Heartstrings

March 8—April 12
Opening: March 8, 7—10pm featuring sounds by Do Not Disturb Collective
Indigo Dye Workshop led by Gasali Adeyemo: Saturday, March 29th from 11am - 3pm 

MASS Gallery Presents Heartstrings: A Tactile Exploration of Memory, Heritage, and Craft. Heartstrings is a group exhibition featuring seven dynamic artists who stitch history, culture, and materiality through the language of textiles and fibers.

Heartstrings delves into the intersection of art, craft, and cultural narrative, offering a rich exploration of memory, heritage, and material practice. This show is a survey of fiber-based techniques such as quilting, weaving, and embroidery influenced by practices dating back generations. These artists transform textiles and recycled materials into evocative works that challenge traditional delineations between art and craft. Through these diverse practices, these artists illuminate the emotional and historical threads that connect us across time and space. 

"Craft has long been an undervalued form of cultural expression, particularly in its association with domestic labor and marginalized communities," says curator Taylor Danielle Davis. "This exhibition elevates those narratives, celebrating the power of textiles to preserve history, tell stories, and engage viewers in a conversation about materiality and memory." 

Participating Artists: 

Brianna McIntyre (Austin, TX) 
Cyle Warner (Brooklyn, NY) 
Mark Fleuridor (Brooklyn, NY) 
Jasmine Narkita Wiley (San Francisco, CA) 
Samuel Nnorom (Nigeria) 
Siena Smith (Providence, RI) 
Tunmi Da silva (Los Angeles, CA)

About The Artists

Brianna McIntyre 

Instagram: @briannabybrianna 
www.briannamcintyre.com 

Brianna McIntyre is an artist and designer based in Austin, TX. Her creative practice focuses on crafting objects and ephemera that communicate narratives of duality, precariousness, and her experiences as a Black woman. One of her goals as a maker is to take materials out of their comfort zone in order to push their structural qualities and intended use. She is interested in investigating political and social identities through the use of clothing, furniture, and found objects as construction materials. She received her BFA in Furniture Design and Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Cyle Warner 

Instagram: @cylewarner 
cylewarner.com 

Cyle Warner is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with space, place, time, and distance in relation to the past and how we choose to move forward outside of contemporary values, an idea he refers to as Dis. Working across fiber, photography, and sculpture, Warner creates compositions that consider notions of home, care, and the creation and preservation of new myths. 

Warner attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2022 and earned a BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts in 2023. He has participated in the Vermont Studio Center with a fellowship in 2024 and is currently a 2024-2026 Van Lier Fellow at Abrons Arts Center as well as a 2025 Bronx AIM Fellow. Warner’s work has been exhibited at Regular Normal, New York, New York (2020, 2021); Oolite Arts, Miami, Florida (2022); Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, Canada (2022); Welencora Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2022, 2023); and the Brooklyn Museum (2024). 

Mark Fleuridor 

Instagram: @markfleuridor 
markfleuridor.com 

Mark Fleuridor was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Fleuridor explores his personal history and lived experiences through painting, quilting, collage and paernmaking. It is important for Fleuridor to understand his past by dissecting his own memories and family narratives through his art process.Working with materials such as family photographs and found materials, helps Fleuridor understand his past and present life. Fleuridor was a recipient of the 2022 Knight Champion Award. He has aended Artist residencies at Art Omi in Ghent NY; Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, CO; and Oxbow Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI. He was also a visiting lecturer at multiple institutions including Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and Florida International University (FIU). Fleuridor holds a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Jasmine Narkita Wiley 

Instagram: @jasminenarkitawiley 
www.jasminenarkitawiley.com 

Jasmine Narkita Wiley is a conceptual artist who works across photography, textiles, craft, installation, and performance. Her exhibition record includes Textile Arts Center, Hausen Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and Colorado Photographic Arts Center, among others. She holds an MA in Arts Politics from the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Currently, she is an MFA & MA in Visual & Critical Studies candidate at California College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Samuel Nnorom 

Instagram: @nnoromsamuel 
www.nnoromsamuel.com 

Samuel Nnorom (b. 1990, Nigeria). He discovered his artistic talent at the age of 9 while assisting his father at his shoe workshop. He started drawing customers who visited the shop while also being influenced by his mother’s tailoring workshop. His body of work is typically constructed from pieces of Ankara/African print fabric scraps collected from tailors or cast-off clothing from homes, along with discarded foam and fibres from furniture workshops that are wrapped and stitched into bubbles of various colours and sizes. Through actions like sewing, rolling, tying, stringing, and suspending, he poetically navigates the boundaries between textile, painting, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in sculpture from the prestigious University of Nigeria and belongs to the New Nsukka School of Art. 

Siena Smith 

Instagram: @smither_ 
www.sienasmith.com 

Siena Smith (b. 1996, NYC) is an artist who works with drawing, weaving and collage to work out the complexities of everyday emotions, Black womanhood and ancestry. She earned her BFA in textiles from RISD and her MFA in fiber and material studies from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in how paern, material and texture of textile and 2D mediums carry the essence of Black Diasporic personal, cultural and spiritual histories. Smith has exhibited at NADA Miami (2022); George Washington Carver Museum, Texas (2021); White Cube, UK (2021); Martha’s Contemporary, Texas (2020–21); and Something Special Studios, New York (2020). She currently works and teaches in Providence, RI.

Tunmi Da Silva 

Instagram: @tunmininuuu 
www.tunmidasilva.com 

I’m inspired by cultural and religious syncretism, the language of materiality, and the ways in which diasporic people preserve and adapt ancestral traditions to new lands, such as basket weaving and amulet-making. The works are charmed, and are metaphors for medicine. Taking inspiration from my natural environment, atmospheric conditions and surface tensions lack distinction. I’m also inspired by an analogous relationship between appendages and bodies of water. When the work is in the water, I try to maintain an aerial, sometimes galactic, perspective on submersion. I’ve lived my entire life in California, and I have a deep affection for Californian terrains, Black feminist histories, and iterations of West Coast hip hop. Ultimately, I’m concerned with the various perspectives of and on self-absorption.