Weaving Community: Amanda Browder
What happens when a work of art is created not just for a community, but with one? For textile artist Amanda Browder, collaboration is at the center of the process. Her large-scale fabric installations transform architecture through bold color and pattern, but their impact begins long before the final work is installed. Through donated materials, public sewing days, and hands-on participation, Browder creates projects that bring people together through the act of making.
As part of the Racine Art Museum’s (RAM) In/Between festival, Browder will present two site-specific installations: Zig & Zag, an outdoor work that will transform a public space through color and movement, and Civic Sparkle, an indoor installation that invites visitors to experience her process from a closer perspective. Together, these works demonstrate how contemporary craft can extend beyond traditional materials and settings to become a shared community experience.
Born in Missoula, Montana, and now based in Brooklyn, Browder has a strong connection to Wisconsin, where she earned her graduate degree in sculpture and installation art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work reflects many of the values associated with the state’s craft traditions: attention to materials, appreciation for skilled making, and the belief that creative work can bring people together.
Browder’s process begins with gathering—not only fabric, but stories. For each project, she invites local residents to donate textiles from their homes, including clothing, linens, and other materials that hold personal histories. During public sewing days, volunteers of all experience levels work together to cut and stitch the fabric into large panels. These gatherings create opportunities for conversation, collaboration, and shared ownership of the finished piece.
The result is a work that carries the imprint of the community that helped create it. Individual fabrics retain traces of personal experiences, while their transformation into a large-scale installation demonstrates the power of collective effort. Browder’s practice celebrates the character and self-beautification of a town, using local materials, participation, and shared creativity to transform familiar environments and encourage people to see their surroundings in new ways.
This relationship between art, place, and participation makes Browder’s work a natural fit for In/Between. The festival explores how contemporary craft can exist between disciplines and beyond traditional museum spaces, connecting material, process, and community. Browder’s installations embody that idea of “betweenness,” existing between sculpture and architecture, individual contribution and collective creation, the familiar and the unexpected.
For In/Between, Browder’s work will also extend the museum beyond its traditional role as a place to view art. Through the collaborative process of collecting, sewing, and assembling, the museum becomes a site of making—almost like a giant loom where materials, stories, and relationships are woven together. The final installation becomes a reflection of the many people who helped bring it to life.
Her work also highlights the sustainability of reimagining existing materials. Fabrics that may have been discarded are given new purpose, transformed from personal objects into a temporary public artwork that reflects the community from which it came.
Although the installations themselves are temporary, the experiences behind them continue. The conversations that happen around a sewing table, the stories attached to donated fabrics, and the relationships formed through making become part of the work’s lasting impact.
Through Zig & Zag and Civic Sparkle, Amanda Browder will bring In/Between’s themes of connection, participation, and contemporary craft to life in Racine. Her work shows how simple materials can carry complex stories—and how the process of making together can transform not only a space, but the people who share it.