Oona Brangam-Snell

Maharam is an international textile company founded in the United States in 1902. Its chief designer, Oona Brangam-Snell, born in 1989, is an artist on the rise in the New York art scene. Her personal work is filled with allegorical symbols of textile design found in older media, as well as contemporary iconography. Brangam-Snell is building a genre of her own within the ancient genre of tapestry. Her strengths are surreal and humorous compositions, and storytelling worthy of a great epic.

“I take images from heraldry, folk art, comic books, etc. and combine very familiar symbols in dense scenes. I combine industrial jacquard quilting with hand embroidery to create multilayered, narrative pieces. I try to create tension on multiple levels.”

Brangam-Snell is bringing five pieces to this year’s Kiaf HIGHLIGHT. Each is full of uniqueness with odd details. Sulker at Home shows a man paying bills, Treelicker shows a woman in a park, and Lemon Ritual is a still life. I will not give up my favorite decoration and Love Letter to a Nightmare is premised on the archetype of the princess and the dragon, a staple of legends and fairy tales.

Brangam-Snell’s work is craft-based but not limited to the visual language of conventional textile art. It is somehow discordant, and the repetition of familiar yet unfamiliar scenes encourages viewers to imagine freely. “My approach is more common in contemporary painting than in textile art,” she says, “and I tend to focus on expressing myself freely without being tied down by genres.”

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a resident of Queens, New York, Brangam-Snell has always made room for her art and continued to work on her personal work even while working in an office.

“Making art can be a fundamentally selfish act, but I still believe it’s worth doing,” she says, “and I don’t really have a specific artistic motivation, I just keep making things out of compulsion.”

Brangam-Snell says she would like to move beyond working with textiles and tapestries and do three-dimensional work in the future.

“I’d like to incorporate silkscreen printing into my art and work with cottonwool-filled canvases, upholster furniture, etc. to bring out the three-dimensional potential of textiles. I want to create a disorienting immersive experience for the viewer through physical work that is not digital.”

Studio of Oona Brangam-Snell