Aaron McIntosh
Cross-Disciplinary Artist and Quiltmaker
Kingsport, TN
2020 USA Fellow
Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. Applications are reviewed by discipline-specific panels who select the finalists, which are then approved by our Board of Trustees. A full list of our panelists can be found here.
This award was generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire, and identity politics in a range of works including quilts, sculpture, collage, drawing, and writing. As a fourth-generation quiltmaker whose grandparents were noted quilters in their Appalachian communities, this tradition of working with scraps is a primary platform from which he explores the patchworked nature of identity. Since 2015, McIntosh has managed Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the LGBTQ+ South.
His work has been exhibited at the Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University’s Green Art Gallery, the International Quilt Study Center, the Los Angeles Craft & Folk Art Museum, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art. He is a recipient of two Center for Craft Windgate Fellowships in 2006 and 2015, a 2017 Virginia CultureWorks Grant, and a 2018 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. He has held residencies at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. His critical writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Surface Design Journal, and the Journal of Modern Craft.
As an educator, McIntosh is committed to transforming and diversifying the next generation of fiber/textile artists. Since 2010, he has taught in the Fiber programs of James Madison University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, and currently at Concordia University.
textiles + materiality research cluster 