Threads of Us: Weaving Identity and Place

Project Statement

What does it mean to carry home with you? Threads of Us is an ongoing portrait and multimedia series that pursues this question through the bodies, garments, and voices of people who know the answer intimately: immigrants, diaspora communities, and Indigenous peoples whose ancestral homelands are here in Minnesota.

Participants are photographed in culturally significant attire, worn as a deliberate act of visibility, continuity, and pride. Hmong vests and Ethiopian habesha dresses, Ghanaian kente cloth and Pakistani shalwar kameez. They bring meaningful objects with them: wedding garments, family heirlooms, Oromo beadwork, Somali incense burners, Ethiopian coffee ceremony sets. Each item is a tangible bridge to a family and a homeland.

Each portrait is paired with a recorded audio and video reflection in which the participant speaks, in their own words, about identity, heritage, and belonging. Image and voice together create what neither could alone: a record of how someone looks and how they understand themselves.

Every participant is a collaborator. Before any session begins, there is a conversation. Participants determine what they bring, what the attire means to them, and what they want people to understand when they encounter the image. The photographs emerge from those conversations. So does the work's meaning.

The Conditions of Its Making

The series began as a response to the 2025 Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award, an architecture competition asking entrants to design a personal curated collection and place of refuge rooted in identity, aspiration, and community. The prompt drew on Eliel Saarinen's philosophy of always designing in relation to the next larger context, and it asked a question that could not be answered through drawings alone. Patricia turned the prompt inside out and asked Minnesotans instead: what parts of home do you bring with you when you leave that place?

A casting call went out on TikTok in December 2025 and drew roughly thirty-five participants. The original plan was to photograph people in their own homes. Then Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota, changed what was safe. Half of the portrait subjects withdrew as federal agents moved through the streets. The sittings moved to a downtown Minneapolis space, and Patricia walked each participant in and out herself, unwilling to leave anyone waiting in the open longer than necessary. She photographed from January through April, carrying her own immigration papers on a lanyard around her neck.

Some participants were galvanized rather than deterred. One agreed to sit specifically to show his gratitude to Minnesota: to hold both pride in his heritage and love for the place he now lives. The series includes Indigenous participants because any honest exploration of belonging in Minnesota has to reckon with whose land this is.