Rebecca Layton & Monika Jakubiak

Rebecca Layton is an Austin-based artist, textile designer, and founder of Rekh & Datta, a “slow clothing” company. Her work is influenced by a combination of handicraft, industrial infrastructure, and abstraction, and often uses all three. Most recently, she spent the past few years in India as a Fulbright Senior Scholar from the US to do research and studio work on block printing design and miniature painting, then to teach art in the foothills of the Himalayas. The work she produced in India—in collaboration with the block printers she met and worked with—was exhibited in Delhi, Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, and at the Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing in Jaipur through December 2013. She has also produced work in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and was the recipient of the William Graf Travel Grant, which brought her to England to conduct research on the history of wallpaper at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She has been the recipient of artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Skowhegan School of Art, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Jentel Artist Residency, Kunstlerhaus in Salzburg, Austria, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. She holds a BA in English Literature from Barnard College, Columbia University and a MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College. She has taught studio art and art history in New York, Barcelona, and India.

Monika Jakubiak hails from Poland, studied at Central St. Martins in London, and has worked internationally, teaching and designing in London and India. In 2011, she was chosen to participate in a European Union cultural project involving travel to 12 countries, including Europe, Korea, and China, to develop a hands-on sewing project with over 1000 participants. Her company, Soulstitch, has been supported by many prominent design labels, such as Chloé and Vivienne Westwood. Her professional life is her means of linking two disciplines that are often erroneously placed at odds with each other—fashion and the arts.

Her work usually challenges issues that are on the edge of design, craft, social issues, ecology and geography. Since the early 2000s, Monika has been invited to run art projects for Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, BOZAR in Brussels , University of the Arts Tokyo, Pearl Academy of Fashion Jaipur, Muzeum Narodowe Królikarnia Warsaw, Zachęta Gallery Warsaw, Alec Reed Academy London, and Museum of Bees in Poznań . She is currently teaching in Poland at the School of Form. She has also been working in India for the last decade designing the womenswear collection for Anokhi, a company using traditional hand block printing techniques.