Rachel Breen
Unraveling Threads: Climate, Labor, and the Clothes we Wear
January 28 – March 8, 2026
Organized with Kathleen Webber
Opening Artist’s Talk, Wednesday, January 28, 4:00 with reception to follow
The TCNJ Art Gallery is pleased to present Unraveling the Threads: Climate, Labor, and the Clothes We Wear, a solo exhibition by Minnesota-based artist Rachel Breen. Through her textile installations and assemblages, Breen has worked to cultivate deeper understandings of labor rights, solidarity, and collective power, often through the lens of the international garment industry.
At TCNJ, Breen will exhibit “Banners for a Common Future,” a series of textile assemblages that address the interrelated issues of labor rights, climate crisis, and the necessity of collective action. Banners were a highly charged, symbolic object of the early 1900s, made by workers of the vanguard International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Breen is aesthetically and materially reimagining these banners, working with used and discarded garments as her primary raw material, taking them apart and reassembled pieces into arrangements that allude to banners. By altering the material evidence of overconsumption to produce something new, Rachel invites an intentional re-imagining of the garment industry as a system that is sustainable and just. Many of these works are red and gold, reflecting the colors of the original ILGWU banners. Today these colors convey alarm about unfair working conditions, declare warning about our climate crisis and of the urgent need for resistance.
Extensive public programming is planned for this exhibition, including a collaboration with journalism professor Kathleen Webber. Students in her Health and Environmental Reporting course will research and write on environmental, human and health issues raised by the exhibition, and their work will accompany the exhibition, either through a series of articles, video explainers, social-media stories, motion graphics or animations (designed by Interactive Multimedia students and printed by graphic design students.). They will also explore the history of textile and garment production in the state and organizations spearheading regional textile economies. A portion of the gallery will be a workshop/reading space, where we will offer a series of fabric/fashion-related workshops, including natural dying, clothing repair, and visible mending, and pop-up thrifting boutiques, co-hosted by student organizations.
Related Programming:
- Opening Day Artist’s Talk
Wednesday, January 28, 4:00 with Reception to Follow
Free and open to the public - Art of the Patch Workshop with artist Julie Woodard
Saturday, February 21, 1:00-3:00 pm
Free, but Pre-Registration is required. Click to RSVP here! - Closing Event: Jeans Implosion!
Lecture & Teach-in with Journalism professor and exhibition organizer, Kathleen Webber
Thursday, March 5, 7:30-9:00pm
Free and open to the public
Artist’s Bio
Rachel Breen’s work has been shown widely across the country and internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Most recently, Rachel’s work was exhibited in the 15th Bienal De La Habana in Havana, Cuba in 2024. Rachel was awarded a Fulbright – Nehru Senior Scholar research fellowship, hosted by the Indian Institute of Craft and Design in Jaipur, India in 2022. Rachel has been awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Ox-Bow, Willapa Bay AiR and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Rachel is a recipient of a McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists in 2024 and was an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2019. She has received five Minnesota State Arts Board grants and a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field. Her solo exhibition, The Price of Our Clothes,” which took place at the Perlman Museum, was Included in the top 20, best of 2018, exhibitions in the US by Hyperallergic (December 20, 2018). Rachel holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from The Evergreen State College. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, maintains an active studio practice. Rachel is a tenured professor of art at Anoka Ramsey Community College and currently serves as the chair of the Dept. of Visual Arts.