Wildcolor is a design studio creating one-of-a-kind textiles and garments

The name Wildcolor is a tribute to the use of natural dyes - achieving color using avocado pits and peels, teas, roses, indigo leaf, and other flowers and plants. Botanical color is beautiful and gives items a charge of nature and a lovely feel.

Wildcolor is also a nod to the use of up-cycled and foraged fabrics found in the wilds of NYC and beyond.

As a brand Wildcolor is committed to sustainability, transformation, abstraction, and beauty.

Amanda Morales is the artist behind Wildcolor.

Amanda grew up in Queens, NY, and her style is influenced by her studies in philosophy, spirituality, and fine art. Some of earliest artworks were collages made for mixtape covers and sheets of paper printer paper covered in shapes - echos of which are still found in her work.

Amanda holds a degree in Philosophy and Art & Art History from the College of William and Mary, with continuing study at SVA, Hunter College, Art Students League, Loop of the Loom, The City Quilter, Gasworks, and more. She is also a yoga and reiki II practitioner.

In addition to her art practice, Amanda has held numerous leadership positions in arts nonprofits. She currently teaches at the Textile Arts Center, and Wordshop, both in Brooklyn, NY, and still works with select organizations like Frieze and The Cooper Union.

Amanda answers Frequently Asked Questions:

What is WILDCOLOR and how does it relate to your art practice?

My art practice took me down a rabbit hole of studying textiles and natural dyes. When I started sharing some of my experimentation with friends, they wanted to have the things I was making, and were interested in the natural dye process. I developed a practice of making small items that people could purchase - clothing & accessories and home goods - for folks who couldn’t buy the large quilts. Motifs and themes from my current work make their way onto these items - they almost become sketches for the larger works. Everything I make is one of a kind, and I work exclusively with up-cycled and naturally dyed fabrics. It works out nicely because I can experiment with materials when I create for WILDCOLOR, and those experiments become items people can have rather than projects that just sit in my studio. I really feel like things I make to should move on from me and being mine, and clear space for the new.

How does your cultural identity influence your art?

I think being a person of mixed heritage (my mom is German & Irish and my Dad is Puerto Rican), living between cultures, and growing up with people of many cultures but none of whom shared mine, has made me curious, mutable, open-minded, fluid and compassionate. I’ve always been someone that doesn’t fit into binaries or into any particular group, and I’m ok with that. I think there is loss that comes from not fitting tightly into one community, but there is a blessing in the path of being a ‘bridge’ person who can see things from many sides.

How did you start making art?

My mom studied painting at Pratt and my maternal grandmother studied photography in college, so I am third in a line of creative women. My mom basically raised us 3 kids in an art classroom — we were batiking, making paper, or constructing 3D models out of wood on the regular. I think that’s when I started exploring iterations. We would make Valentine’s Day cards, for example, and I could never make one the same as the last. I always wanted to pursue a new idea on the next try. I am still like that. I just want to see what I can make next.

My mom sewed our Halloween costumes, and clothes, and basically went above and beyond with everything she made. I remember years when my mom made these beautiful sewn stuffed bunnies, complete with little outfits and hats. My grandmother had a little sewing room in her house and I would dutifully sew curtains or whatever she needed. There was a small old church in my mom’s hometown that became a historical museum and had an old wooden floor loom in the attic, and when I was around middle school age they let me sit and weave on that thing for hours. I think I just tapped right into that sacred thread of creation that so many women are a part of - pushing and pulling and pinning and pulsing in rhythm until you make something new, or necessary.

Why quilts?

I started making quilts in 2013 but really fell into them during the first part of the pandemic. Just cutting and sewing and flowing with life. Quilts are so personal - they are touched and held and in your lap and go on to be touched and held and snuggled. So many hours go into creating them. I love the history of quilting and the ethos of repurposing materials.

I’ve always been interested in fashion, thrift-shopping, and fabrics. Spending hours upon hours combing through garments, you learn a lot about materials and well- constructed items - fine silks or cottons or the like -start to jump out at you from the rest. There is a charity shop one block from my house in Brooklyn that will often make everything in their basement $5 (or $1 if you’re really lucky), and, if you are a gatherer like me, you can pick out the most incredible things. Discarded double-color silk kurtis; vintage French ditzy floral cottons; American denim; triple-x Eileen Fisher linen pants in the most unfathomable chartreuse. The fabrics are so lovely and special but no one wants the garment because it has a small stain or is off trend or whatever. So I began foraging these materials and transforming them into new items with new lives. They become a sort of collage — items that did not relate to each other at all in a wardrobe start to sing together in their new composition.

I am really interested in using things that already exist and transforming them into something new. I have learned I am at my best when I am responding to life and to my environment, and my work is very much just me responding to materials. It’s rare that I have a plan much beyond that response. Assembling the materials is like cooking or making collage or a really good vinyasa flow — not too much in the brain, just bodies in motion, organizing molecules until they settle. I am a weaver, and I like the idea of making my own fabric from scratch, but barring that I really prefer to work with materials that have already lived a little and have some soul. My work really comes together, I think, when I combine my foraged fabrics with fabrics I overdye with natural dyes.

Why natural dyes?

Natural dyes are living things that we are in relationship with. They are ph-sensitive, they shift and change, they develop patina. There is a lot of busy about colorfastness and lightfastness and mordanting and scouring when you work with natural dyes, and I am a humble student (and teacher) of those arts and sciences. But I’m also totally ok with natural color fading or changing. What’s the big deal about that? Why do we need our work to stay the same? I hope everything I make shifts and changes and lives on and on. Stagnation and plasticity is not appealing. Organic processes are.

Natural dyes are also just fun and pleasing to work with. Bits and bobs and bugs and barks. Mess and mounds and bundles and piles. Flowers and twigs and teas. Moldy berries. Plants! How lovely to learn to draw color from the earth and bond it to something you can carry or wear or simply look at. Because I only work with natural fibers, I feel that the natural dyes are in conversation with the fabrics, greeting one another fiendishly or just standing still together.