Bio
Weinberg’s art is in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, and Denver Botanic Gardens and is exhibited internationally, including at Griffith Art Museum (Australia), Zhejiang Art Museum (China), 21C Museum (Oklahoma City), Center for Craft (NC), and Dreamsong (MN). In 2024 her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Denver Botanic Gardens, the University of Missouri, and New York University’s Gallatin Galleries. Her artwork has been featured in the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the New York Times, Colossal, National Resource Defense Council’s onEarth Magazine, American Craft, Ecotone, and Journal of the Data Visualization Society, among others. She is the recipient of an Illinois Artist Fellowship, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Serenbe Fellowship, Windgate Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, and grants from the Puffin Foundation and Illinois Arts Council. Her numerous residencies include New York’s Museum of Art and Design and a SciArt Bridge Residency for cross-disciplinary collaboration. She has been an invited visiting artist and researcher at the University of Missouri and Berea College. Weinberg received her MFA from California College of the Arts and an interdisciplinary MA (Textiles & Social Theory) and BA (Peace Studies) from New York University. She currently lives and works in Champaign-Urbana, IL.
Statement
I create weavings, sculptures, and drawings that explore the interconnected harms extraction inflicts on humans and the earth, from rising temperatures, species loss, and plastic proliferation to illness and displacement. I trace these connections through the systems and structures of weaving, vascular systems of people and trees, flows of watersheds, and streams of news and data.
In the decade-long Datascapes project, I transform climate data into weavings and coiled sculptures that suggest soft horizon lines, shimmering waterbodies, or burial flags. Rather than visualizing the data, I materialize it with plant fibers and dyes, petrochemical-derived medical tubes, and fishing line, using color, pattern, material, and scale to weave the social-political dimensions of the climate crisis and a sense of place back into the story the data tells.
Much of my work simultaneously references landscape and body. I weave monofilament and cotton into silhouettes of tree species threatened by climate crisis, suspending the ghostly, semi-transparent forms upside-down to evoke lungs, arteries, and roots. I make sculptures referencing circulatory systems from the more-than-human world using expired, petrochemical-derived medical waste once associated with the circulatory systems of human bodies: Tourniquets become tree rings, and tubes become flowing water bodies. Together, these works retrace and reimagine relationships between corporeal and ecological bodies, between personal and communal loss, and between grief and possibility.