Chris Roberts-Antieau

Note: Chris Roberts-Antieau had her first connection with art in her seventh-grade home economics class, where she encountered sewing and formed a lifelong love of working with fabric. Despite a lack of encouragement, she forged a path to the fashion world, where she made hand appliqué jackets and handbags for clients in New York City. Even though she was quite successful, the constraints of fulfilling orders and the manufacturing process ultimately proved too constricting to her creative side. She made the decision to put her work “under glass and not on bodies.”

Roberts-Antieau utilizes a mixture of processes; fabric appliqué, thread painting and hand embroidery in a method she calls Fabric Painting, all done on a single Bernina sewing machine. This method is perfect for translating her unique and whimsical ideas into art, and her desire is to capture the “mysterious origins of joy.” In fact, that goal could be called her modus operandi: to find joy, experience it and spread it to others through art. Roberts-Antieau now owns galleries in Ann Arbor, Santa Fe and New Orleans and has works in museums and private collections all over the worldwonderful accomplishments for a woman with no formal art training who defied the odds and those who told her that she would never become an artist.