Sheri Schumacher is a textile-based artist and designer. Her work explores narratives about
cultural landscapes and records a sense of place through observation and material
investigation. Informed by relationships between interior and exterior conditions, her textiles
move beyond being just a cloth surface and become a space with defining enclosure systems
such as boundaries, edge and territory.
Discovery through the act of making is integral to her work, finding beauty in imperfection from
discarded garments and linens with a history of use. The repurposed cloth provides a site for
conversation between surface and support, intention and unpredictability and resistance and
fragility. Dialogue with the cloth’s tendencies is explored through hand sewing, piecing and
mending, a choreography between maker and material.
Multicultural experiences of her childhood, living in Europe and the Washington DC
metropolitan area, informed her creative path. Cross-disciplinary studies at Cranbrook
Academy of Art, where she earned an MFA in 3D Design, and teaching interior architecture
provided a natural progression to a studio practice focused on the convergence of art, design
and craft. Her textile works, ranging from an intimate scale to larger site specific works, are
exhibited nationally and held in private and public collections.