Rena Wood, received her BFA in Fiber from the Kansas City Art Institute and earned her MFA from the Department of Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Working primarily with fiber materials and processes, her work explores ideas about memory through the manipulation of textiles and stitched surfaces. Rena has been a resident artist at the Craft Alliance Center of Art and Design in St. Louis, MO, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, and at the Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts in Houston, TX. Her most recent exhibitions include, Extreme Fibers: Textile Icons and the New Edge at the Muskegon Art Museum, Gatherings: Contemporary Drawings at the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center, and the Surface Design Association’s exhibition Materialities: Contemporary Textile Arts at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Fiber Art at Tennessee Tech / Appalachian Center for Craft.
My work gives physical form to the ephemeral sense of memory. The time I spend working is marked by each stitch, each knot, and each repetitive act of my hands. I construct and deconstruct my materials to show a suspension between formation and falling apart, the acts of remembering and forgetting, and to represent time passing and time stopped.
- Virginia Commonwealth University, MFA in Fiber, Department of Craft and Material Studies, Richmond, VA
- Kansas City Art Institute, BFA in Fiber, Kansas City, Mo
- Study Abroad, Summer Session, Bernini to Fellini: The History and Visual Culture of Italy, Florence Italy
Assistant Professor at Tennessee Tech University
rwood@tntech.edu
NAFTAE 