Spotlight on 2022 Biennial Grant Recipient Show fiber artist Roseline Young

A fiber artist, Roseline Young utilizes weaving, quilting, spinning and fabric manipulation to create artworks and installations for both indoor settings and outdoor venues. Her medium includes cotton, wool, linen, mohair and raw, unspun fleece, some of which she obtains from friends who raise sheep and grow their own cotton.

“I love texture, things that come out, exploding from structured pieces,” comments Young.

She creates this effect in a number of ways.

For some works, Young uses a spinning wheel to combine different colors of yarn. For other works, she spins several pieces together by hand until they twist back on themselves “often leaving edges and ends spilling out of the tapestry and inviting the viewer back inside,” in the words of Naples Botanical Gardens.

A self-avowed social activist, Young believes “art has the power to motivate action.” Toward that end, Young creates tapestries, installations and community weavings for display in public spaces. Many of these artworks and installations express environmental concerns relating to water quality and climate change.

“I am livid about the mistreatment of our earth and water,” Young asserts.

“I am passionate about using my artistic voice to call attention to better stewardship of our environment by creating community art projects.” Among these are her Fish Talk installations at the Alliance for the Arts, Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, Mound House and Broadway Palm, and Turf Wars – Art Speaks for the Earth, a 2018 and 2019 collaboration by Young with Marci Mills, Paulette Karlin, the Weavers of Char-Lee, Common Threads, Art Quilters Unlimited and Art Lunch Bunch. The latter project produced a 72-foot-long aggregation of 200 circular rings designed to draw attention to the deleterious effect that cyano-bacteria is having on the Caloosahatchee River. Expressing the imperative that agricultural interests in the Kissimmee River valley and surrounding Lake Okeechobee need to stop dumping nitrogen, phosphorous and waste in our waters, the installation traveled to the Langford Kingston Home, Alliance for the Arts and Visual Art Center in Punta Gorda after first being displayed above the entablature of the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center.

Young has received several arts & culture grants which have supported her efforts to foster the arts in Fort Myers and Lee County. She has exhibited work at the City of Fort Myers 2022 Biennial Individual Artist Grant Recipient Show at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, the COVID-delayed 2020 Biennial Individual Artist Grant Recipient Show at the Langford-Kingston Home (November, 2021) and 2017 Fort Myers Individual Artist Grant Recipient Show at the Davis Art Center (that was shortened by Hurricane Irma).

A retired Art teacher with more than thirty years of experience, Rose offers classes locally at the Alliance for the Arts, Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, public libraries and her own Rose Line Weaving Studio that are intended to instill creative problem-solving and play in her students. “What I love about weaving is that you’re playing all the time,” Rose adds. “You ask, ‘Will this work?’ Then try and see.”

Young holds a Master’s Degree from Tulane University in New Orleans.

May 4, 2022.