Katya Oicherman a.k.a. Laundry Maid

Artist, educator, curator, textile researcher based in Cleveland, OH, USA.

As an artist, Oicherman works with embroidery, animation, installation, performance and writing. She explores how personal and collective memories and identities are reflected in and shaped by material culture, in particular textiles as cultural containers and witnesses of exilic experience.. Her creative research often delves into textiles in her family and their histories as Soviet Jews. Examining the role of cloth in contemporary art, Oicherman created performances emphasizing the oft-neglected role of textiles in civilizational development. 

She also conducts historical research on the material culture of sleep in the late modern period in the United States, with a focus on bed linens. This research feeds into Oicherman’s practice as a writer and curator, examining the role of sleep and bed linen in everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Dream/Bed” was a series of texts she commissioned in 2021 as a guest editor for MNartists, an art writing platform for the Walker Art Center. Bringing together a diverse group of local artists and writers, the series captured the contemporary experience of sleeping and being in bed. She continued this work as an Artist Curator-in-Residence at the Museum of American Art in St. Paul with a large-scale site-specific project “Im/perfect Slumbers” opened in February 2023.

In September 2023 Oicherman was appointed as the Director of the Temple Museum of Jewish Art, Religion and Culture in The Temple Tifereth Israel (TTI) synagogue in Beachwood, OH. There she oversees an internationally distinguished collection of over 2500 Jewish ritual objects and related works of fine art in a unique setting of a community museum inside one of the largest reformist Jewish congregations in the USA. Alongside collection management and care for the permanent display in the TTI Judaica gallery at the adjacent Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage,  her activity includes devising and curating exhibitions for the Hartzmark Gallery at the TTI building. She works to create up-to-date programming for different audiences and age groups  in the context of both permanent and temporary galleries, using the collection, as well as bringing relevant contemporary art and developing community projects in collaboration with other cultural institutions in Cleveland.

Oicherman holds a practice-based PhD from the School of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Oicherman is an active member of Praxis Fiber Workshop in Cleveland.

Recent residencies and grants:

R. Rauschenberg Foundation Archive research residency (NY, 2023), Short term Winterthur Museum Postdoc Research Fellowship (2023), Minnesota Museum of American Art artist in residence (2022-3), ShUM cities artist in residence (Germany, 2022), Legacy Research Fellowship at Minnesota Historical Society (2020), Emergency Grant COVID-19 Fund from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2020), Minnesota Jewish Arts Council project grant (2019)