Current Perspectives Lecture Series: Kira Dominguez Hultgren

Kira Dominguez Hultgren (b. 1980, she/they, Oakland, CA) is United States Artists Fellow, Center for Craft recipient, and Illinois Arts Counsel Fellow. They studied postcolonial literature at Princeton University, and studio arts and visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts. Their research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, re-storying material culture, and weaving as a performative critique of the visual.

This event is free and open to the public.

Dominguez Hultgren weaves with the material afterlife of a so-called multiracial family: Chicanx-Indigenous-Indian-Hollywood Hawaiian-Brown-Black. Instead of being passed down, weaving and textile processes are brought up, resurrected from family stories and fabrics. Questions about cultural appropriation and codeswitching, exoticism, and performing cultural misrecognitions occupy their practice.

Dominguez Hultgren has exhibited their work broadly including shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Ballroom Marfa, the San Jose Museum of Quilt and Textile, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. Their public art projects include installations with the city of Berkeley, the city of Phoenix, and an upcoming installation at Stanford University’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies.

When not in the studio, Dominguez Hultgren teaches weaving as an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies.