Turk's Head Rope Bracelet

Tanya Aguiñiga gives shape to her craft through jewelry and furniture. But textiles inform the sought-after work by this prolific Atwater Village artist. From double-strand necklace to folding chair, each piece undergoes steps of handiwork. With her jewelry, she knots, twists, braids and dip dyes each one. Furniture is sedulously skinned in colored wool felts. The Tijuana expat is as much activist as artist. She's lead educational outreach programs in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and San Diego Museum of Art, her alma maters, where she earned an MFA and BA in Furniture Design, respectively. She was named a USA Target Fellow in Crafts and Traditional Arts in 2006. As a decade-long member of Border Art Workshop BAW/TAF, a bi-national artist collaborative, the border experience is a constant source for her work, specifically “the interconnectedness of societies, the beauty in struggle and the celebration of culture,” she says. To wit, Tanya is spending part of Summer 2010 collaborating with the Mayan community in Chiapas on a textile project to be later realized as a fundraising commercial enterprise stateside.