34.7998° N, 87.6773° W
ENCOUNTERS
For more than thirty-six years, my work has been about encounter: building things whose purpose is to bring the viewer into contact with something they weren't expecting to find—a story, a stranger, a piece of history, a version of themselves.
SABBATICAL — 1999–2000
In late 1999, Chanin begins a sabbatical centered on photography, writing, and observation. Traveling through Venezuela, she turns from a decade of commercial image-making toward a more personal practice shaped by repetition, encounter, and attention.
The photographs, taken in a bill-operated photo booth on a Nolita sidewalk, were raw and immediate—images of myself without past or future, simply in the now.
Natalie Chanin, from the essay “On Image,” The Studio Journal, Issue 7, Fall 2025.
HAND-SEWN T-SHIRTS — 2000
Working with secondhand cotton T-shirts, Chanin cut the garments apart and reconstructed them by hand, reversing their conventional construction. Seams, knots, and raw edges were turned outward; what had once been hidden on the inside became visible on the surface. The gesture established a material language that would continue through her work: exposing structure, labor, and the evidence of the hand.
Everything that was once on the inside was now raw and exposed to the outside world.
Natalie Chanin, as told on The Moth, “200 One-of-a-Kind Shirts,” April 17, 2014.
Natalie Chanin, as told on The Moth, “200 One-of-a-Kind Shirts,” April 17, 2014.
ALABAMA — 2000
Lovelace Crossroads, Alabama
In December 2000, Chanin returns home to The Shoals with the idea of making two hundred one-of-a-kind, hand-sewn T-shirts.
She gathers a group of women from the community—quilters, seamstresses, family, friends, and neighbors—and begins translating the garments she had been making in New York into a collective practice. Cotton jersey is cut apart and rebuilt by hand using techniques rooted in quilting, embroidery, and everyday sewing.
The work becomes Alabama: garments made by many hands, shaped by the knowledge of a place and the people who live there.
What begins as a collection becomes a way of working—connecting design to labor, material, community, and place.
In December 2000, Chanin returns home to The Shoals with the idea of making two hundred one-of-a-kind, hand-sewn T-shirts.
She gathers a group of women from the community—quilters, seamstresses, family, friends, and neighbors—and begins translating the garments she had been making in New York into a collective practice. Cotton jersey is cut apart and rebuilt by hand using techniques rooted in quilting, embroidery, and everyday sewing.
The work becomes Alabama: garments made by many hands, shaped by the knowledge of a place and the people who live there.
What begins as a collection becomes a way of working—connecting design to labor, material, community, and place.
THE KITCHEN PROJECT — 2005
In 2005, Chanin develops The Kitchen Project, inspired by the oral-history work of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Working with Angie Mosier, Robert Rausch, and Tom Driver, the work documents people in their homes, kitchens, and places of work across Alabama. Portraits, handwritten recipes, clothing, and stories come together in a catalog that expands the practice beyond the garment and into foodways, oral history, place, and everyday life
In 2005, Chanin develops The Kitchen Project, inspired by the oral-history work of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Working with Angie Mosier, Robert Rausch, and Tom Driver, the work documents people in their homes, kitchens, and places of work across Alabama. Portraits, handwritten recipes, clothing, and stories come together in a catalog that expands the practice beyond the garment and into foodways, oral history, place, and everyday life
THE BBQ DRESS PROJECT — 2012
In 2012, Chanin works with Drew Robinson for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s symposium on barbecue. A collection of white, hand-sewn Alabama Chanin wedding dresses is exposed to fire and smoke, staining and transforming the cloth. The dresses are displayed on bed frames used as barbecue devices alongside Landon Nordeman’s photographs of pitmasters, pigs, and barbecue culture. The project brings garment, ritual, foodways, and material transformation into a single installation.
THE COTTON PROJECT — 2012–2014
In 2012, Chanin plants six acres of organic cotton in North Alabama with farmers Katie and KP McNeill, Billy Reid, and more than three hundred neighbors, friends, and volunteers. The project follows cotton from field to fiber, tracing the material back through agriculture, labor, community, and regional textile systems. What begins as a collective act of planting becomes a sustained investigation into the relationships between land, making, and the material itself.
ALABAMA ON ALABAMA — 2015
In 2015, Chanin presents Alabama on Alabama at the Boiler Room at Heath Ceramics in San Francisco. Bringing together her textiles and quilts with work by Alabama artists Butch Anthony and John Henry Toney and photographer Rinne Allen, the exhibition considers a contemporary South through place, material, process, and tradition. Chanin’s indigo-dyed textiles and Textile Story Quilts extend the work beyond clothing into installation, memory, and the cultural landscape of Alabama.
THE COTTON PROJECT — 2012–2014
In 2012, Chanin plants six acres of organic cotton in North Alabama with farmers Katie and KP McNeill, Billy Reid, and more than three hundred neighbors, friends, and volunteers. The project follows cotton from field to fiber, tracing the material back through agriculture, labor, community, and regional textile systems. What begins as a collective act of planting becomes a sustained investigation into the relationships between land, making, and the material itself.
In 2015, Chanin presents Alabama on Alabama at the Boiler Room at Heath Ceramics in San Francisco. Bringing together her textiles and quilts with work by Alabama artists Butch Anthony and John Henry Toney and photographer Rinne Allen, the exhibition considers a contemporary South through place, material, process, and tradition. Chanin’s indigo-dyed textiles and Textile Story Quilts extend the work beyond clothing into installation, memory, and the cultural landscape of Alabama.
TEXTILE STORIES — 2007-PRESENT
Beginning in 2007, Chanin developed an ongoing body of work using garments and textiles as carriers of memory, biography, and place. Hand stitching, appliqué, embroidery, repair, and reuse became ways of recording lived experience while preserving evidence of the maker and the material.
Oral histories of labor were transcribed into cloth and embroidered into quilts, creating permanent material records of individual and collective experience.
This body of work, titled Textile Stories, explores how cloth can hold memory and history—and how making can become a form of storytelling
Oral histories of labor were transcribed into cloth and embroidered into quilts, creating permanent material records of individual and collective experience.
This body of work, titled Textile Stories, explores how cloth can hold memory and history—and how making can become a form of storytelling
THE SELF-PORTRAIT PROJECT — 2000
Beginning with a reconstructed T-shirt in February 2000, The Self-Portrait Project developed through daily making, photo-booth portraits, and stickers placed throughout New York and other cities.
The SIOSEH project was described by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as "not really a magazine but a work of art."
The stickers made the invisible visible.
Natalie Chanin, from the essay “On Image,” The Studio Journal, Issue 7, Fall 2025.
ABOVE After the Sabbatical, Brooklyn to NYC, February 2000.
AT LEFT Prince Farm, March 2000.
BELOW SIOSEH 7, “Stickers,” published by Sissi Farassat, June 2000.
SIOSEH 7 — 2000
AT LEFT Sample Card inviting reader to use the sticker in their own city to join The Self-Portrait Project.
From the title page of SIOSEH 7:
Natalie Chanins Stickers bereisen die Welt belegen ihren Besuch. In U-Bahnen, Museen, Bars hinterlässt sie wohl plaziert ihr Bild, ist
abwesend doch präsent. Zurzeit in New York, demnächst in Wien...
Natalie Chanin’s stickers travel the world, marking her visit. In subways, museums, and bars, she leaves her image carefully placed—absent, yet present. Currently in New York, soon in Vienna...
ABOVE Sample Card from SIOSEH 7 inviting reader to use the sticker in their own city to join The Self-Portrait Project.
STITCH — 2000–2001Stitch grew from the first Project Alabama collections and the community of women who made them. Filmed in and around Florence, Alabama, the documentary follows the handwork, conversations, homes, and landscapes surrounding the project, placing the garments within a larger story of labor, skill, memory, and place.
The film marks an early expansion of Chanin’s practice beyond the object itself—toward the people, histories, and systems held within making.
LOLA SCHNABEL COLLABORATION— 2002
In 2002, artist Lola Schnabel comes to Florence, Alabama, where Chanin and local artisans work to interpret Schnabel’s drawings through the language of regional craft. Schnabel hand-paints and embellishes each reconstructed cotton T-shirt. The garments are then hand-stitched and embellished with visible seams, looping stitches, beads, teeth, and collected amulets. The collaboration results in 200 one-of-a-kind garments that bring Schnabel’s dark, talismanic imagery into cloth and handwork.
In 2002, artist Lola Schnabel comes to Florence, Alabama, where Chanin and local artisans work to interpret Schnabel’s drawings through the language of regional craft. Schnabel hand-paints and embellishes each reconstructed cotton T-shirt. The garments are then hand-stitched and embellished with visible seams, looping stitches, beads, teeth, and collected amulets. The collaboration results in 200 one-of-a-kind garments that bring Schnabel’s dark, talismanic imagery into cloth and handwork.
MICHI MEKO COLLABORATION— 2005
In 2004, Chanin begins working with Florence-born, Atlanta-based artist Michi Meko, interpreting his graffiti-based imagery. Meko’s marks are translated onto cotton jersey through paint, stencil, reverse appliqué, hand-stitching, and embroidery, becoming garments that bring together his graphic vocabulary and Chanin’s evolving language of regional craft. The work is presented in 2005.
WORKS IN PROCESS — 2018
AN INTERACTIVE EXHIBITION
THE HAMBIDGE CENTER RESIDENCY
In collaboration with Rachel GarceauDeveloped during a residency at The Hambidge Center, Works in Process examined making as both action and record. Created with artist Rachel Garceau, the interactive exhibition brought together objects, materials, tools, and works in various stages of completion, inviting viewers to encounter process rather than only finished form.
The project extended Chanin’s ongoing interest in labor, repetition, collaboration, and the visible evidence of the hand.
I love the idea that a photographer may take a picture of a tree which then becomes a writer's inspiration for a short story, which in turn inspires an architect to design the entrance to a building inspired by the idea of a tree.
Natalie Chanin, "Starts with a Stitch," Blackberry Magazine, January 6, 2021.