Using an archive of family photographs, I create quilts to explore spatial and familial memory that confronts a whiteness-centered ancestral paradigm by challenging the individual, conceptualizing experience as communal, and questioning concepts of gendered work. Considering the life cycle of a quilt as a meditation on its historical context, both from its use as currency by enslaved women to gain access to white society and a utilitarian object, I consider the ways anthropologic and ethnographic systems of the museum and settler-colonialist Western perspectives have made it so that underserved communities seem non-existent.

I am interested in the ways in which abstract visual language and the presentation of works can challenge and subvert preconceived ideas about a single or group of peoples. As I embrace these histories, I seek to heal audiences through my work and redress narrowed populations. This research and the resulting objects embrace a sense of self as multitudinous and experiences of transgenerational trauma, producing an iconology of these experiences. I hope to create a tactile link between current diasporic experiences and those of our ancestors.

My newest quilts are reflection and meditation on an image of my mother with her sisters and mother, and an image of my grandmother. I wanted to consider the space they are in and the space they occupy in the image. Neither quilt represents or is built with a 1-to-1 recreation of the image, but is an interpretation of what I see.

Collaging together fiber techniques, found textiles, and photographs from family archives, my work explores phases of acculturation, immigrant identity, and ideas about gendered labor. Decorative fringes are influenced by Turkish oya (lace edging on a headdress) and its use of symbolic patterns that serve as a secret language between women to express private, personal sentiments. Adopting these methods of embellishment and encoding, I create intercultural portraits framed with oya on floral bedsheets. The transferred images of people get repeated or turned into patterns themselves to intertwine the “individual” into “collectives” that form multiple personalities. I then layer embroidery and painting to obscure their identities.

The used domestic fabrics hold personal and bodily history, invoking feelings of home and intimacy. By utilizing found materials and fiber crafts, I question the value and worth assigned to materials and women’s work. The draped fabrics are framed with colorful crochet, where I crudely mimic traditional oya styles or devise new motifs reflecting my contemporary reality within the coding. Similarly, my use of Islamic ornamentation juxtaposed with portraiture is a subversive strategy. Seeming as mere beautification, ornamentation can trigger tension between the focal point and the motifs by teasing our vision’s periphery and overwhelming the figure it initially sets out to embellish. This echoes the different strategies of acculturation: integration, separation from, assimilation to, and social marginalization. Mimicking this ploy, the ornament and the figure perpetually displace each other as the core of identity and the other.

Haptic skips of woven textiles gone awry, the distortion of image dictated by the hand, and games of hide and seek inform the use of weaving, mended imagery, and installation to examine false histories and notions of the South. By utilizing slow craft, I draw on my experience living in the Southern United States and her research documenting and archiving how Southern narratives are made and maintained throughout the history of Georgia. By exploring how Southern myths are acted and re-enacted in the stories and objects surrounding them, I iteratively piece, mend, and patch as a way to respond and dissect the physical and personal distances between cultural spaces – both set afar and rewritten one on top of the other.

A tarp becomes a boundary, dividing the complete with the unfinished – a blinder, hiding spaces that become momentary place holders. Images taken from my family photos are printed onto warp to then be distorted by the tension of the hand. Making use of woven offcuts, Southern iconography, and collage, prospective patches are both used and exhibited as objects in action. The blurry edges of vision are magnified, piecing together moments of personal narrative to subvert larger myths of the South. Creating patches for unmaterialized textiles becomes a guarded optimistic practice, used to conserve personal places in memory and allow space to consider something new.

My work is composed of paper receipts, tickets, envelopes, and documents, as well as plastic and paper shopping bags and stickers. Each item provides a record of my various activities at a particular place and time. The receipts and shopping bags represent capitalism, consumerism, and my aspiration for wealth, status, and success. As I experienced the radical reshaping of the global economy, along with increasing globalization, I became obsessed with the capitalistic ideals of money, fame, and success. My work asks questions about the impact of American capitalism on one’s values. It is an examination of the roots of our desires, and how we determine value. I sew the papers and other materials together by hand to create a patchwork. The repetitive and meditative act of stitching abandoned objects, leftover, or discarded things (not special, unnoticed, undiscovered) helps me to record the passing of time and highlights the sanctity of labor.

These two pieces contrast the differences between machine stitched shibori and hand stitched shibori, both in natural indigo on linen.

Chalice is inspired by the work of Shibori Master Motohito Katano, formerly a painter and then expert natural dyer whose work in indigo and other natural dyes serves an inspiration to many shibori artists today. It is an example of machine stitched resist.

Untitled is natural indigo on linen and cotton with linen binding. The shibori resist is all hand stitched. This Noren panel is typically hung in a window for two reasons: luminosity – how the daylight illuminates the design on the cloth, and to provide privacy. I live in the city where the houses are close together and I don’t like to close the window coverings. This is my practical, enchanting solution. My own private moon!

In my work I am interested in navigating spaces by making handweavings that address queerness, orientation, and impermanence. Working within a space I use the entryways, windows, lines on the floor, walls, the light in the room, among other objects. When I work I think about how viewers would navigate the space in relation to the weavings. Where do the viewers stop to rest? How do they approach the work? How does the space echo?

The work I make comes from a place of sharing. As a queer artist, I am interested in centering queerness as a collective and personal contribution. Queerness is on a horizon and what I offer as a queer, brown person is a point of view that contributes to queerness as a whole. Ultimately, I am interested in investigating spaces in the simplest form – navigation and adaptation.

My practice is rooted in three main points: areas of research, an open land, and ways of seeing. The areas of research are ongoing and speak to the overall framework of literally having different areas of research (queerness, orientation, space). The open land is a metaphor; it references queerness being an open land of possibility, hope and forwardness. Lastly, ways of seeing are forms of orientation – how do we encounter work from different points of view? – but also how do we “see” queerness.

The words text and textile share a common Latin root with the word texere, meaning to weave. But the connections are more than simply linguistic; they are also cultural and historical: from books wrapped or bound in cloth, to tapestries and embroideries used to depict legends, fairy tales, and other narratives.

My work resides at the intersection of the cultural and historical where textiles, those relatively commonplace objects such as scraps, threads, and the patterns they merge to create are meaningful, both symbolically and culturally. This is especially true in West Africa, where they are considered to be treasures, heirlooms, and mediums through which the average person can literally weave their personal and collective narratives.

As a Ghanaian-born woman artist, I find that engaging with textiles provides a unique path toward (re)claiming agency in self-expression. In my work, I examine the histories of West African textiles, especially within masquerade societies, focusing specifically on their significance to a particular region, how they have been constructed, what they are used for and what sorts of materials are used in making them. I am also interested in taking apart the values assigned to these textiles, often defined by gender, and as belonging to the domestic sphere; in practice that means literally taking apart the textile itself so that it exists as a sum of its parts. These parts are what I reinterpret by employing a range of materials that I then use to construct and reconstruct what becomes my work.

The “piecing-together” or weaving what symbolically becomes a new material text for the audience to read and engage with requires a repetitive process, one that emphasizes the time, effort, and labor often associated with traditional weaving methods. Techniques include the more conventional weaving, threading, and stringing of organic materials while incorporating other objects such as hand- sanded glass beads and bits of wire to create works that reference and pay homage to traditional textiles while expanding the definition and function of the final product. In doing so I aim to push the limits of what a textile can be and often incorporate dimensionality into the works I create, making the space as important as the artwork itself. Transforming the space is a crucial part of my practice because in doing so my work takes on an embodied, sculptural effect, allowing for a multisensory experience where the audience plays an important role in meaning making, shaping the narrative, and bringing the object to life.

Yarn makes me think of my mother and grandmother. I learned how to knit and crochet from my grandmother and my mother taught me how to sew and latch hook. Working with yarn makes me nostalgic for those times, but it also resurrects the battles I have endured surrounding my identity and societal body standards.

My tufted rugs reference my life as a black queer man, memories of growing up outdoors, and how I view my childhood living in Duluth, Minnesota. My rugs always tie back to Duluth. The piece made during my residency at Textile Center for this show, Striations #7, shows my interpretation of the shores of Lake Superior during the winter months and the shards of large ice slapping against the rocks. It also tells the tales of haunted stories of my youth surrounding the dead bodies frozen to the bottom of the great lake.

The piece, You’re Always There, is an accumulation of my personal demons wrapped up into one feeling. This touches on insecurities from my youth that have followed me into adulthood—ones that I tend to find “sick comfort” in.

Having been reintroduced to fiber art within the last couple years feels central to who I am and how I like to work. The authentic and familiar emotions I get working with yarn helps me feel comfortable creating these intimate self-portraits. My mindful and labor intensive process allows me to watch creation come whole, while spending cherished time with each piece. Being able to work at a faster speed with an electric tufting gun allows me to work on the larger scale I prefer, while working with the loud, sometimes vigorous tufting gun itself creates an empowering sensation.

As an Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary textile artist, my sculptural wall tapestries combine the labor-intensive skills of traditional Ghanaian loom and floor loom weaving with Black and African hair styling. The subsequent deconstructing of each practice creates an open system of cultural and generational conversation on identity, diaspora, sisterhood, and sacred space, where the work transcends its formal and material properties. Braids and patterns merge into each other poetically and painterly, and structure gives way to the organic, like flesh in armor. Comprised of both the choreographed action of the loom and the performative space of a Black Hair Salon, the work leans into the ideas of feelings as corporeal and labor as a marker of time.

Much of my work references perseverance but also delves specifically into the stages of grief, which also perseveres. Grief is a constant condition of being a Black woman in America. We’re always justifying our bodies, what we wear, how we dress, how we carry ourselves, always needing to be conscious of how we’re styled. Everything has to be up to par with how our hair is done, and that too is consistently scrutinized.

I take inspiration from designs on my own crown, created by my Chicago-based stylist, Derricka Crumb. The use of synthetic braiding hair and high quality blends in conversation with a more ‘kinky’ puff hair speaks to the Black Hair Salon and my upbringing around what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hair. The differing material operates as a push and pull of positive and negative space, where I allow the material to dictate its own form in certain places, and tightly render the weaving in others.

Through these discussions of grief, particularly grief experienced in isolation, my work taps into survival and proliferation. Through material, I address a spectrum of tradition rooted in technique into a love letter to Black women, referring back to the machines and bodies that the work is built upon.

My work examines the role of inherited legacies and family traditions within histories altered by immigration, loss, and war. My paintings derive from my greatgrandfather’s archive of photographs, taken when he was a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army. These are turned into y?rei–ghosts–floating bodies on the periphery of life. These subjects are deprived of the comfort of existing within space, longing for a home within the reserved solitude of undefined worlds.

Simultaneously, I create hand sewn stuffed dolls, using the nami nui (wave stitch). Nami nui was taught to me by my mother, who learned from my grandmother, who was taught by her mother, and on it went–a stitch passed from the hands of mothers to daughters, connecting generations of hands that will never touch.

Duty to preserve these photographic and craft legacies stems from my belief that I have a responsibility to raise up the stories of those who came before her and preserve their memories for those who will come after.

The dolls in Fantasy of Family were sewn entirely by my hand, using no machines. Their details are hand embroidered and felt appliqué. The patterns used here are all of my own design. The felt pieces and all the minky fur was dyed by hand from white. These two dolls are meant to represent the people in the image behind them: my great-grandparents, Kikue and Satoru. I painted the image using sumi ink on a canvas panel coated in gold leaf. A photo of my great-grandparents was used as a reference.

These dolls were made for a very specific reason. They will be sent to Japan to my grandmother, Nobuko, the daughter of Kikue and Satoru. Nobuko has dementia. The family she remembers most vividly are her long-gone parents. They appear in the painting as they were when she was a young girl. This is the family that her mind returns to. Caring for my grandmother is a burden on those around her. As a result, her days are primarily spent alone in a dark room with the curtains drawn, watching television. It is my hope that these dolls give her some measure of comfort.

The Support Network series started as a way to process the trauma and memories I experienced alongside my community during the 2020 uprisings in Minnesota. I contextualized the duality in materials used to create borders or barriers. I noticed that both the community and government were using similar materials for different reasons. One to withhold space, and the other to enforce security. The monochromatic color scheme draws attention to the texture of the materials. This allows me to redefine the hardness of the chains, ropes, and metal with the softness of yarn, ribbon, and fabric.

I relate woven tapestry to how the community came together to support one another. The act of weaving involves stacking and pressing materials tightly together. When the weaving is released from a loom, each element creates a collective network of support. Whether a person gets lost in the tactile experience or connects their own memory to the piece, the installation of Support Network is a way to create space for meditation and reflection.