Between the folds of this world, lingering pieces of one’s own gossamer, narrative threads lay waiting to be unearthed and held.

To Be Remembered: Woven Matters of the Heart embraces the reflective ways in which five contemporary textile artists illuminate their rich interior worlds through their unique fiber practices. The artists: ebere agwuncha, Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Hale Ekinci, Josué Esaú, and Thương Hoài Trần each visually intertwine time, memory, and emotion to conjure deeply felt histories across spatial geographies, venerating the cultural traces that connect us to the motherlands.

Embedded in their designs and motifs, the artworks’ layered meanings preserve cultural continuity through extensive research that awakens their ancestors’ legacies and gifts. The works create new pathways to becoming closer to one another, communicating how we become and become undone within the ever-changing cycles of life. Skillfully made by hand, the artists guide us in how we learn to weave our own personal mythologies.

The magic in life is apparent, and we invite you to find it within.

ebere agwuncha is an Igbo-American artist born and based in Chicago. She crafts sculptural portals which celebrate traditional techniques, methods, materials, and archives of the Igbo Diaspora.

agwuncha’s solo exhibitions include meditation on: woven fishing ports at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA (26′); chinelo house at Roman Susan Gallery (24′); soft structures with Chicago Artists Coalition (24′); and owoko with Comfort Station (22′). More recently, agwuncha has received the 3Arts Teaching Artist Award (25′), Jackman Goldwasser Residency at Hyde Park Art Center (26′), Penland Winter Residency Textiles Fellowship (25′), Ragdale Residency (26′), and Centrum Residency (26′). Her work has been represented in private collections nationally.

Thương Hoài Trần is a Vietnamese American immigrant whose background informs their interdisciplinary art practice. Using family photographs to pay homage to their ancestral history and reconciling the gaps and barriers experienced by those in diasporic communities, including displacement, loss of language, and generational disconnect.

Hoài Trần earned a BFA from Emporia State University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been a recipient of the DCASE Individual Artists Program (IAP) and a Residency at MASS MoCA. Their work has been showcased at the Plains Art Museum, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Center for Craft, and Janet Turner Print Museum, among others.

Nnaemeka (Emeka) Ekwelum is a Chicago-based fiber and installation artist from Boston, MA. His creative and scholarly work as a multidisciplinary and transnational researcher and cultural worker is informed by his upbringing as an American-born child of Nigerian immigrants. From that perspective, he produces cultural artifacts that aspire to amplify Black diasporic materials and symbols, cultural memory, collaborative friendship, and the ongoing significance of global Black cultural production.

In addition to his creative arts practice, Ekwelum is also an independent curator and global arts researcher/educator with a PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the South Side Community Arts Center (Chicago, IL), Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, IL), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Center of Knowhere Art Gallery (Oak Bluffs, MA), and the 2025 reimagining of The People’s Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church in New York City.

Hale Ekinci is a Turkish-American artist based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and is currently a Professor of Art & Design at North Central College. Rooted in her lived experience as an immigrant, she creates embroidered paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos, embellished with vibrant colors, patterns, and cultural relics. Combining Middle Eastern and Western textile craft and fine art traditions, her work explores identity, folklore, communication, and gendered labor.

Ekinci was an artist-in-residence at Facebook Chicago, Indiana University, ACRE, CAC, and Spudnik Press. Her work has been exhibited nationally across states, internationally in Germany, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Israel, and Turkey, and locally in numerous galleries including T.S.A., Goldfinch, Zolla/Liebarman, and Studio Gang. She is the recipient of the Fiber & Figure award by the Surface Design Association and the best in show at the South Bend Museum of Art’s 30th Biennial.

Josué Esaú Romero Velasquez was born in Honduras, raised in San Antonio, Tejas, and currently lives in Chicago. He is an educator at Arts + Public Life on the city’s South Side, and a visual artist and multidisciplinary fabricator. Josué holds a BFA from Southwest School of Art (now UTSA Southwest) and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. He is currently a resident at Chicago Art Department and an alum of the Hyde Park Art Center, Center Program Biennial (2025). He is the recipient of the Luminarts Fellowship (2026), Three Walls’ RaDLOW 3.0 Fellowship (2026), Illinois Arts Council’s Creative Accelerator Fund (2025), and DCASE’s Individual Artists Program (2025).

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Tags: Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, ebere agwuncha, Hale Ekinci, Josué Esaú, Loop, Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Thuong Hoai Tran, To Be Remembered: Woven Matters of the Heart