Briena Harmening

October 2025

My work combines deadpan, humorous, and backhanded dialogue with domestic materials to create a sense of discomfort and confrontation. Recycled textiles—both nostalgic and everyday—are deconstructed, stitched, and sculpted into interwoven surfaces that become sites for screenprinted or stitched text.

The language I use draws from southern vernacular, storytelling, politics, and belief structures. Through word spacing, layering, repetition, and masking, I create visual puzzles that disrupt the way text is typically processed, asking viewers to linger in the tension between familiarity and disorientation.

Recycling and reinventing old textiles is integral to my practice; I consider myself in collaboration with the women who made them before me. Having grown up with a grandmother who was a seamstress and a mother who was a needleworker, I carry forward their skills and love for craft—not as a matter of tradition alone, but as a way of weaving my own voice into a lineage of labor, care, and storytelling.

Briena Harmening uses text to explore autobiography, politics, and southerness. Employing sewing and quilting techniques, Harmening transforms everyday materials like quilts, tablecloths, and yard tarps into canvases for her screen-printed narratives and commentary. Harmening is a Florida Gulf Coast University alumna and later received her MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2010. Recently, her work has been exhibited in Coined in the South: at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC and in Ancestral Lines at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs, FL. In January 2026, 5 pieces will be included in the exhibition, In her place at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN Currently, she resides and teaches art at James Lawson High School in Nashville, TN.

More About the Artist

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Mineral House Media’s digital residency program is a series of online “takeovers,” wherein each selected artist is given full control of the Mineral House Media Instagram feed for 2 weeks. Residents complete an interview to be published at the close of their designated month. The residency also includes a group exhibition at the end of the year. It is a great way to experiment, showcase your practice in a new way, and develop a new following. If you wish to be considered for our 2024 residency year, Apply Here!