Allida Warn is an artist, teacher, and researcher with a practice in Socially Engaged Art (SEA). She creates participatory projects in order to share and learn with others. She loves the ephemeral and the interconnected. She creates contemplative personal work primarily in the disciplines of printmaking, fiber, and non-traditional materials. Allida’s SEA practices range through most artistic media and bridge academic disciplines through collaborations that she cultivates with disciplinary experts from anthropology and geology to engineering and math.
Collaborative and Social Projects
There is a tension in creating socially engaged work between breaking through boundaries and creating connections between people so that they gain critical awareness of differences that create dissonant systems.
In my work, I tend to create opportunities for learning through imaginative narrative or metaphorical abstraction. The piece above leverages the metaphor of weaving with different choices, textures, and motions to create a literal social fabric. You can read more about it in these two posts.
Art



Fascinated by grandmother’s drawings and rag rugs, the abstract expressionism of Sonia Delaunay, and traditional arts from Finland, I made a series of rag-rugs to evoke natural imagery: the sun and the rain.



While living in Spain, I was overwhelmed by the dryness of the land. Having lived in Chicago near Lake Michigan, the arid desert was so different, and I started to draw the Seine while sitting on the banks of a canal near Gare du Nord. These became abstract images that I have printed on cloth and have worked into a few designs.



In the fall of 2016, I curated a show that featured teaching artists from FLY. During the honey-bee festival. My own contribution was a giant walk-in honeycomb installation constructed out of fabric so that visitors could walk into it and be engulfed in texture.



In the fall of 2019, I did an experimental limited engagement to get feedback on a new project that will combine theatre, digital projection, fiber art and participation called In-Between Thoughts.