UNM-Gallup fiber artist shares woven exhibition, workshop with community
UNM-Gallup’s gallery opened its doors to a first solo fiber show and a weaving workshop, giving Gallup residents a hands-on look at an art form rooted in local tradition.
Leigh Oviatt turned UNM-Gallup’s Ingham Chapman Gallery into a working space for fiber art, showing her first solo exhibition, Eclosion, and leading a hands-on weaving workshop for students and community members in March.
The show featured eight sculptural pieces Oviatt spent eight months making, including 9-foot-tall, cocoon-like forms built with mixed fibers. UNM-Gallup described the work as a meditation on transformation, using the butterfly-cocoon transition as a metaphor for women in midlife and the changes that come with a new chapter of life.
That focus fit the gallery’s role on campus and in the community. The Ingham Chapman Gallery says it exists to provide exhibitions that offer knowledge, experiences and service to the UNM-Gallup community, while Visit Gallup describes it as a rotating art space that enriches both the campus and the public arts experience. The reception and demonstration took place March 26, 2026, during the exhibition’s March run.
Oviatt, who is originally from Montana and now lives in Santa Fe, said she was grateful for the chance to share her craft with local residents, even as she described the setting as intimidating. She hoped the weaving demonstration would feel relaxing, meditative and accessible, a practical invitation into a craft that has long held meaning in Gallup and neighboring Indigenous communities.
Her own artist materials place the work at the intersection of tradition and contemporary design. Leigh Oviatt Fiber Art describes her pieces as one-of-a-kind contemporary tapestries and woven wall works inspired by Mexican and Guatemalan cultures and desert landscapes, while the New Mexico State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts says her large-scale textile pieces emerge through intuitive exploration of texture, color and organic form.
For McKinley County, the event mattered because it was not only a gallery display but a community-facing lesson in process, skill and cultural continuity. By opening Ingham Chapman Gallery to students and residents, UNM-Gallup gave Gallup a chance to experience weaving as both art and practice, tying campus programming more closely to the county’s broader cultural life.
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