Picnic, a collaborative exhibition by Dana Caldera and Kaylan Buteyn, brings together works made from domestic textiles—quilts, tablecloths, dishcloths, napkins, picnic blankets, and other familiar materials—to explore the picnic as both a joyful gathering and a charged metaphor for unseen labor. Rooted in the everyday acts of feeding, caring, gathering, and tending, the show examines how moments of leisure are inseparable from the work that makes them possible.
Caldera and Buteyn draw from the rich histories recorded in domestic cloth, using textiles that have absorbed years of touch, repetition, and caretaking. Working with textiles drawn from their own lives—linens from family meals, found and thrifted fabrics, and materials gathered from their community, including pieces acquired from the estate of Sue McCullough—they embed lived history directly into the work. Their practices embrace the aesthetics of mending, layering, and reconfiguration, transforming everyday fabrics into works that hold emotional resonance as well as cultural memory. Through their exploration of the seasonal nature of raising children, the seasonal ritual of the picnic emerged as an apt metaphor. Flowers, grids, spring colors, and other representative symbols of nature are present in this collaborative work.
Together, Caldera and Buteyn weave an environment where the picnic becomes a nuanced symbol—an intersection of pleasure and pressure, generosity and exhaustion, celebration and duty. Picnic invites viewers to consider the complex emotional terrain of domestic labor and to recognize the quiet power of the textiles that support, witness, and record the care at the center of home life.
Exhibition at Mimi and Rolland Art Center, 3/2/26 - 3/20/26
