Savaree “Sav” Hazard-Chaney is a self-taught multimedia artist who has a passion for tufting. Now, she wants to build a stronger following in a “remarkable” art community.
Hazard-Chaney is a fiber artist in Providence and owns TuftXPVD, a rug-tufting studio. Tufting is a carpet-making technique where a person uses a special gun that shoots yarn through mesh fabric. That allows an artist to loop or punch yarn through the fabric to create unique patterns and textures.
Hazard-Chaney teaches classes at her studio, becoming proficient in tufting even though she never had experience working with fibers or textiles. Not taking an art class never stopped Hazard-Chaney. Painting was something she did on her own and “completely just out of interest.”
Hazard-Chaney said that being a creative “was probably one of the last things I thought I would ever grow up to becoming.”
Instead, she was “pretty hell-bent” on becoming one of the first women to play in the NBA, calling it one of her “famous dreams.”
Hazard-Chaney earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology and a bachelor of science degree in chemical dependency and addiction studies at Rhode Island College. She also played some college basketball during the 1990s but the wear and tear of the hardcourt took its toll.
“And then the joints and the knees and things like that really caught up with your girl and I just couldn’t play the way I wanted to play,” she said. “I was still connected in the community and I joined a few women’s leagues around here just to be able to still move my body.”
Then Hazard-Chaney discovered tufting. She had moved from Warwick to Providence after her family experienced a house fire at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It turned out to be a blessing; Hazard-Chaney calls the art community in Providence “remarkable.”
“It completely took me in when I didn’t feel like I even had a place inside of it, and then it completely just hovered around me and helped me grow in this,” she says. “It really felt like my call and my mission to explore and figure out what it meant to build that community.
“I didn’t have any idea that I would be teaching When I first stepped out into the community and started sharing my rugs, people were like, ‘You should totally teach.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to teach.’”
Hazard-Chaney “very loosely” made an Instagram reel of a workshop she led. She was surprised at the positive response.
“I posted that reel and next thing I know I had half a million views and my workshops are sold out for the first six months of the year,” she says. “And I was begging people to take this class a year ago. You know what I mean?
“So there is just power and intuition, and when you’re anointed, you’re anointed. Just the idea of tufting in more of these spaces just keeps expanding. And then of course the idea of what it means to make a rug also just continues to expand and grow, and as the community grows, more cooler artists come out with even bigger and better ideas, and I feel like I have a piece of that.”
Hazard-Chaney says she still considers herself a “basketball girly.”
“I’m learning that too, being an adult and then having come into this beautiful relationship and having children come up right beside me, and I hope that I’m showing them what it means to just follow something they really love to do,” she says. “There’s so much about my childhood that I just miss or wish I got to spend more time in, and so I think this is also homage to little Sav and just making sure that she’s good and she feels good and she’s being taken care of now because that’s an also really important piece of this.”
