Paula Stebbins Becker is an artist and weaver who connects with memory through the process of unraveling cloth. The unraveled threads are re-woven, resulting in an organic transformation of structure, texture, color and form. She is also currently part-time faculty and the Fiber MFA advisor at UMass Dartmouth.

Paula is a textile designer and artist living on the coast of Rhode Island. Throughout her career she has designed textiles and created artworks for the residential, hospitality and contract textile industry, while sustaining a personal art practice. As a designer, she creates artwork in a variety of mediums and techniques that are reproduced as woven, print and embroidery fabrics. As an artist, she is a weaver.

She says: “In its simplest form a thread holds memory. It is woven, entangled, knotted and stitched, forming layers of texture, pattern and structure connected to the hand, mind and spirit. I unravel or manipulate an existing textile and rearrange the threads with new threads on my loom, merging the past with the present. Through this work, I express the fragility of life on earth and how as humans we have the ability to embrace our past while creating new patterns and structures to bring about positive change in ourselves, and our relationships with the environment and each other.”

Paula’s work has been exhibited at: Cranbrook Art Museum, RISD Museum, Reading (PA) Public Museum, Attleboro Art Museum, Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Marion Art Center, Bristol Art Museum, Narrows Center for the Arts and Fuller Craft. Her work is in the collection of the American craft collector Robert Pfannebecker, the collection of Gerhardt Knodel, the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Saarinen House. Paula was a visiting artist at the Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan, where she taught a workshop “Memory and Memorabilia” and had a solo exhibition “Unraveling” of her work. Paula has researched, and hand-woven a series of Loja Saarinen reproduction curtain textiles for the Cranbrook Center of Collections and Research (1992 – 2022). She has taught as an adjunct professor in the fiber/textile departments at PCT&S (Jefferson University), RISD, UMass Dartmouth and continues to design for the textile industry. Publications include, “Mendings”, Megan Sweeney (2023), “Hot House, Expanding the Field in Fiber, at Cranbrook” (2007) and “Saarinen, House and Garden, A Total Work of Art”, Gregory Wittkopp (1995).