Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and educator. She is founder of The Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of pieces of lace and family histories, The Crit Lab, graduate-level critical seminars for working artists, and MAPSpace project space.
statement
Can an object embody an act of resistance, without replicating the modes of repression?
The female body is a center of creation and a space of continual occupation. My large-scale textile works are purposefully feminine, resilient, with a small ecological footprint, a response to the intensely anti-female culture of this moment. The machismo of big installations- hard, heavy, resource hungry, motivates me to create objects that are responsive, adaptable, collapsable, able to grow in scale without a corresponding destructive use of resources. I use a binary to disrupt a binary; strength and softness are equally undeniable, in a beautiful almost monstrous femininity. A body that refuses to comply.
Textile touches our bodies from birth to death, it records visceral histories in its fibers. The work is comprised of textiles found and donated to the Lace Archive, an ongoing community archive of donated lace and histories from women around the world. The aggregation of tiny stitches of lace into room-size works is a tangible document of women’s labor, evidence of the hidden economy of care that circulates inside the domestic sphere and outside commodified masculine spaces. The work is alternately dyed with historic natural colors such as cochineal, a material that carries a long history of trade and conquest, then hand sewn into large sculptures and wall works. Clothing is identity-forming architecture for the body, it alters it in repressive and liberatory ways. The oversize skirt sculptures are erotic metaphors for women’s lives, they shelter and nurture, conceal and reveal, resist and liberate, care and love. The ties of aprons read as forlorn arms in search of a body to wrap around. The sculptures contain slits that open to the interior without possibility of entry; inside hangs ghostly clothing or bibles hand-dyed red in lace girdle books.
Making this work is an act of mending, remembering, collecting, and preserving. My work is a feminist manifesto of softness.
The Lace Archive
These projects began with family lace from my Italian and Irish grandmothers, Ermenegilda Eugenia Glorinda Fungaroli Miranda, and Rebecca Cogan. After I posted images on social media of dying the lace with cochineal insect dye, an outpouring of initially unsolicited donations of lace from around the world began to arrive, and continues today. Donations arrive with letters, stories, and pictures of the family and maker. The complex form of lace, dismissed as grandma’s doilies, retains traces of the economic and craft histories of women. I recognized these donations as representing the countless stories of unknown women, and founded The Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of pieces of lace and family histories. Each note and textile is documented— photographed, measured, and archived, before being sewn into an artwork. Many textiles arrive at my door; lace, linens, skirts, aprons, napkins, handkerchiefs, tablecloths and duvet covers, embroidered in colorful threads, crocheted in complex patterns, or with unfinished needle work, from a mother, auntie, grandmother or great-grandmother. These intimate items have no commodity value, created for a home they might never leave. They are tangible acts of love, a labor of care circulating inside the domestic sphere.
The care and generosity shared through these donations is instrumental to the work, through intimate stories about the lace, the makers, the women who preserved it, and the desire for it to live on in the work and in the archive. This work demands to take up physical space, without ceding either softness or strength. This feels urgent in a moment when women’s bodies continue to be in the peril of legal and social control by governmental and religious institutions and individuals.
curatorial and consulting
I curate at MAPSpace and independently, and work with artists in critique and professional practice both privately and in the Crit Lab. With decades of experience in teaching professional practice to undergrad, grad and working artists, I have developed pragmatic and ethical structures that support artists in creating a rigorous soulful ecosystem for their work. This happens through what I consider the 3-legged stool of the artist: The intuitive cognition of the studio, the reflective cognition of analysis and critique, and through writing. This is made visible in websites and representations of work in the digital space. I offer consults for writing and preparing portfolios for grants and proposals, website analyses, and many ways to be accountable to the desire of our work. Every consultation incorporates an ethical and socially conscious framework for building a sustainable garden suited to each artist's unique life. Artist-run culture and community are fundamental to all of my work.
bio
Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, educator, and founder of the artist-run orgs The Crit Lab and MAPSpace, where she developed residencies in Port Chester, Peekskill, and Italy. In 2021 she founded the Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of donated lace works and family histories. She has received grants from the Barbara Deming Fund for feminist work (2024); Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation (2022);Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (2021); two artist grants from ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts (2021/2014); an Anonymous Was a Woman Covid19 Relief Grant (2021), and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth (2004-5). She has been awarded residencies at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, I-Park Foundation, Weir Farm Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Julio Valdez Printmaking Studio, and been Visiting Artist at Vermont Studio Center, the Heckscher Museum, and University of Utah. Miranda has developed education programs for K-12, museums, and institutions, including Franklin Furnace, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution. She is a noted expert on the history and use of natural dyes and pigments, and teaches about environmentally sustainable art practices. As faculty at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts (2005-19) she led the first study abroad program in Prato, Italy (2017). Recent solo exhibitions include: Five Points Art Center, (Torrington, CT), the Olin Fine Art Center (Washington PA), 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, NH), Jane Street Art Center, Garrison Art Center (Hudson Valley, NY), ODETTA Gallery, and Maine Window DUMBO (NYC). Group exhibitions include Museo Camuno, (Breno, Italy); Spartanburg Art Museum (Spartanburg, SC); Dunedin Fine Art Center (Dunedin FL); HV MOCA (Peekskill NY), The Lyman Allyn Museum (New London, CT), Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA), Williamsburg Art+Historical Center, The Clemente Center (NYC), The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery at UConn Avery Point, (Groton, CT). Her work has been featured in PiùValli TV (Italy), Movida Terre Camune Magazine (Italy), Art New England (2022), Hudson Valley One (2022) and Brooklyn Rail, (2021). She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Chiesa Santa Maria, Museo MiraD'or , Pisogne Italy (2025).