Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Textiles, Social Practice, Performance
Website: ramekon.com
Ramekon O’Arwisters was born in Kernersville, North Carolina, where he grew up on a farm; his parents worked in a cotton factory in Winston-Salem. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina in 1982 with a B.A. in psychology and political science, and in 1986 earned a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from Duke University School of Divinity in Durham, North Carolina. After graduate school, he spent five years in Japan, teaching English and making colorful abstract drawings that he showed and sold in a Tokyo gallery. He subsequently moved to San Francisco in 1991, seeking a place where his queer identity would be accepted and allowed to thrive.
Upon returning to the United States, O’Arwisters worked in various curatorial posts in San Francisco, eventually serving as the photography and video curator for the city’s airport. A turning point came in 2016 during his Recology Artist-in-Residence program, when he discovered shattered ceramics at the San Francisco dump and began combining them with fabric and the crocheting process. This new direction launched a sustained sculptural practice that brought him widespread institutional recognition. He received an Artadia Award in 2002 and is a 2014 Eureka Fellow, awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. He is also the 2021 recipient of the McLaughlin Foundation Award for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21.
O’Arwisters has been an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is also the founder of Crochet Jam, a community arts project infused with folk-art traditions that foster a creative culture in cooperative relationships. Crochet Jam has been presented at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and ICA San Francisco.
Rooted in the exploration of traditional textile and craft practices, O’Arwisters’ work reflects his lived experiences as a Black and Queer man in the United States. Growing up in the de facto segregated Jim Crow South and later moving to San Francisco during the pivotal 1990s, he 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 — sharp ceramic shards, zip ties, leather, and jewelry — which O’Arwisters densely knots, wraps, braids, and crochets into abstract forms using shredded fabrics, investigating topics of intimacy, gender, race, and queer identity. With large sharp ceramic shards knotted together using shredded fabric and black zip ties, the sculptures stand as cultural totems, embodying the couture of drag, Black culture, African American quilting, and religion.
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 his sculptural work and his socially engaged project Crochet Jam, which uses craft as a tool for healing, dialogue, and resistance. He also takes salvaged materials and binds them to his body to make self-portraits.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.