Location: El Cerrito, CA
Medium: Textiles, Painting, Installation
Website: terrifriedman.com
Terri Friedman was born in Denver, Colorado, to a grocer father and interior designer mother. She received her BA with honors from Brown University in 1986, where she also took classes at Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA from Claremont Graduate School in 1993. After launching her career in Los Angeles, Friedman relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives in El Cerrito with her family. She is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts.
Originally trained as a painter and sculptor, Friedman developed an expansive practice that encompassed kinetic sculpture, installation, and mixed-media work before discovering large-scale weaving in 2014. A visit to Barcelona’s Fundació Miró in 2012–2013 was transformative, where a mural-sized tapestry designed by Joan Miró and woven by Josep Royo catalyzed her engagement with fiber. Her work has been acquired by major institutions including the De Young Museum, Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), Denver Art Museum, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In 2021 she received the San Francisco Artadia Award, and in 2019 her practice was recognized in Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art (Phaidon Press).
Friedman describes herself as “an artist who weaves” rather than a tapestry maker — fiber is for her an extension of painting, with yarn standing in for paint. She employs a mix of wool, acrylic, cotton, metallic, hemp, and chenille fibers to build large-scale textile works dense with color, texture, and embedded language. Her palette runs to magenta, vermilion, fluorescent yellow, and cobalt blue, and woven words such as “Enough,” “SOS,” “Now,” and “If Only” appear directly in the surface, turning each piece into what she calls a “somatic poster of urgency.”
Her practice is grounded in research into neuroscience — particularly neuroplasticity and epigenetics — and the idea that the brain can build new connections through attention and repetition. She uses color, abstraction, and text to explore the brain-body connection, mental health, and recovery from psychological and physical trauma. The meditative, repetitive act of weaving itself mirrors these themes, and her work cultivates formal tension between natural and synthetic fibers, asymmetrical shapes, and contrasting hues to generate a simultaneous pull of attraction and unease in viewers.
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