Textiles in Translation: Hmong Women Tell the Stories Behind the Artwork of Their Migration and the Secret War

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory the Southeast Asian Healing Center, and the LAB^4 commuinity curation team welcome artists Lou Vang and See Vang for an artist talk and collaborative event, Textiles in Translation: Hmong Women Tell the Stories Behind the Artwork of Their Migration and the Secret War on Friday, July 11 at 6:00pm. 

Textiles in Translation is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Stitching the Story: Capturing Heart and Resilience through the Story Cloth on display Tuesday, July 8 through Friday, August 29, 2025.

This collaborative event will unite cultures while honoring the resilience, creativity, and stories of Hmong survivors of war through an immersive celebration of culture and art. A live interpretive experience will embrace the rich storytelling traditions of the Hmong community. Told in both Hmong and English, the program invites attendees to engage in meaningful conversation, free from language barriers, and connect through shared stories.

The event features local artists See Vang and Lou Vang, both with decades of experience in Hmong embroidery. See and Lou are excited to connect with community members, share their journeys, and offer insight into the philosophies that have guided their artistic and personal paths.

more on the exhibitions:

New LAB^4 exhibitions on display from Tuesday, July 8 through Friday, August 29, 2025. A reception for all current exhibitions will be held on Thursday, July 17, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

"The Whimsyland Series" by Poornima Moorthy is a drawing series that conveys a place where one feels unconditional love, acceptance, and protection. There is an invisible thread that binds us: love, empathy, curiosity. These are the magical forces we can’t see. Moorthy captures that magic in the world around us. By listening and observing, she reveals how magic lives in ordinary moments—hidden marvels we don’t always notice, feel, or think about. Her drawings are intended to spark hope, faith, and a sense of endless magical possibility.

"Willow Sanctuary" by the artist, master naturalist, land steward, and environmental educator, mars. "I am deeply encouraged by the possibility of highlighting women builders and connecting people and plants through place and curiosity," explains mars, "As an Artist, Ecological Restorationist, and representation of my Ancestors wildest dreams, I am joyful to be a part of watering seeds of interest around honoring Art as common soil to cultivate germination of ideas, curiosity, and connection."

"The Persistence of the Unsorted" by Sara Black, Jessie Mott, and Claire Pentecost: A motley collection of makeshift beings wanders through a museum in search of a home. Lost, excluded, imperfect and unfinished, these creatures of indeterminate constitution persevere. They persist in a world almost beyond repair, a realm where all they have is what they can scavenge from a failed paradigm. Survival depends on solidarity across differences of kind, persuasion and species. Haunted by boundaries, conceptual and material, the unsorted carry on in the exuberance of impure existence.

"Stitching the Story: Capturing Heart and Resillience through the Story Cloth" is a powerful exhibition celebrating the artistry, resilience, and lived experience of local Hmong artists. Rooted in the traditional textile art of paj ntaub, the featured works reflect stories of survival, displacement, healing, and cultural pride. Many of the pieces were created during times of great personal and collective hardship, spanning from refugee camps to resettlement in Wisconsin. Others were stitched in moments of reflection, drawing from memory, landscape, and the rhythms of daily life.

The exhibition highlights the work of eight Madison-based artists – Chang Lee, Lou Vang, Mai Vang, See Vang, Kia Yang, See Yang, Thao Yang, and Kong Xiong – whose embroidery bridges generations and geographies. Through detailed motifs, cross-stitching, appliqué, these works preserve a cultural legacy while embracing adaptation and change. In sharing their work, the artists offer a vibrant testament to creativity as a form of storytelling, healing, and connection. Visitors are invited to learn from their techniques, honor their histories, and celebrate the enduring beauty and strength of the Hmong community. 

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Family Beings, Before the Sea in the Sky’s Eye features three videos, and three related books offering distinct and related configurations of family beings and animated personas enacted through video, drawings, dance, song, and writing, crossing domestic, natural, and urban locations.  The videos Who Gets To? (2024); Harbor (2024); and Carmelina’s Farm (2023), reveal art documentation, including family interviews, improvised songs and performances in site-specific landscapes (beaches, mountains, studios, galleries, and urban streets.) Wilson dances, sings, holds conversations, sometimes donning aviary and old white man masks, and playing with a baby doll, all as poetic meditations. Though poetry, prose, 2D collage, video and performance documentation, Wilson’s books Virgil Kills: Stories (2022); Carmelina: Figures (2021); and Lucy 72, Poems (2018) engage the insides and outsides of perceived race and identity, excavating memory, nation, and embodiment, while manifesting grounded, fluid, and soaring poetic imaginaries.

"Home Is Where You Find It: Reimagined Little Free Libraries"  invites viewers to explore the intimate, expansive, and layered concept of “home” through a unique collaboration between six Madison-area artists and the city’s iconic Little Free Libraries. Madison becomes both canvas and collaborator in this citywide installation, reimagining these beloved neighborhood structures as portals into artistic expressions of the many things that “home” can mean.

Inside the gallery at Arts + Literature Laboratory, visitors will find a work by each participating artist that offers a window into their practice. Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated zine created by local artist TL Luke, charting the locations of each artist-designed Little Free Library across Madison.

Visitors are encouraged to take home a printed copy of the map and experience this expansive art show in person and beyond the gallery walls.