Gallery Talk with BA Harrington and Viola Bordon
Gallery Talk with BA Harrington and Viola Bordon | Sat. April 4, 2026 | 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET | In-person
Join us for a gallery talk with artists BA Harrington and Viola Bordon. These two exhibitions, Viola Bordon: Muliebrity and BA Harington: Suite Américaine, are a part of Radical Americana, a series of exhibitions organized by The Clay Studio and a consortium of Philadelphia’s extensive collection of arts and cultural institutions that celebrate how today’s artists are continuing the city’s unique and rich legacy as a center for creativity and civic engagement. To learn more about the other participating artists and organizations, please click HERE.
About the Artist:
Since 2012, BA Harrington has been a Professor of Woodworking in the Department of Art and Design and Director of the Wood Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She continues to write essays, speak at conferences, and build sculptural work in reference to early American furniture forms. She has held Windgate Artist Residencies at San Diego State University and SUNY Purchase and was a recipient of the Center for Craft’s inaugural Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship. Each year this substantial mid-career grant is awarded to two artists who are revising, reclaiming, and advancing the history of craft through their work. Harrington graduated from the Cabinet & Furnituremaking program at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. She also holds an M.F.A. in Wood and an M.A. In Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
About the Artist:
Viola Bordon is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia whose work examines transformation across material, ecological, and social systems. Her quilting is an act that binds histories of labor, belief, and resistance. Working through inherited methods of reuse and repair, she frames systems of power that shape both personal and collective experience. Her quilts negotiate structures that hold tension between faith and skepticism, memory and material. Quiet repetitive labor forming articulated dissent, allowing form itself to think through what endurance makes visible. Her practice also includes environmental installations, drawing on methods of reuse, endurance, and collaboration. Her projects have been supported by the Fulbright Commission, Lilly Endowment, Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Salt Planes State Park. Bordon’s teaching and research emphasize tactile knowledge and the quiet radicality of sustained attention to material and processes.
Suite Américaine and Muliebrity are generously supported by the Cambium Giving Society of the Museum for Art in Wood, Radical Americana, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Bresler Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the William Penn Foundation, and Windgate Foundation.
This event is free to the public. The Museum for Art in Wood interprets, nurtures, and champions creative engagement and expansion of art, craft, and design in wood to enhance the public’s understanding and appreciation of it. A suggested donation of $5 per person enables us to provide programs and exhibitions throughout the year.
Questions? Please contact Katie Sorenson, Director of Outreach and Communications, at [email protected].
