Artist Fellows and Artists-in-Residence
Rosy Petri, Karen Ann Hoffman, 2025; dyed cottons. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2024–25, WMQFA hosted Rosy Petri as its inaugural Digital Humanities Fellow. During her yearlong fellowship, Petri crated a series of podcast interviews with fiber artists and textile experts. These interviews are archived on an interactive Listening Station embedded in the museum's Textile Library and on her website Stitchworks: Fiber Artists Behind the Seams. Additionally, she also produced detailed quilted portraits of each interviewee to accompany the interviews.
The artists interviewed by Petri include Karen Ann Hoffman, Anne Kingsbury, Bobby Sharon, and McLaughlin & Hays Hats Co.
This project emerged from discussions with Petri about how she would like to engage with the museum, drawing on her expertise as a textile artist and storyteller. Through dialogue with Petri, we realized meeting artists and audiences in ways they feel welcome is essential. A digital humanities fellowship, free and open space at the museum, and published resources on WMQFA's website are ways we are working to increase accessibility and encourage participation among people who have been traditionally excluded. The project is a continuous effort to deepen our audience's understanding of contemporary textile practices through diverse voices and multiple access points.
About Rosy Petri
Multidisciplinary artist Rosy Petri received a Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship in 2020. During that time, she interviewed twenty-five African American women who were actively engaged in, advocating for, and educating Milwaukee communities about their experiences during the 2020 George Floyd protests, now archived on the Haggerty Museum of Art's Google Arts & Culture website. In 2022, Petri was commissioned to illustrate the book It's a Good Day to Change the World (Countryman Press, 2023), a collection of stories from the podcast Inflection Point.
Support for this project is provided by grants from the Cedarburg's Tourism, Promotion, and Development (TP&D) Committee and the Greater Cedarburg Foundation.