Viola Bordon, a multidisciplinary artist based in Chestnut Hill, will be presenting an exhibition at the Museum for Art in Wood in Old City from March 6 to July 26.

As part of the semiquincentennial celebrations this year, The Clay Studio — a nonprofit organization for the cultivation of ceramic arts — is developing a series of exhibits called “Radical Americana.” These shows celebrate how today’s artists are continuing Philadelphia’s legacy as a center for creativity and craft.

“Radical Americana” includes two exhibits at the Museum for Art in Wood: “Muliebrity” by Bordon and “Suite Américaine” by BA Harrington. While Harrington’s exhibition explores transforming historic furniture to reveal the work of women inside them, Bordon’s work questions who freedom has truly served.

Bordon, who received her bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis and master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, was originally trained in sculpture. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she did not have studio access.

“I was in the middle of grad school and still needed to produce work,” Bordon recalled. “So I ended up in COVID lockdown at my folks’ house with a sewing machine. I started sewing and now most of what I produce is fabric based.”

Bordon describes the themes she works with as “all over the place.” She has created artwork exploring landscapes, the outdoors, the human body, technology, politics, and history.

For the upcoming exhibit at the Museum for Art in Wood, Bordon conducted research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to create “Muliebrity,” which is defined as the state of womanhood. She was especially interested in the concept of liberty as portrayed through the Statue of Liberty. According to Bordon, she found an irony in the 1886 dedication of Lady Liberty prior to women gaining the right to vote.

The result was a quilt with themes of endurance, fertility, and embodied knowledge. Bordon said these themes spoke to her because of the modern implications.

“A lot of times we think of history as something that’s really in the past, but women are dealing with a lot of questions — autonomy and choices and things like that,” Bordon said. “I think the fact that history is not dead is really interesting to me.”

In addition to Lady Liberty, Bordon also found herself thinking about Mary Magdalene. Late Medieval and early Renaissance depictions of the biblical figure often show her as a naked woman in the wilderness.

“This question of the shifting of the narrative from this great and powerful person to this naked woman in the wilderness has become really strange for me,” Bordon said. “It feels like it keeps happening again and again and again. When we use women to describe power, we also have to put a caveat, which is such a strange and ridiculous thing to do, but it speaks to the patriarchal system that we’ve been living in for thousands of years.”

Bordon said she hopes visitors to the exhibit will reflect on the complexity of systems and the nuance of these issues.

“I find current conversation on a lot of these issues dry and one-sided, and part of that is we haven’t given our time and space for nuance,” Bordon said. “I think that humans are far more complicated than that.”

Bordon is also excited to see how people interact with the work.

“I have a lot of ideas about where the world is and what I see and how I interact with things, but I’m really excited about the potential for other people to come and interact with those same things — and potentially make a quilt out of that one day,” Bordon said.

Learn more at museumforartinwood.org.

Maggie Dougherty can be reached at Margaret@chestnuthilllocal.com.