Gwen Triay Samuels, a native of Florida, was born during Jim Crow.  Her family moved to New York, then New Jersey, during the Great Migration. Gwen is a retired New Jersey K-12 Teacher, and was also an Adjunct Professor at Seton Hall and Centenary Universities. She learned sewing and arts and crafts from her grandmother at an early age. As a young mother, she sewed and made clothes and crafts with her children. She began quilting in 1999. As a teacher, she used quilting and other arts as a key component of her instruction.

After retirement, Gwen, who considers herself a “climate refugee” (hurricane sandy), moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, consistently voted one of the top 25 U.S. art destinations. There she continued quilting, then began taking classes in “Punch Quilting.” This is a relatively new, unique fiber art that employs fabric, batting, foam board, tempered board, and a few tools, mostly handmade, to create works reminiscent of quilts, but no sewing is involved. 

Gwen’s fiber arts include traditional quilting, art quilting, and punch quilting, but she also creates baskets, home decor, costumes, accessories, jewelry, and apparel.  She uses techniques such as appliqué, fabric painting, embellishment, long arm quilting, beading, photo transfer, mixed media, and more. Her fiber art creations have received many awards and have been exhibited in many venues including: the Quilt Festival of New Jersey, the New Jersey Medical School, the African American Fiber Arts Festival (South Carolina), the Textile Center (Minnesota), the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta, the New Mexico Humanities Council, and the New Mexico Cancer Center.  She has won two “Best of Show” awards and a  “Purchase Award” from the New Mexico State Fair. The winning piece of the latter award became part of the New Mexico State Fair Permanent Art Collection.

Gwen is also an accomplished Poet and Author of two books and has published her poetry in several journals and anthologies. She is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow (2007), and a member of the New Mexico Live Poets Society.  She published her first collection of poems, 9 Patch Life, in 2019 and published a memoir, A Second Second Chance: A Black Woman’s Story of Recovery from COVID-19, in 2020.

Gwen’s visual inspiration comes largely from world cultures, especially the cultures of the African diaspora. Her work is also influenced by Asian and Latino cultures, as she lived and studied in Japan, Korea, Spain, Latin America, and the American Southwest. She is a Japan Fulbright Scholar, a Korea Foundation Fellow, and a Certified Interpreter and Translator. Gwen is multilingual in several languages and has traveled to 14 countries. Gwen recently moved to the Triangle area of North Carolina to be closer to family, and after a brief art hiatus during her cross-country move, she is jumpstarting her art practice once again. For more information about Gwen’s work you can view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr6vjC4v6-c and visit her website at https://triayarts.com.