Dee Clements Opens The Weaving Workshop, a New Basketry School in Chicago’s Pilsen Neighborhood
Chicago-based artist Dee Clements poses at The Weaving Workshop, 1616 W. 18th St., as seen on May 20, 2026. Credit: Francia Garcia Hernandez/Block Club Chicago
Alumna Dee Clements (MFA 3D Design 2020) opened The Weaving Workshop, a new artist-run school for basketry, off-loom weaving, and fiber craft, in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Block Club Chicago featured the opening, spotlighting the school’s welcoming brick-and-mortar space and Clements’ vision for a community centered on hands-on making.
The Weaving Workshop draws its name and spirit from the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop, the legendary department founded at the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1933, where artists including Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Otti Berger established weaving and textiles as a serious artistic and industrial practice — often in the face of institutional discrimination. For Clements, the reference is deliberate: a reminder of the history of craft, the labor of women, and the ongoing relevance of fiber as a material and a language.
The Workshop, which has operated out of Clements’ Chicago studio space for two years and recently expanded into a dedicated Pilsen storefront, offers workshops in basketry techniques ranging from foundational to advanced sculptural weaving, paper weaving, dyeing, and off-loom fiber craft. Classes are designed for all skill levels, from curious beginners to practicing artists. Upcoming workshops include a painted paper weaving class on July 28, and a four-day Sculptural Basketry Intensive on August 14–17. The Weaving Workshop is also presenting SPOKE, a group exhibition at Oxbow House in Douglas, Michigan, featuring work by artists who have participated in its workshops.
Clements is a sculptor and process-based artist whose practice examines women’s roles in society and their unseen labor through the lenses of basketry, ceramics, feminism, and ethnography. Her curvaceous woven vessels, made from rattan reed, dyed with natural pigments, and often combined with ceramics, paint, and found materials, are metaphors for what women hold and how their societal roles have historically shaped their relationship to craft. Her work has been exhibited with Nina Johnson Gallery (Miami), Kasmin (New York), R and Company (New York), Library Street Collective (Detroit), and at Design Miami, Felix Art Fair, and Salone del Mobile in Milan. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Grant, and holds a BFA in Fiber and Materials Studies and Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Local Artist Opens Basket-Weaving School In Pilsen – Block Club Chicago
