Elevate: Poppy DeltaDawn

Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the Northwest Arkansas community.

The program provides hotel guests and visitors with unique access to the work of notable regional artists, while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.

From the artist, “I am often asked how I found myself making textiles. My answer is that it is in my bones. It is in embedded deep within, and I have always felt it.  

When I was a young girl I dug my mother’s crochet hook and yarn out of a storage container in the basement and brought it upstairs; I pleaded with her to show me how to use the hooked metal rod. She demonstrated how to make long looped chains, but soon after, she regretted this. I spent the next few days walking around the house with a long acrylic daisy-chain trailing everywhere I went. She wouldn’t teach me how to attach the chain to itself to make a form.  

During a trip to my grandmother’s house, my mother told me to leave my new skill in the car; she told me that this kind of thing is not for boys. Embarrassed, I lock this impulse to work with thread away, until freshman year of high school in Baltimore when I followed friends to the afterschool knitting club. Again, the teacher dissuaded me from continuing and told me it might be better to stick with drawing and painting. Then, at the start of college I am introduced to the looms in the fiber department, which I was determined to know, and nobody is around to dissuade me. I immediately switched my major. Today, I am a tenure-track professor of Textiles + Fiber at the University of Kansas. I am also a woman of transgender experience. 

My work is not about my gender identity but is a joyful expression of culture and spirit. My work is a critique on the human technology that broke the prairie and colonized this land. It connects my spirituality, my body, and my culture together to create meaning and critical analyses of the world we live in. The meaning of the material evolves as time passes, and the work is always alive and in transition, just like people. 

Through my studio, I reflect on legacy and lineage. I reflect on finding agency, autonomy, and power by making cloth with my hands, and teaching others how to do the same. My work makes meaning with material. Because I made them, my weavings are a physical manifestation of their modes of production. They are a record of the way that they were made, and with the memory of the fiber, they hold every movement that I made at the loom. Every decision is present.”

Poppy DeltaDawn

Poppy DeltaDawn is an artist, writer, and teacher making work addressing the communication between modernity and cultural and traditional practices, primarily with textiles and fiber. Her work has been featured in exhibitions with BravinLee (NYC), Dimin (NYC), STNDRD-NONSTNDRD (Sauget, IL), Ortega y Gassett Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Below Grand (NYC), Zürcher Gallery (NYC), and Standard Space (Sharon, CT), among others.