Unlike the coasts, Midwestern culture is synonymous with the manual labor of blue-collar jobs, resilience necessary in harsh winters, and a certain friendliness that lends itself to a deep-rooted sense of community. These humble tenets grounded Melissa Joseph’s childhood in Saint Marys, a small, rural city in Pennsylvania, where she was born to a mother with Irish heritage and a father from Kerala, India. The melange of biracial life, Midwestern niceties, and gendered fiber art traditions are woven through Joseph’s artistic practice, which translates family photos into tender needle-felted scenes.
In her forthcoming solo exhibition, Casserole Culture, the New York-based artist echoes the warmth and mundanity present in these snapshots of life through soft layers of wool. An upturned hat on a wooden dresser, the bright orange flowers of dining room wallpaper, and even the titular hot dish all appear in hazy fiber, nodding to the fuzziness of memory.
needle felted wool on industrial felt in artist’s frame, 48 x 36 inches. Photo by Mark Waldhauser
Alongside two-dimensional works, Joseph also incorporates found objects like worn tires, salvaged boxes, frames, and industrial materials into her more sculptural pieces. In this body of work, a felted fire roars inside a hulking model hearth, for example, while another embeds a fragment of a fork inside a metal-and-wood form.
The artist’s mother died in 2024, and she’s found it difficult to depict her family in the wake of such profound grief, instead focusing on their possessions and the places where cherished moments occurred. “Even if the people themselves may elude the artist’s hand, she captures the spaces they enliven, the unremarkable yet prized moments that shape our lives,” says a statement about the exhibition.
Casserole Culture will be on view from September 9 to October 17 at Charles Moffett in New York. Until then, explore more of Joseph’s work on Instagram.
