Marina Contro Featured in Architectural Digest, With Joint Exhibition Opening at Blunk Space
Cranbrook alumna Marina Contro (MFA Fiber 2017) is featured in the November issue of Architectural Digest, which follows the San Francisco-based weaver at an antique hand loom that stands six feet tall. Setting up the loom is physically demanding. To thread it, Contro told the magazine, “I have to sit inside the loom on the cloth beam,” and when she ties up the pedals, she works from the floor beneath the warp.
Contro is shown at work on a blanket for her next show, woven in ochre and brown cashmere in a gingham pattern, with eight picks for each square. It will be on view in Commune Shows: Marina Contro and Noah Cohen, a joint exhibition with woodworker Noah Cohen at Blunk Space in Point Reyes Station, California. The exhibition opens Saturday, October 24, with a reception from 3 to 5 pm, and runs through January 2, 2027.
In an interview with Commune Design, she describes herself as a little resistant to modern tools and works on a late-19th-century loom from Vermont, which she considers technology in its own right, “just old tech.” The loom has four shafts, which she finds enough, and she turns to a loom from the 1970s only when a design calls for more pattern options. What matters most to her is the history embedded in the main loom and her place within it. She sees herself as a very small part of a long weaving tradition, says she feels small in the craft all the time, and expects she will never know all of it, though she suspects the feeling may ease by the time she is 80 or 90.
Her work uses traditional weaving techniques and natural materials to explore the overlap between objects of use and objects of thought. In summer 2025, she held a residency at Lottozero in Prato, Italy, where she sourced yarns from the textile district and wove samples to study their structure and feel. She has also held residencies at Castello di Potentino, Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West, Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio, and Marshfield School of Weaving.
Contro earned a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2009 before earning her MFA from Cranbrook. She has taught at California College of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, she is a professor in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.
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