts.

I am not interested in making didactic work. I intend to evoke responses, ask questions, and create dialog rooted in vulnerability (myself included).

This work is based in intersectional feminism and privileges the act of listening, being heard, and hearing. When we share stories we become a community, less alone. However, telling the most private of our stories requires fortitude and sometimes listening does, too. Whether a community member is recording an audio story for a video, sitting in an installation telling secrets to a stranger, or witnessing a video performance, the viewer becomes a participant compelled to engage as their own memories are evoked.

My practice is shaped by my upbringing in a family of Holocaust survivors. These histories make me especially attuned to social injustice and forgiveness. My mother unknowingly passed down the practice of knitting. In my work, it started as a symbol of generational trauma. I remember watching my parents, imagining who they would have been had they not been through the war; who I would have been (would I have been) had they not. 

In 2018, I digitally photographed knitted yarn with a three megapixel camera, printed those photos on paper, and drew the shapes I saw in the highly pixelated picture. This led to painting where I photographed those drawings, enlarged them further, and printed that new image onto canvas. This process was the foundation for my paintings in The Politics of Color in 2020. After two years of working on this body of paintings, COVID hit. No one saw the work. This frustration led me back into community performance work with the added element of video. 

After timely receiving the Word Artist Grant in 2021, I made The Undoing: Forgiveness video which started a series of videos on the subject of forgiveness. My hands knit and unravel waxed hemp twine while community sourced anonymous stories play as voice over. In 2022, I performed Release Me in which I knit a cocoon around my body and unravel it, with voiceover of my stories, my parent’s survival stories, and sounds of nature. The audience participated by speaking to me, knitting with me, observing, and writing their reactions on post it notes. It was a roadmap to overcoming my generational trauma.

2025 was pivotal, turning the focus from the experiences passed down to me to what happened to me firsthand. My recent performance …and then this happened… tells the story of four years in which I battled with major health crises all the while maintaining my artist practice. I learned the lessons of resiliency and persistence from my parents’ example. There were many months when I was bedridden. There were times in which I felt bound and limited, and yet I persisted and became healthy, free, having learned that the crises were lessons. At the end of the performance, the elastic knitted form over my body fell apart. I pulled out the knitting needles and the piece unraveled itself. 

“The personal is political” is a tenet I encountered in the two years I spent working with Judy Chicago on The Dinner Party. It means that by looking at personal experiences collectively we depersonalize an experience and see it as a larger political issue. I learned that by healing personal and generational trauma, we are changing the world around us.