Ramekon O’Arwisters is the 2021 recipient of the McLaughlin Foundation Award for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence program and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21. Past artist-in-residence programs include the de Young Museum Artist in Residence; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program and the Vermont Studio Center. Grants and Awards include Artadia, NY; the San Francisco Foundation; the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Initiatives Program; Black Artists Fund, Sacramento; and the Eureka Fellowship awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Museum exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE; American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Making in Between: Gender Identities in Clay (MIB:GIC); and San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Queer Threads. O’Arwisters is the founder of Crochet Jam, a community arts project infused with folk-art traditions that foster a creative culture in cooperative relationships. Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, O’Arwisters earned a M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School in 1986.

Rooted in the exploration of traditional textile and craft practices, the work of multimedia artist Ramekon O’Arwisters reflects his lived experiences as a Black and Queer man in the United States. Growing up in the de facto segregated Jim Crow South of the 1960s and 1970s and later moving to San Francisco during the pivotal 1990s—a transformative era for LGBTQ rights—O’Arwisters anchors his complex sculpture and socially engaged work in material and object politics, drawing from cultural, familial, and personal histories. These explorations materialize through a multitude of objects, including sharp ceramic shards, zip ties, leather, torture devices, and jewelry, which O’Arwisters densely knots, wraps, braids, and crochets into abstract forms using shredded fabrics. Through these combinations of found objects and craft techniques—many associated with domestic spaces, O’Arwisters investigates topics of intimacy, gender, race, and queer identity. Challenging the histories and inherent meanings of materials, O’Arwisters questions the neutrality or passivity of objects, while highlighting the pleasurable and painful histories they carry. These investigations into materialized emotion, spirituality, and trauma are uniquely informed by O’Arwisters’ background in divinity and his early connections to religious and spiritual practices. This is further reflected in his ideas and practice of crafting as an act of care, healing, and resilience—a concept rooted in childhood memories of his grandmother, Celia Jones Taylor, who first introduced him to quilt-making as a safe space for creative expression. This foundational experience resonates throughout O’Arwisters’ sculptural work and his socially engaged project Crochet Jam, which uses craft as a tool for healing, dialogue, and resistance, embodying his vision of art as a communal act of transformation and liberation.