Ian Danner, Lars Shimabukuro

media release: The Textile Arts Center of Madison (TAC) is pleased to announcethe openings of two new exhibitions, "Mend Ends" and "ぎりぎり giri giri - At theedge, and just enough," solo exhibitions featuring work by artists Ian Danner and Lars Shimabukuro. 

TAC will celebrate the exhibition closings with a public reception on Friday, April 10 from 6-8pm. This event is free and open to the public. TAC’s public hours for viewing the exhibition are Wednesday through Friday from noon-4pm and Saturdays from 10am-4pm, March 18 through April 11, 2026.

"Mend Ends" showcases recent work by artist and educator Ian Danner, including woven, knit, felted, wooden, and ceramic pieces. Danner’s art practice includes an extensive sampling of materials and techniques. This exhibition focuses on the emergence of wholeness, as each piece is assembled to emphasize the materials, processes, and feelings that are fundamental to reaching a finished object. To Mend Ends, means to make whole again. Through the performance of craft-centric processes and exploration of materiality, new and more earnest works are composed. These works often expose the (non)binary relationships between materials, systems, and forms to reflect on queerness.

Ian Danner is an artist, researcher, and educator who focuses on craft pedagogy and its entanglement with emergent and speculative queer becomings. Danner is a master of fine arts (MFA) degree candidate in design studies at UW-Madison, who focuses on mixed craft materials and processes to investigate (non)binary assemblage and performance. Danner’s artworks explore interiors by creating objects to adorn domestic spaces with a queer sensibility and explore materiality in fibers, clay, and wood, including how these materials can inform identity-building and promote community engagement.

In "ぎりぎり giri giri - At the edge, and just enough," Lars Shimabukuro presents a series of installations shaped by their first research trip to Okinawa, the ancestral homeland of their great-grandparents. Encountering the Ryukyu Islands for the first time, they experienced a striking sense of familiarity—red clay soil, sugarcane fields, orchids growing untended, and ocean crossings that echoed their upbringing in Hawai‘i. These parallel landscapes, both profoundly altered by U.S. military presence and environmental strain, form the conceptual ground of the work. Through careful attention to material and place, Shimabukuro reflects on migration, ecological depletion, cultural erasure, and the quiet persistence of memory.

Combining kasuri-dyed woven cloth, shifu paper yarn, woodworking, basketry, and cast glass, the installations create tactile, layered environments that invite slow looking and embodied reflection. For Shimabukuro, studio practice is an act of listening—learning from materials as teachers that hold tension, resilience, and tenderness. Visitors can expect work that considers how textiles and handmade forms bind us to land and lineage, reveal the healing work our communities require, and ask us to remain as responsive and adaptable as the materials themselves.

Lars Shimabukuro (b. 1991, Honolulu, Hawai’i) is an artist whose work expands ideas of homelands, family, and memory to include the queer landscapes that raised them. They earned a bachelor of arts degree in Studio Art from Yale University in 2013, an Associate Degree from Haywood Community College (NC) focusing on weaving in 2019, and completed the core fellowship program at the Penland School of Craft in 2023. Shimabukuro has shown nationally and internationally, and teaches weaving at craft schools. He is currently pursuing a design studies MFA at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology in Madison, on unceded Ho-Chunk land.

About the Textile Arts Center of Madison

The Textile Arts Center of Madison (TAC) is a hub for the fiber arts community, offering classes and workshops, exhibitions and events, and access to supplies for makers and enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds. The nonprofit organization was founded in 2023 with a vision for a community in which creative expression through textile and fiber arts is celebrated, supported, and accessible to all. Through its programming, TAC celebrates the rich traditions and cultures of fiber craft, and seeks to reflect the diversity of fiber art makers. Visit textileartsmadison.org to learn more.