My earliest memory of making art is helping my mother quilt. I was two years old, sitting in a JoAnn Fabrics shopping cart, choosing fabrics and holding on to her skirt while she used a rotary blade at quilting club. By the time I was six, she had taught me to sew and embroider. Each small stitch carried intention, even if it sometimes meant a pricked finger. Art, she showed me, was more than mere decoration. It was a vessel of energy. Those lessons never left me.
If Margaret Wingard’s art practice were a building, the foundation would be sandstone etched with symbols of ancient rituals. Embroidered textiles would pave the floors. A roof would be thatched from ecofeminism and New Genre Public Art, while paint would form its bastion. Research and heat-induced meditation would whittle out each window, door, and column.
Her first memory of making art was choosing fabric for a quilt and sewing it with her mother at the age of two. Since then, textiles, a historically feminine practice steeped in storytelling, have remained central to her process of understanding a complex world.
This foundation shaped her work into a mode of inquiry that is conceptually driven and multidisciplinary at its core. It seeks patterns between disparate realms to contextualize contemporary life and our relationship with the Earth. Much like the earliest forms of art, she creates each piece as an amulet: symbolic and alive. Anything created by hand with time and care holds energy. Art is both an offering and an artifact, and it should give something back to those who live with it. That is always the goal.
While seeking her purpose in society as an artist, she came to the Bay Area, the birthplace of New Genre Public Art. In San Francisco, through work in construction, interior design, architecture, and property development, she gained the tools to extend her practice beyond two dimensions. She now creates large-scale sculptural installations and conceptual art events. In 2025, she co-founded Shifting Studios, an initiative that converts vacant commercial real estate into free, temporary art studios.
