NEW INC x Fabric Workshop & Museum
NEW INC’s Open Call is live from February 2–March 2, 2026!
Immerse yourself in the work of the NEW INC Members and learn about NEW INC's Year 13 Open Call for artists, technologists, and creative entrepreneurs.
Fabric Workshop and Museum's current exhibition, The Living Temple: The World of Moki, draws from a deep collaboration of Moki Cherry's textiles and Don Cherry's jazz compositions. Rena Anakwe (SENSORHEUM) grounds participants in a meditative sound experience responding to the work of Moki Cherry.
Current NEW INC Members, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Rena Anakwe, and Will Takao Elliot join in a conversation with Cooperative Studies Track Mentor, Sloan Leo Cowan, on their experience as Members in the Year 12 cohort.
End the evening with at mixer at City Winery (990 Filbert St). NEW INC staff and Members will be available to respond to any questions about Year 13 Open Call.
About NEW INC Presenters:
The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), Year 12 Cooperative Studies
FWM is an internationally acclaimed contemporary art museum devoted to the creation, presentation, and preservation of innovative works of art. Its mission—collaborating with artists, revealing new possibilities—embodies a 48-year commitment to helping artists experiment with a broad spectrum of new materials and techniques. Through its renowned Artist-in-Residence Program, FWM provides artists at all stages of their careers with the opportunity to collaborate with studio staff and take their work in fresh and often unexpected directions. FWM presents large-scale exhibitions, installations, and performances, utilizing innovative fiber and other media, including sculpture, video, painting, photography, ceramics, and architecture. Founded in 1977, FWM brings this spirit of creative investigation and discovery to an eager audience, broadening access to art, and advancing its role as a catalyst for innovation and social connection.
Rena Anakwe, Year 12 Extended Realities
Rena Anakwe is a Nigerian-Canadian-American interdisciplinary artist, poet, and healer that uses sound, visuals, and scent to explore where and how traditional healing practices, spirituality, and performance can connect and fracture. Her deeper inquiry is how reconnecting to nature can help us to understand and mend these fractures; not only for ourselves but in relation to one another. She is the creator and founder of SENSORHEUM, a multi-dimensional, digital portal that offers access to healing experiences, practitioners, and tools, both in-person and virtually. In its first phase, it will feature: sound healing for visual and auditory enjoyment, herbal remedies for plant-based support, and mutual aid to expand accessibility to offerings for people at lower income levels.
SENSORHEUM is a complement and an alternative to westernized systems where only symptoms are treated versus Non-Western approaches that holistically consider the mind, body, and spirit, and is available to all.
Will Takao Eliot, Year 12 Social Architecture
Founded by William Eliot, Biocrafting.Studio stands apart from other design studios by radically collaborating with nature. The studio’s methodology dives deep into scientific literature to unearth biological processes that might reshape the way things are made in the manufacturing and design industries.
These biological processes are combined with craft techniques, often linked to indigenous knowledge, to define novel design and manufacturing methodologies that relinquish control from the human and hands the reins to non-human entities.
The studio’s goal is to envision a future where the things that we make are co-designed by the natural world in which we live to effectively move away from the Anthropocene and into the Symbiocene.
Sloan Leo Cowan, Year 12 Cooperative Studies Mentor-in-Residence
Sloan Leo Cowan (they/he) is a community designer, facilitator, educator, and strategist whose work sits at the intersection of queering design, solidarity economy, and collective liberation. A leading thinker in community and facilitation design, Sloan Leo sees design as more than problem-solving—it is an act of orientation toward change, a practice of reshaping the conditions that allow people to live, work, and thrive together.
As Founder of FLOX Studio, Sloan partners with philanthropic, cultural, and social impact institutions to seed practices that move us beyond extractive systems and toward solidarity-based, democratic, and regenerative economies.Central to Sloan Leo's practice is the idea of queering design—disrupting dominant norms of power, productivity, and hierarchy, while inviting expansive understandings of identity, relationship, and possibility. Through queering design, they are working to shift design away from extraction and toward practices that sustain community care and interdependence.
An artist as well as a strategist, Sloan Leo’s work is decidedly queer, unapologetically Black, and compassionately collective. Using facilitation, dialogic pedagogy, digital video, photography, and printmaking, their social practice invites participants and audiences alike to grapple with values, belonging, and the beautifully fraught realities of community life.
About NEW INC
As the first museum-born cultural incubator, NEW INC was conceived of as a not-for-profit platform to further the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas. Now in its twelfth year, NEW INC’s membership model continues to support a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing new creative projects and businesses. In 2020, NEW INC launched ONX Studio, an XR accelerator for artists, in partnership with the Onassis Foundation. NEW INC was cofounded by the New Museum’s Toby Devan Lewis Director Lisa Phillips and former Deputy Director Karen Wong in 2014.