Join WILD WOMAN designer Myriam Marcela De Anda and textile artist Laura Renée Maier in a discussion of their collaborative process creating wearable art with a social purpose.
WILD WOMAN is a couture clothing collection that marries art and fashion to build unity across borders while celebrating diversity and multicultural expression. The project was inspired by the January 2017 Women’s March – a global protest that centered women’s rights as human rights at the start of Donald Trump’s US presidency. Over the last five years, the WILD WOMAN collection has grown and pieces of the collection have been shown around the world. The twelve pieces in the WILD WOMAN collection will ultimately be auctioned off, with one hundred percent of the proceeds going to support Fondo Semillas, a non-profit feminist organization focused on improving women’s and trans people lives in Mexico.
In partnership with the Portland Art Museum and the current exhibition, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism, the creators of WILD WOMAN collaborated on Magdalena, a cape inspired by Kahlo’s lithograph, Frida and the Miscarriage (1932), a work that is currently on view in the exhibition.
Myriam Marcela De Anda was born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon and has been living in Portland, OR for the last twenty years. Since studying fashion design in Guadalajara, Mexico, Marcela has evolved into a designer with a mission to bring more sustainability and purpose to her work in the fashion industry. It is with this intention that she began her own label, Myriam Marcela. Her work is primarily done by hand, giving texture and dimension to her designs. As a couturier with an acute sense of detail and an appreciation for bold colors and blended patterns, Marcela finds her passion through creating one-of-a-kind custom pieces for all women that are intended to last a lifetime.
Laura Renée Maier is a figurative artist with a focus on textiles and technological mediums. In her works, texture is deeply connected to human memory and the metaphysical body. In her textile pieces, Laura Renée utilizes an antique hand-crank sewing machine to meticulously stitch figures in a months-long meditative practice. Laura Renée explores the convergence of tech and traditional manual practices as a vehicle to further investigate the concepts of the human figure and the physical embodiment of memory in a medium that reflects our continuous human evolution. Laura Renée is originally from Seattle, Washington and currently lives and works between New York and Bogotá, Colombia.