Five Chicago-based textile artists are showing how fibre can carry memory, migration and the pull of distant homelands in a free exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. "To Be Remembered: Woven Matters of the Heart", curated by Mya Lewis, runs in the building's Chicago Rooms through February 2027, and is the subject of a new feature by MutualArt published on 6 November.

The five artists, ebere agwuncha, Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Hale Ekinci, Josue Esau and Thuong Hoai Tran, each work with distinct fibre practices, weaving time, memory and emotion into pieces that honour the cultural traces connecting them to their motherlands. The show opened on 21 August as part of the city's fall and winter season at the Cultural Center, alongside a programme of free weaving, crochet and embroidery workshops.

agwuncha, an Igbo-American artist, builds sculptural portals that draw on the traditional techniques and archives of the Igbo diaspora. Ekwelum works in fibre and installation; Ekinci, a Turkish-American artist and professor at North Central College, brings an interdisciplinary approach shaped by her training at Columbia College Chicago. Josue Esau Romero Velasquez, born in Honduras and raised in San Antonio, is an educator on Chicago's South Side, while Tran, a Vietnamese American immigrant, works across media to explore displacement and belonging.

Lewis's curation, as MutualArt describes it, invites a stillness into the Cultural Center, a pause in a busy civic building for work that asks to be looked at slowly. The exhibition is free, in keeping with the Cultural Center's role as the city's public living room, and its run through February gives visitors months to return to it.