Laura Petrovich-Cheney Portfolios

Photo credit: Spenser Hasak, courtesy ItemLive Magazine

Laura Petrovich-Cheney is a visual artist whose work combines sculpture, woodworking, and textiles to reflect on how personal and collective lives are upended—and renewed—by disruption. While climate change often serves as a catalyst in her work, she is equally interested in the healing, resilience, and sense of regeneration that can emerge in its aftermath. Drawing on the lineage of women’s practices such as quilting, weaving, and needlework, she creates sculptural forms that invite dialogue between the domestic and the environmental. Her work challenges conventional boundaries between craft and fine art, while also examining how gendered associations with materials—wood as masculine, textiles as feminine—shape our understanding of artistic labor and value. Using salvaged wood and discarded remnants, Petrovich-Cheney transforms the cast-off into constructions that hold stories of memory, identity, and recovery.

Her work has been exhibited nationally in both solo and group exhibitions. Notable solo shows include Against the Grain at Berea College in Kentucky, Memory and Material at the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska, and What Remains at the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts. Group exhibitions include Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Change at the Toledo Museum of Art and Pattern Pieces with Kaffe Fassett at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania. In 2023, her solo exhibition Weathered Shapes, Wooden Quilts was on view at the Boston Children’s Museum.

Petrovich-Cheney’s work has been featured in numerous national and international outlets, including television, podcasts, and NPR radio. Her press includes The Boston Globe, American Craft, Uppercase Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the James Renwick Alliance Quarterly Craft, where her work appeared on the Summer 2023 cover.

She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund’s Money for Women Grant. In 2017, she was awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, followed by a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Crafts in 2021.

Alongside her studio practice, Petrovich-Cheney teaches part-time elementary art and leads workshops across the country. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and English Literature from Dickinson College, an MS in Fashion Design from Drexel University, and an MFA in Studio Art from Moore College of Art and Design. As a certified Master Gardener and dedicated beekeeper, she volunteers in the care and maintenance of public gardens and tends to her hive of honeybees, embodying her deep commitment to environmental stewardship. Petrovich-Cheney lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her husband, a cat, and a dog.

Biography

Photo credit: Spenser Hasak, courtesy ItemLive Magazine

Laura Petrovich-Cheney is a visual artist whose work combines sculpture, woodworking, and textiles to reflect on how personal and collective lives are upended—and renewed—by disruption. While climate change often serves as a catalyst in her work, she is equally interested in the healing, resilience, and sense of regeneration that can emerge in its aftermath. Drawing on the lineage of women’s practices such as quilting, weaving, and needlework, she creates sculptural forms that invite dialogue between the domestic and the environmental. Her work challenges conventional boundaries between craft and fine art, while also examining how gendered associations with materials—wood as masculine, textiles as feminine—shape our understanding of artistic labor and value. Using salvaged wood and discarded remnants, Petrovich-Cheney transforms the cast-off into constructions that hold stories of memory, identity, and recovery.

Her work has been exhibited nationally in both solo and group exhibitions. Notable solo shows include Against the Grain at Berea College in Kentucky, Memory and Material at the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska, and What Remains at the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts. Group exhibitions include Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Change at the Toledo Museum of Art and Pattern Pieces with Kaffe Fassett at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania. In 2023, her solo exhibition Weathered Shapes, Wooden Quilts was on view at the Boston Children’s Museum.

Petrovich-Cheney’s work has been featured in numerous national and international outlets, including television, podcasts, and NPR radio. Her press includes The Boston Globe, American Craft, Uppercase Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the James Renwick Alliance Quarterly Craft, where her work appeared on the Summer 2023 cover.

She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund’s Money for Women Grant. In 2017, she was awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, followed by a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Crafts in 2021.

Alongside her studio practice, Petrovich-Cheney teaches part-time elementary art and leads workshops across the country. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and English Literature from Dickinson College, an MS in Fashion Design from Drexel University, and an MFA in Studio Art from Moore College of Art and Design. As a certified Master Gardener and dedicated beekeeper, she volunteers in the care and maintenance of public gardens and tends to her hive of honeybees, embodying her deep commitment to environmental stewardship. Petrovich-Cheney lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her husband, a cat, and a dog.