Collective Resistance

Artist Adela Goldbard, Associate Professor in RISD's Experimental and Foundation Studies, and her collaborator, Marcela Ortega, discuss their work, Nochixtlán with Kate Irvin, Curator of Costume & Textiles. Nochixtlán, a needle-felted wool triptych commemorates a bloody conflict within Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2016, federal police attacked teachers and allies protesting educational reforms that denied better working conditions and threatened to suppress Indigenous narratives.
The triptych materially expresses the trauma of this event by using a technique that binds fibers through contact and agitation. It also provides a metaphor for the forces of Indigenous solidarity and collective resistance to government oppression.

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Faculty Forum is a series of RISD faculty sharing their scholarship and research at the RISD Museum.
Upcoming Faculty Forums (in person) - Translating Tradition: Of Protocols and Readings of the “Past” in Contemporary Iranian Art on Wednesday, February 26, 12-1 pm and Small Quantities of Intensities: The Untold Story of William E. and Clara Brigham, Wednesday, March 12, 12-1 pm

Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar and educator from Mexico. Member of the National System of Artistic Creators of Mexico (SNCA), she holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of Mexico (UNAM). Goldbard investigates how radical community performances can subvert the imposition of hegemonic narratives, and how performances of violence and destruction can become aesthetic tools of resistance against power. She is especially interested in how collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation. Goldbard’s investigation focuses on developing a poetics of violence and a decolonial methodology for participant artistic practice. Recent commissioned projects include a pyrotechnic play with/for the Mexican community of La Villita, Chicago (Gallery 400, University of Illinois, 2019-20), and a socially engaged art project with/for the P’urhépecha community of Arantepacua (FEMSA Biennial, 2020-21). She is currently working on a long-term participant project in the Peruvian Andes.

Originally from the community of San Agustín Etla, Marcela Nahomy Ortega Ramos is a Professional Technician in Social Work. She always had a love for sewing and crocheting and for this reason, she took pattern making and weaving courses during her adolescence. In 2012, she trained as a textile artisan when she began working at the Workshop of Felpado at the San Agustín Arts Center. Initially supporting the making of cushions and later in the production of tapestries with the little known technique. In this field of art, over eleven years she has had the opportunity to develop different collaboration projects with teachers such as Francisco Toledo (2012, 2018) with whom she learned the technique by making prototypes for tapestries based on the work of this artist, the brothers Francisco and Miguel Castro leñero, Irma Palacios (2012), Guillermo Olguín, Demián Flores, James Brown, Jan Hendrix, Paloma Torres, Abraham Cruz Villegas, Trine Ellitsgaard with whom, in addition to collaborating in the making of tapestries, she learned the wet felting technique to be able to make hats designed by the founder of the Workshop (2013), Arnulfo Aquino, Eber JC (2014), Erika Versutti (2015), Gary Goldberg, Lorenza Aranguren (2016), Nigel Akintson, Víctor Chaca (2017), Adela Goldbard, collaboration with the Biyú brand (2018), Daniela Edburg (2020), Fernando Sandoval (2022), Lapiztola (2023). In the workshop there was also the opportunity to receive guidance from people trained in the art of wet felting and with needles, with whom exchanges of experiences were carried out, such as Mira Jokic (Yugoslavia 2013). Rosana Cartolano (Argentina 2016), Loreto Millalén (Chile 2018). She currently works as Coordinator of the Plushing Workshop at the San Agustín Arts Center, where she has taught various workshops with the plushing technique.