Threads of Us: Weaving Identity and Place
How we carry home with us
Ongoing series, 2024–present
Project StatementWhat does it mean to carry home with you? Threads of Us is an ongoing portrait and multimedia series that pursues this question through the bodies, garments, and voices of people who know the answer intimately: immigrants, diaspora communities, and Indigenous peoples whose ancestral homelands are here in Minnesota.
Patricia Mutebi photographs participants in culturally significant attire, not as costume but as deliberate acts of visibility, continuity, and pride. Each portrait is paired with a recorded audio and video reflection in which the participant speaks, in their own words, about identity, heritage, and belonging. Image and voice together create what neither could alone: a record of how someone looks and how they understand themselves.
Every participant is a collaborator. Before any session begins, there is a conversation. Participants determine what they bring, what the attire means to them, and what they want people to understand when they encounter the image. The photographs emerge from those conversations. So does the work's meaning.
Remmus Xiong
In this reflection, Remmus speaks to what it means to carry identity across generations, to inhabit a cultural heritage that is both deeply personal and publicly invisible.
Hmong
About This ProjectThreads of Us began as a response to the 2025 Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award, an architecture competition asking entrants to design a personal curated collection and place of refuge rooted in identity, aspiration, and community. The prompt drew on Eliel Saarinen's philosophy of always designing in relation to the next larger context, and it asked a question Patricia could not answer through drawings alone: how do people carry home with them when they are far from where they started?
She turned to photography to pursue it. What began as an architectural inquiry has grown into a sustained investigation of cultural identity, land, and how communities reconstruct belonging across generations and geographies.
The series currently comprises up to 20 portraits representing communities, including but not limited to Ojibwe, Ghanaian, Pakistani, Hmong, Thai, and Indian participants in the Twin Cities. The series includes Indigenous participants not as a gesture but as a recognition that any honest exploration of belonging in Minnesota must reckon with whose land this is.
Threads of Us is currently in preparation for its first public exhibition in the Twin Cities, accompanied by artist-led dialogue. A coffee table book and a companion children's coloring book extending the work into homes and classrooms are in development for 2026.
Medium: Portrait photography, audio, and video
Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota
Status: Ongoing; Exhibition in preparation
Participants: 20 portraits across 10+ communities