A contribution to SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

September 19th, 2025 - February 28th, 2026

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The Linen Closet holds ordinary things—comforters, quilts, playful conversations, uncovered memories—they carry the weight of extraordinary lives. They represent care, embodied in the act of folding, storing, passing on. A blanket that once warmed a body becomes evidence of private endurance, a record of the unseen labor that sustains us.

This work sits inside a long history of people making home where the world said they couldn’t. My mother was the first builder I knew. She taught me that homemaking isn’t decoration—it’s defiance. The closet becomes a monument to that practice, a place where private rituals of care turn into public memory. It also holds the rituals we rarely share—the improvisations, the hand-me-downs, the moments of making do—practices often hidden because they don’t align with the standards of what home is “supposed” to look like. In that tension between pride and shame, another story of belonging takes shape.

I’ve been gathering the stories that come with each piece—asking why this one, what it has carried you through. Each answer becomes a new kind of care instruction, stitched into the fabric. Not directions for how to wash or fold, but reminders of how it once held, comforted, endured. These transcriptions extend the life of the object, charting the ways it has already cared and been cared for, and the ways it might continue to provide respite and resilience.

The Linen Closet is a chapter in an ongoing body of work, HOME PRODUCTIONS, reconstructions of the post-colonial home.​​​