“Together, these five artists use craft to share personal memories shaped by intergenerational experiences and the world around them,” says Lauren Leving, the exhibition’s curator. “Using tangible materials to “speak,” they draw on traditional methods of passing down culture while experimenting with new modes of memory dissemination.”
Goldfinch is proud to present legacy as lexicon, a stand-in for my voice, a group exhibition in Gallery I featuring works by Hale Ekinci, Azadeh Gholizadeh, Roni Packer, Marina Peng, and Yasmin Spiro. Emphasizing texture as a trigger for haptic memory, or “touch memory,” each artist combines historical crafting practices with contemporary techniques, revealing their individual and ancestral narratives as continuous threads in an interwoven tapestry.
“Together, these five artists use craft to share personal memories shaped by intergenerational experiences and the world around them,” says Lauren Leving, the exhibition’s curator. “Using tangible materials to “speak,” they draw on traditional methods of passing down culture while experimenting with new modes of memory dissemination.”
Hale Ekinci combines Middle Eastern and Western art-making traditions in her embroidered paintings. An avid crocheter, she pairs ornamentation found on Turkish oya (lace) and kilim rugs with familial archival imagery. Using techniques like slow stitching and collage to incorporate personal narratives and historical references into her work, Ekinci challenges perceptions of what is often considered women's labor. Embedding cultural symbols and personal relics into textiles like “New New House,” the artist explores complex narratives of belonging and connection, as well as the immigrant experience.
Azadeh Gholizadeh’s felt and embroidered tapestries explore the body, landscape, memory, and the singularity of perception. Teetering on the edge of abstraction, her scenic compositions use pixilation to depict views of different landscapes she encounters. These works function equally as windows into her emotional journey and ongoing exploration of belonging. By fusing traditional embroidery techniques with contemporary artistic practices (collage, sculpture, digital rendering), Gholizadeh’s viewpoints become portals that transcend time and place, connecting her memories of Tehran with her present experiences in the United States.
Roni Packer’s works also highlight the artist’s use of materials as a grounding for self-reflection. For Packer, painting is an intimate process; her No Paint series demonstrates this intimacy through the subtle relationships tethering her body to her material choices. The pale beige of her canvases becomes the wide expanse of her homeland desert, for example, while the fringe that crowns Untitled (Split) recalls the artist’s own, blunt-cut bangs. Displayed together, Packer’s body of work is both a self-portrait and a snapshot of the artist’s daily life – comprising “a body” in more ways than one.
While the works of Gholizadeh and Packer use abstraction to create glimpses into their worlds, Marina Peng’s weavings depict fully-formed imagery. Using frenetic, spiraling gestures and the impulsive snip of scissors, Peng’s textiles capture bodies in motion, effortlessly communicating the behavior patterns that shape familial dynamics. At once personal and universal, Peng’s textural narratives extend outwards, bringing us into her story and reminding us of our own.
Yasmin Spiro uses jute, driftwood, and rope to evoke the muted tones and textures of Caribbean architecture. These organic and fiber-based materials, which for Spiro are symbolically connected to the landscape and culture of Jamaica, are employed by the artist as a means of examining her unique personal and cultural identity. In textiles like “Grain of Sand,” Spiro invites viewers to engage with the memories and histories her work evokes, in hopes of encouraging dialogue about landscape, heritage, and the tactile experience of touch memory.
legacy as lexicon: a stand-in for my voice runs from January 25 through March 8, 2025. The exhibition’s opening reception will take place on January 25 from 2 - 5pm and is free and open to the public.
Artist Biographies
Hale Ekinci
Hale Ekinci is a Turkish-American artist based in Chicago. Rooted in her lived experience as an immigrant, Ekinci creates embroidered paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos embellished with vibrant colors, patterns, and cultural artifacts. Combining Middle Eastern and Western textile craft and fine art traditions, she explores identity, folklore, communication, and gendered labor. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and is currently a professor and chair of Art & Design at North Central College.
Ekinci was recently the Engaged Artist-in-Residence at the Gayle Karch Cook Center at Indiana University, including a solo exhibition in Fall 2024. Previously, she was also an artist-in-residence at ACRE, Jiwar Barcelona, Momentum Berlin, Elsewhere Museum, Chicago Artists Coalition Hatch, Spudnik Press, and Facebook Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally at EXPO Chicago, One After 909, Woman Made Gallery, Koehnline Museum of Art, University of Illinois Springfield, Dittmar Gallery (NU), and Queens College Art Center. Her videos have been screened internationally in New York City, Berlin, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. She is the recipient of the Fiber & Figure award by the Surface Design Association and the best in show at the South Bend Museum of Art’s 30th Biennial.
Azadeh Gholizadeh
Azadeh Gholizadeh was born in Tehran, Iran. Her works explore the body, landscape, and the fragmentation of memory through an examination of her own emotional connection to a sense of belonging. She is interested in thinking about the relationship of landscape to memory in a manner described by Simon Schama as "a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have… instead of being yet another explanation of what we have lost, it is an exploration of what we may find.”
Gholizadeh received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois in 2012; a Master’s of Architecture and Urbanism from Iran University of Science & Technology in Tehran, Iran, in 2009; and a Bachelor of Architecture from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran in 2006. Solo exhibitions of Gholizadeh’s work include Dawn to Dusk at Goldfinch in Chicago, Illinois; Oh, Swallow, where do you live in Winter? at Apparatus Projects in Chicago, Illinois; and Withing the Threshold at Chicago Artist Coalition’s Bolt Space in Chicago, Illinois. In 2022, Gholizadeh was a Chicago Artadia Awardee and Hopper Prize Spring Chapter winner. In 2017, Gholizadeh was the recipient of a Brenda Green Gender Inclusivity Scholarship for participation in the ACRE Residency program.
Roni Packer
Above all else, Roni Packer sees herself as a colorist; “I use color to trace the relations between painting and space, in a search for a material presence that can generate a vague memory,” she notes. Packer was born and raised in Tel Aviv. She completed a BFA and a BA in philosophy before moving to the United States in 2014. Packer received her MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2017 and was a BOLT resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition the following year. In 2020, she returned to Tel Aviv, where she is based now. Packer’s work has been shown in various spaces from Chicago (Hyde Park Art Center, 6018 North, The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Gallery 400, Aspect/Ratio, LVL3, Roots and Culture, Chicago Cultural Center, and others) to Israel (Bat Yam Museum of Art, The Lobby Art Space, Almacén Gallery, Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center, The Jerusalem Artists’ House, and others).
Marina Peng
Marina Peng is a multimedia artist from St. Louis, MO, working across fiber, sculpture, and photography. She received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She has exhibited her work locally and regionally at spaces, including ACRE Projects, Dream Clinic Project Space, Duane Reed Gallery, G-CADD, The Kranzberg, The Luminary, and PLUG. She has attended residencies at ACRE, Caldera Arts, Craft Alliance, Elsewhere, the Hambidge Center, Otis College of Art & Design, and the Vermont Studio Center. Recent awards include a Puffin Foundation Grant and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. In addition to her practice, she is a co-organizer of PSA, a citywide public art initiative in St. Louis.
Yasmin Spiro
Yasmin Spiro is a Jamaican artist living and working in Chicago. Spiro’s work is multi-disciplinary, primarily based in sculpture and immersive installation, with video, drawing, and performance—exploring issues of land and the environment, cultural identity and socio-economic issues within the framework of architecture, personal history, spirituality, and memory—often through the lens of Caribbean culture. Much of her work is textile-based, burlap, rope, and felt, with integrated cast elements of plaster, ceramic, and cement—creating forms that often reference vernacular architecture, and the knowledge and memory that's held in those structures, as well as the history embedded in craft and making.
Spiro attended Pratt Institute and has held residencies at the Hyde Park Art Center, The Dora Maar Foundation in France, The Kohler Arts and Industry residency, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hatch Chicago Artist Coalition residency. Her work was recently exhibited at the Arts Club of Chicago and The Tapestry Alliance of America. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.
Curator Biography:
Lauren Leving (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Chicago, IL. Her work explores how creative practice can expand institutionally-rooted understandings of access. She is ACRE’s Exhibitions Director and Associate Curator for the 2025 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Previously, she served as Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Leving was co-curator of Everlasting Plastics in the U.S. Pavilion during the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. While at moCa Cleveland, Leving organized numerous projects including a large scale textile commission by Aram Han Sifuentes entitled Messages to Authorities (Go Away!); Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Synergy; and Don’t mind if I do, a group exhibition stewarded by Finnegan Shannon. Leving holds an MA in Museum & Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois–Chicago and a BA from Tulane University. She is an AAMC 2024 Propel Program Fellow and in 2025, will be a Critic/Curator-in-Residence at Art Omi.
