2025/26 MCAD–Jerome Fellow Interview: Tshab Her

Becky Mutrux: You have written about the history of paaj ntaub, Hmong story cloths, and how they were used as a tool for resistance, recording history, and generating income. It’s clear that Hmong culture and craft traditions are an important influence on your artistic practice. Could you share about how you incorporate the story cloths into your work? And I’m curious who else has inspired you conceptually?

Tshab Her: I grew interested in exploring story cloths after my parents travelled back to Laos for the first time in 2017. It had been over 30 years since they had immigrated to the United States as refugees, and I could feel how important this trip was for them. I didn’t know how to talk to them about it at the time, but I began reflecting on my own feelings about their experiences of fleeing war, resettling into a new country, and making sacrifices in order to create and sustain a new life with their growing family. As I reflected on their love and labor, I asked myself: “What does it mean to be a Hmong daughter born and raised in the United States while my mom and dad struggled to adjust to this capitalist society that continually discriminated against them?” Though I did not have the words for it at the time, I could sense the fear and imagined the violence my parents had endured both in Laos and in the United States. These experiences shaped my world view and in response to the questions and feelings I had, I embroidered my first story cloth titled Returning about my parents’ journey back to Laos. Sewing images of them with their traveling backpacks gave me the space to move my feelings of our unsettled reality into a constructive hope. I was reminded of how my ancestors had documented their lives with paaj ntaub as they navigated displacement, persecution, and war. In relation to Hmong migration and movement depicted in traditional story cloths, I saw the connections in my parents’ own journey of going back to a land they once knew halfway around the world. Personalizing my parents’ experiences and eventually recording my own stories through story cloth helped me uncover and identify what it meant for me to be a Hmong woman and artist in America.

My art practice draws from the stories of Hmong resistance as well as from other cultures and communities who have fought for their dignity and cultural autonomy. I am inspired by people who reject imperial propaganda and work together to create systems that are non-transactional, flow in the spirit of hospitality, and live in harmony with nature. Self expression through clothing, dance, and laughter while communing with my loved ones keep me grounded, inspired, free, and secure, granting me the space to create art that challenges and disrupts the status quo.

BM: Will you tell us a bit more about your choice to work in textiles? Was this how you've always worked as an artist, or a more recent development?

TH: When I was 7 years old, I remember taking a loose leaf lined paper out of my school notebook and drawing a small black teddy bear with a mechanical pencil for the first time. Although art and creativity was not prohibited growing up, it was also not fully encouraged as my parents were preoccupied making ends meet and caring for five children. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school when I rediscovered my love for art and made projects with materials I had access to at the time such as pencils, pens, colored pencils, crayons, paint, and paper. When I attended community college and later transferred to a university in Chicago, I started experimenting with photography, sculpture, moving image, and new media. It was fun working in these new mediums and honing my skills in painting and drawing, but I fell in love with textiles when one of my professors brought in a roll of muslin to class and opened my perspective on using textiles as an art medium. I was drawn to working in textiles as a lover of clothes, but also because of the many times I saw my mother and aunties sew paaj ntaub.

When I first started making textile art, I was a young adult who had moved from a sheltered suburban lifestyle into a big city. Living outside of my childhood home and “adulting” brought up many questions regarding my identity and purpose in life. I was being confronted by my own naivety and making work through textiles became an avenue for me to unpack these limitations and ignorance. This offered a space for me to reflect on who I was and who I desired to be. Sewing became an entry point for me to explore my story in relation to my cultural heritage and researching Hmong history and paaj ntaub became an important aspect of my practice. This deepened my art as I began my journey into self discovery and recovery.

BM: Working with textiles can be a laborious process. Can you talk about what the investment of labor adds to your work?

TH: Sewing teaches me how to be patient, present, soft, and slow. I move my body at a meditative pace that follows a needle and thread—in and out, in and out, in and out. My labor is revealed when the images I embroider come to life one stitch at a time. Though I may grow tired repeating these movements and feel the accrued stress in my hands, I see my labor as an intentional and connected offering to those around me. Embroidery is tender and intimate. It connects me to the lineage of Hmong women who kept our culture alive through paaj ntaub despite the pressure to conform to the surrounding dominant cultures as an ethnic minority. I believe their resilient spirit lives within me and although the labor can be strenuous, I choose to take on the responsibility of preserving the traditions of my culture as I adapt and move to the rapidly changing times of the modern era as a Hmong woman living in the United States.

BM: Text is a common element in your practice. How do the visual elements in your work support your use of language to express ideas about identity?

TH: Despite having our original written language destroyed by imperial powers, the oral storytelling traditions of the Hmong grew stronger and have been passed down from generation to generation. Though many written languages have surfaced over the centuries, it wasn’t until the 1950s when Christian missionaries created the Romanized Popular Alphabet and communication among the diaspora spread more widely as the world industrialized and technologies advanced. I share this history to make known my complicated relationship with language and text. The Hmong language is tonal and mimics the sounds of nature. It is beautiful and I lament that I have lost my fluency over the years when I was pushed to assimilate into the dominant American culture. Translating the tones of my people into written word goes against our vibrant, fluid, and evolving oral traditions, but I also see the benefits of communicating through the Romanized Popular Alphabet today.

I often use text in my work as a bridge to explain my Hmong experience to the Western world. The written word was originally created to tax and exploit people in developing civilizations. The act of writing is a tool of empire and as a Hmong woman whose ancestors have been persecuted for their indigenous life-ways and for resisting imperial violence, I have an aversion to text because I do not want to go through the layers and labor of translating my experiences just to be dominated and erased by people in power and those who co-sign imperialism and colonization. Despite this, I use text as a tool to express my Hmong experience and also write poetry for its nuance. The visual elements in my work are utilized in a similar way. I embroider images that reflect my identity, heritage, and personality. These visual memories mirror nature that language cannot encapsulate and grounds my art in reality so that I remember who I am.

BM: Can you share a little about winning the Jerome Fellowship as a Hmong artist at this moment in time?

TH: I am humbled with gratitude to be a recipient of the Jerome Fellowship. Receiving this recognition has not only helped combat my imposter syndrome, but has grown my confidence as an artist here in the Twin Cities. I moved to Minnesota almost five years ago in hopes of finding a supportive community and expanding my art practice while having more access to Hmong culture and food. I am grateful to now live in a city that has been shaped by Hmong presence compared to growing up in a city that did not know who the Hmong were. The cultural erasure and ignorance I had experienced growing up in a predominately white suburb in Illinois negatively impacted my self esteem. But moving to Minnesota and seeing Hmong people doing everyday things helped demystify my Hmongness because I, too, am a Hmong person doing everyday things—it feels both special and mundane. In this, the fellowship award has granted me the opportunity to share my story and create new art that I hope speaks to my generation and brings awareness to the trauma, discrimination, and abuse we have endured and continue to endure, especially now in 2026 as we work together to support our communities that have been impacted by Operation Metro Surge and navigate the ongoing abuse of power of this administration.

BM: What do you hope your audience takes away from experiencing your art?

TH: Though the bright colors I often use in my work lean towards a perspective of having a glass half full rather than half empty, it does not take away from the violence, grief, and trauma of living in an imperial system that destroys anything it touches. The work I create is my attempt at resisting imperial ideologies while choosing to celebrate a communal sense of being with each other and nature. I create, dance, laugh, cry, rest, and work because I am alive and have the will to continue with the support of a loving community. I hope my stories are received with openness and that my vulnerability is a catalyst for my audience’s own healing and self discovery. I hope that when they experience my art, they see the strength and hope amidst the grief and sorrow.

BM: If you could describe your work in one word, what would it be?

TH: Autonomy