Homecoming presents a body of wall-based sculptures by Laura Petrovich-Cheney ‘11, on view in the Alumni Gallery May 16 – July 18, 2026. Working with salvaged architectural wood—siding, cabinet doors and floorboards—Petrovich-Cheney cuts and reassembles these materials into compositions that draw from the logic of quilt-making, translating pattern, repetition and structure through woodworking. The work is materially driven: warped, split and weathered fragments retain their original surfaces, with chipped paint, nail holes and signs of prior use left visible. Rather than imposing control, she works in response to the inherent instability of salvaged wood, allowing resistance, weight and variation to shape each piece.
Guided by an intuitive process of sorting, cutting and arranging, Petrovich-Cheney builds compositions through testing and adjustment, where the familiar structure of quilts is both referenced and reinterpreted. Feminist perspectives on labor and care inform the work, drawing from traditions of quilting, weaving and garment construction to consider endurance, repetition and sustained physical engagement. Sourced initially from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and now from demolitions and renovations, the materials carry traces of domestic space and environmental change, situating the work within broader conversations around climate instability, repair and responsibility.
Homecoming returns this work to Philadelphia, where the artist was born and later earned her MFA at Moore College of Art & Design. Presented during the nation’s 250th anniversary, the exhibition reflects on ideas of home as something continually reshaped through movement, loss and reconstruction. Through acts of careful reassembly, these sculptures hold the accumulated weight of time, considering how continuity is built through attention, labor and the structures we create to contain it.
About the Artist
Laura Petrovich-Cheney ’11 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 & 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, reflecting her ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship. Petrovich-Cheney lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her husband, a cat and a dog.
Image courtesy of the artist.
