“I consider everything I do a weaving,” says Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege. “Talking to you, I consider myself the weft and you the warp, and as we’re talking the threads of our lives, our histories, and our futures become intertwined and braided and tangled.” A fiber artist born and based in Gallup (Na’nízhoozhí), Riege makes sculptural installations from natural and synthetic materials—cat fur, sheeps wool, stuffed animals—to examine both his own personal cosmology and that of his Diné heritage. Following solo shows at the Hammer Museum in LA and ICA Miami, Riege recently returned to Minneapolis’s Bockley Gallery, site of a 2021 solo show, for the group exhibition Now You See It, Now You Don’t, on view through April 29. To mark the occasion, we shared our 2021 conversation—on topics including queerness, art activated through performance, and his belief that objects are animate—on Bockley’s newly redesigned website.
Read “I Am the Weft, You Art the Warp,” my interview with Eric-Paul Riege.
Eric-Paul Riege, dah ‘iistl’o ́ [loomz], weaving dance (fig.1) (2018), Sanitary Tortilla Factory, Albuquerque, NM.
Photo by Rapheal Begay, courtesy of the artist