Maija Peeples-Bright

b. 1942, Riga, Latvia

The work of California artist Maija Peeples-Bright offers one of the few prairie intersections of textiles and ceramics, another medium with ambitions to overturn modernist assumptions about art and craft.

Peeples-Bright’s sojourn in Regina overlapped with that of her former teacher, the noted Funk ceramist David Gilhooly. From 1970 to 1971, she created a wide range of Funk-inspired works in ceramic and textile, including crocheted “Woofishes,” a play on the word “fetish” and the name of her Dachshund, Woof W. Woof. During this period, she also produced crocheted, woven, and sewn “beast” curtains for the Art Building at the University of California, Davis.