Staci Swider is a mixed-media artist and sculptor whose work occupies the threshold between memory and becoming. Working in textile, wire, found objects and paint, she creates ceremonial vessels, sculptural headdresses, and layered paintings that give form to what cannot otherwise be held—the liminal, the inherited, the almost-said.

Her practice is rooted in more than forty years of working with materials. She began her career as a textile designer in the home furnishing industry where her innovative designs earned national recognition and multiple awards. That sustained engagement with cloth, pattern, and the intelligence of making by hand remains central to her work today.

For the past twenty-five years she has worked as a fine artist, developing a body of work that has been exhibited at numerous art museums and in galleries across the American Southeast. Her mixed-media paintings and sculptures draw on folk textile traditions, ancestral ceremonial dress, and the symbolic vocabularies of cultures that have always encoded wisdom in the handmade.

She is a juried member of the National Association of Women Artist—the oldest professional women’s art organization in the United States—and a Certified Golden Artist Educator. Her book Acrylic Expressions, published by North Light Books/Random House, became a bestseller in it’s category and remains in print.

Her current body of work, Tide Carriers, has been accepted for solo exhibition at Burroughs Chapin Art Museum opening October 2027. The exhibition comprises three thematic bodies of work—The Soft Architecture of Rain, Songs of Becoming, and Unbuilt Rooms—along with a central installation of large-scale hanging vessels. It represents the fullest expression of a practice long concerned with thresholds, transformation and the forms that carry us between worlds.

Swider works from her studio in Aiken, South Carolina.