China Marks

China Marks (b. 1942, Kansas City, MO) lived and worked in Long Island City, NYC, before moving to Massachusetts. She currently resides in the New York metropolitan area. She dedicated the last twenty-three years of her artistic career to sewn drawings, a term she used for her textile art, which includes large collaged tapestries of drastically altered jacquard reproductions of paintings, broadsides of embroidered text, small and medium-sized drawings, and a small library of sewn books. 

Raised in Kansas City, Marks earned a BFA in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. A Fulbright-Hayes fellowship took her to Kathmandu, Nepal, where she spent sixteen months constructing a major installation out of local materials. Upon return to the United States, she was awarded a graduate fellowship by the Danforth Foundation and received an MFA in sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis. 

Marks is the recipient of two George Sugarman Foundation grants, a Mid-Atlantic Arts fellowship, three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Interest in her sewn works took off after a 2004 review by Grace Glueck in the New York Times. 

She has had solo exhibitions at The Center for Book Arts in New York City, the Foosaner Art Museum at the Florida Institute of Technology, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, the Owen James Gallery, and University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well group exhibitions at numerous venues including the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA; Concord Center for the Visual Arts in Concord, MA; Knust Kunz Gallery in Munich, Germany; and The Painting Center, NY.