Stitches & Wiggles: Unraveled and Reimagined Mixed Media Art by Jody Alexander and Thomas Campbell invites us to participate in an object-based dialogue that speaks to the similarities of vision, intention, and ways of creating. Alexander and Campbell gather materials to reuse, repurpose, repair, mend, patch, or stitch together to make compelling artworks that use the language of our time.
Stitches & Wiggles was co-created with Encounters: The Photography of r.r. jones, on view October 17, 2025, through February 15, 2026, by curator Susan Hillhouse Leask.
These two exhibitions are aesthetically separate and emotionally intertwined. The three artists use different materials and tools, but they are unified in their celebrations of resilience, creative impulses, and lively conversations.
The ability to develop resilience activates vast healing powers that can be accessed through making and viewing art. When we open our minds to art—through making or connoisseurship, we have the opportunity to engage in deep, important, or delightfully silly conversations that open possibilities of gaining new perspectives, deepening our observational and critical thinking skills, and finding alternative avenues to self-knowledge.
We are all creative beings, and we all have access to some form of creative expression. For some of us, our creative impulse is quiet and somewhat untapped, and for others, like artists Thomas Campbell, Jody Alexander, and r.r.jones, it is ever-present and full-voiced. Resilient hope and emotional elasticity are threaded into their works and connect their art practices and philosophies. And, if we let art into our lives, we, too, can connect more deeply to ourselves and to each other.
These three Santa Cruz County artists keep their ideas fresh and vibrant. Their works offer front-row seats to the ways they weave and connect disparate approaches, concepts, and aesthetics. They gift us, individually and collectively, with visual manifestations of joy through their shared flexibility and adaptability.
Additionally, there are other elements of collaboration in Stitches & Wiggles. Both artists are featured in portraits by photographer r.r.jones. In the spirit of their shared sensibilities, Alexander and Campbell created a collaborative piece that wiggles and stitches together photography, material, and painting.
No matter how their approaches may converge and diverge, Jody Alexander, Thomas Campbell, and r.r jones bring to NUMU intentional art making that reminds us that art saves lives and can make our lives more beautiful than we can ever imagine.
Stitches & Wiggles: Unraveled and Reimagined Mixed Media Art by Jody Alexander and Thomas Campbell is on view in our main gallery.
About the Artists
Jody Alexander
Jody Alexander is a book, fiber, and mixed media artist who includes textiles, objects, wall pieces, garments, and installations in her art practice. Her work is inspired by the art of repair, reuse, and by the imagery and stories encountered in her travels on the ground and in the water.
Alexander is fascinated with water. She swam competitively between the ages of eleven and twenty-one, and was on the U.S. National Team in 1979, qualified for the 1980 Olympic Trials (which was canceled due to the U.S. pulling out of the Olympics), and swam on scholarship for UCLA.
When the pools closed in the spring of 2020, Alexander turned to the ocean and lakes to continue her daily swims.
Her latest project, “Aqua Lab: In Search of the Third Thing,” is an investigation to understand her attraction to water. “Is it,” she asks, “the weightlessness, solitude, color, patterns of light, sound, adventure, or the thrill of the unknown?”
Thomas Campbell
Thomas Campbell is a self-taught painter, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker. He grew out of the underground music genre, punk, surf, skate, graffiti, and street art scenes, and he travels all over the world to make films. Featured in the film “Beautiful Losers,” he is associated with the San Francisco Mission School.
Campbell is also part owner and creative director of Galaxia, a small, independent record label based in Santa Cruz, California which has released records by contemporary artists Tommy Guerrero, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Peggy Honeywell and The Black Heart Procession among others. Galaxia was established in 1993, and, in 2013, Campbell started a new creative platform he named UM YEAH ARTS which is a nexus for the making of books, music, and films.
Included in the exhibition are some of his stitched flowers and quilts, drawings, altered photographs, and ceramics, all of which reveal his philosophy of giving back to the universe.
