To be sure, there are many ways to use fabric in the search of artistic meaning. For me, it has been a lifetime journey, starting in my childhood. I was, so to speak, “born to the velvet.” By this I mean to say not that I was a rich kid, but that velvet was an intrinsic part of my life because my father was a velvet salesman. And frankly, when designers were creating velvet gowns, it was good news financially for our family. To us, we believed that velvet was a social fabric that possessed such grand qualities of lushness that it could be considered royalty.
My father was a master of French silk velvet; he knew the difference between what was ordinary and the exceptional. Thus, I got an early education in fabrics of all kinds. I learned that there is a hierarchy of fabric; some are soft and lush, and others are crushable. Fabric responds to the touch; you can drape it you, and you can stitch it. It is no wonder that artists have found it to be a material worthy of creativity… After all, fabric is fashion.
Sadly, in recent times, fabric has gotten a bad rep due to its role in “fast fashion.” Depending upon how you look at it, that one can make a case for fast fashion making fabulous fashion available to people of every economic class speaks to our inner egalitarian conscience. There is a bit of irony in the story of fast fashion…It’s cheap, it’s disposable, and tends to be given away or trashed. Its final destination is usually a landfill in a poor country, where it has become a source of anguish for both governments and people. The irony is that the final resting place is where it all began… in a foreign country, where workers are poorly provided for and underpaid to produce garments made out of synthetic fibers that do not break down or decay, a practice now of epidemic proportions.
Many women are making a statement by buying secondhand clothes. Celebrities like Jane Fonda believe their embrace of repurposed clothing will lead to a fashion awakening. That may be wishful thinking, but here at ArtsWestchester, we are encouraging artists to use fabric to point out issues of social justice; one of them may be the environmental impact of fashion.
– Janet Langsam CEO, ArtsWestchester
Photo credit: Cathy Pinsky
As is often said in different ways, to sew, stitch and weave with expressive purpose today is to question hierarchies and the categories that sustain them, including Eurocentric and patriarchal notions of art versus craft and the gendering and classing of creative work. For artists who aim to disrupt dominant norms or narratives, working with these materials may be a tactic for working, acting or seeing differently.
The artists in The Social Fabric engage themes of broad social consequence. Their wide-ranging explorations include issues of equity and justice, climate, consumerism, identity, and realities of labor in material life. The artists pursue their projects through a variety of artistic strategies, techniques and languages. They may employ abstraction or figuration. Some artists foreground traditions of handmaking, and may bring these traditions into contemporary frameworks and discussions. Some use materials or procedures that diverge from conventions. A common thread is the choice of physically and contextually malleable materials to prompt conversation on vital themes and experiences.
Art made with or about textiles and fibers has commanded increasing attention in recent decades, as evidenced by numerous exhibitions and publications. (1)
Fabric is “a material that we can all relate to,” writes exhibiting artist Paolo Arao. The clothes that cover, reveal and adorn the body are made from textiles. We inhabit interiors with fabric-covered seats and windows, and rely on fixed or portable cloths to soften and decorate tables, beds and pillows. Flags and their colors may symbolize allegiances and solidarity. Artists leverage these familiar contexts and related memories, though the effects of their work may challenge or defamiliarize connections or meanings we thought we knew.
Natalie Baxter uses materials and handmaking procedures that are coded feminine and domestic, to “playfully push controversial issues that have
become social and political points of division.” Originally from Kentucky, the artist also addresses differences of place-identity that can harden into stereotypes. Attitudes about gun ownership inform the artist’s Warm Gun series, which she exhibits as multiple-object installations– arsenals of pillow-like, flaccid rifles and pistols covered in patterned or shiny fabrics with floral designs and bright colors. In a different project, a series of oversized housecoats, Baxter transforms the garment she calls “homemaker workwear” into wearable sculpture. Created from discarded domestic textile products, homemade quilts, t-shirts and state fair ribbons, the housecoats feature the artist’s expertise in composition and various needlework and sewing techniques, as well as her
knack for pop satire. When displayed on hangers in a row, they exhibit multiple dimensions of “women’s” labor. (2)
For Paolo Arao, an artist who mines and invigorates the expressive resources of abstraction, textiles carry personal meanings and intimacies in their material substance. He chooses repurposed fabrics from second-hand clothing, including cottons and corduroys that “often carry physical traces of the bodies that wore them ” He describes his sewn paintings as explorations of “the elastic and open-ended concept of queerness.” In his Othered Sides and We Belong Together series, canvas supports with nonconforming shapes and diptych formats combine with strategic use of color, geometric abstraction and verbal language, setting evocative puns and metaphors into motion.
Anthony Akinbola, a Nigerian-American artist, explores complexities of identity with readymade media that have dynamic cultural meanings. In his Camouflage series, the media are durags, cloths that are used to maintain Black hair. Selecting and sewing the
Textiles contain very personal and embodied histories. It’s a material that is both intimate and immense.”
– Paolo Arao
durags together, the artist creates large-scale fields of saturated color and repeated shapes; the tie strings invoke paint drips or brushwork. The dialogue with canonical abstract painting is charged by the materials, and the artist cites the works’ engagement with respectability, consumption and the commodification of Black cultural practices. As he has been quoted in an interview with Sebastian Jean, “with the advent of Black culture, there is this demonization of the same things being idolized…This notion of Black culture being subjected to the capitalist structure is a theme I’m continuing to explore.”(3) The artist also continues to investigate the physical materiality of his medium in works of varying scale, textures and colors, and in hanging or draping formats.
Some artists are drawn to the tactile appeal of various fibers and yarns. Their works may summon the viewer’s sense of touch, or foreground the handwork involved in their making. Mary Tooley Parker writes that her textile form, hook rugs, offers “a strong connection not only to the fibers running through my fingertips, but also to the women who used this medium and other fiber mediums to express themselves during difficult times.” Parker is among the artists who see their work in relation to communities of creative handwork past and present.
Jill Parry’s striking fabric portrait was developed from a painting with a live sitter. The social character of this work may be seen in its effects as a portrait, a representation that brings the viewer and the subject into a social exchange. The collaged fabric materials and technique emphasize the work’s flat surface with its lively shifts of pattern, shape and texture. Despite (and through) the discontinuities of these media, the picture reads as a likeness that conveys the subject’s “self.”
A number of artists in the exhibition are committed to recovering forgotten or erased stories, narratives or historical memory. They create works that testify
to past and continuing legacies, and to experiences and lives that matter. Hoodies, by quiltmaker Sylvia Hernandez, includes hand appliqué by students from the El Puente Academy of Peace and Justice in Brooklyn. The work represents thirty people of color who were shot by police. This work, and Hernandez’s Black Lives Matter quilt, appeared in a 2020-2021 exhibition initiative in Minneapolis titled We Are the Story. The project was described by its organizers as “a visual response to racism in America following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.” (4)
Lina Puerta’s contributions to the exhibition belong to the Latinx Farmworkers in the U.S series of tapestries and portraits. These handmade-paper paintings focus on “the extreme physical labor and hardship demanded by exploitative industrial agricultural systems, contrasted against the poetic life cycle of the crops themselves,” in the artist’s words. The artist embeds the paper with an array of repurposed, fragmented fibers and fabrics that may include discarded food wrapping, Aztec or Mayan textiles, feathers and jewelry. The larger tapestries are each devoted to a particular crop and cite information on the exploitation and onerous conditions the workers endure. The smaller portraits adopt a frontal format in which individual workers look out from the crops and address the viewer face to face.
Adebunmi Gbadebo chooses materials that resonate with the experiences and histories of people of the African diaspora. She writes, “My material is human hair from people of the African diaspora. Our hair is so connected to our culture, politics and history… It is history and DNA.” (5) In recent works, the artist explores histories of land, commodities, and the forced labor and exploited skills and knowledge of enslaved people. These projects developed from her research into former plantations in South Carolina to which she traces her maternal ancestry. The artist has stated, “I’m confronting my relationship with the color blue, indigo, and materials cotton and rice in the context
I make story quilts so that our stories will not be forgotten.”
-Sylvia Hernandez
of their origins as commodities born of violence and enslavement.”(6)
Kate Hamilton’s monumental sculptures of clothing conjure bodies and voices from the past that speak to the present. The enduring works and words of women are persistent themes. Words Untie Knots displays statements from suffragettes and other feminists on the hanging ties of a blouse and encourages viewers to respond with their own words and actions. Hamilton describes the effect of enlarging and replicating a shaker bonnet with modern materials and techniques in Humble Monument: “To my 21st-century eyes, the original shape immediately signified gender and submission. Now it hovers, a giantess. Submissive? Not so much.”
Stan Squirewell’s intensely patterned mixed-media collages endow layers of splendor, color and complex characterization to historical photographs of people whose names and lives are not known to the viewer. The artist states, “The history I was taught did not have my ancestry represented.…. I look at my work
as almost remixing, crate-digging, but my crates are museums, private collections and historical narratives. I remix my pieces according to my own way of writing history.” The artist combines painting, photography, collage, sculpture and a ritualized process in his layering of the works’ components.
Artists may envision a more just, equitable or sustainable world. Natalya Khorover’s installation, created for ArtsWestchester’s sculpture court, offers visitors a seductive environment of flora, fauna and flowing water made entirely from repurposed single-use plastic items. The artist invited community contributors to donate plastic bags and other singleuse products, and to participate in the transformation of these items into an abundance of colorful, semitransparent flowers. To create the elements of her installation, Khorover led workshop participants in various handmaking techniques and shared strategies
and tactics for creative reuse in daily life. Ruby Chishti, a Pakistani artist based in New York, has cited her childhood experiences of patriarchy and her early discovery of dollmaking as formative components of her creative work. Trauma and mortality are human conditions that inhabit her figural and architectural sculptures and installations, which often seem haunted by political and social violence. She writes of her aim to prompt viewers’ empathy. In Free Hugs, groups of female figures enact this humane response as they meet in a deep embrace, a mutual acknowledgment of unspecified losses. In the artist’s words, her figures enact “the touch of proximity and togetherness, while challenging the heroics of masculinity.”(7)
Ancestorship and Black womanhood are overarching
the talents of artists within the Gandhi ashram world into dialogue with works by contemporary international artists. Sinift writes, “We as artists are trying to help envision a world in which the degrees of separation between village farmers and Khadi spinners and the worlds of museums and higher education are bridged, and we share each other’s worlds as having equal value. That is what makes the project beautiful.”(8)
themes in the vibrant textile compositions of Simone Elizabeth Saunders. In She Reveals, the artist creates a garden world in which a luminous figure presides over a visionary environment. The work is part of the Ancestral Bodies series, in which Saunders honors the contributions of her ancestors and develops forms and techniques to extol their continued presence. She writes: “The bodies illuminate from the textile as though constellations were captured from within. In creating the bodies this way, I am honoring my ancestors, acknowledging that they are with the stars.”
Beacon-based artist Aaron Sinift works with Gandhian service ashrams in India on the 5 Year Plan Project, producing a series of handmade artists’ books printed on homespun and handwoven khadi cloth. Homespun khadi cloth was the cornerstone of Gandhi’s project of self-sufficiency. The pages of the books bring the compelling, popular traditions of South Asian art and
(1) A few examples among many include: Pamela A. Parmal, Jennifer M. Swope, Lauren D. Whitley and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, exh. cat (Boston: Museum of Fine Art), 2021; Erica Warren (editor, contributor) with contributors Michèle Wije, Jordan Carter, Isabella Ko and Bisa Butler, Bisa Butler, Portraits, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago), 2021; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Textile and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2017; Kristy Robertson and Lisa Vinebaum (2016) Crafting Community, TEXTILE, 14:1, 2-13, DOI: 10.1080/14759756.2016.1084794; Akron Art Museum, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, exh. cat., (Akron: Akron Museum of Art), 2012; and Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
(2) See Julia Norton, Backbone/Natalie Baxter, 2022, https://www.nataliebaxter. com/backbone. Accessed 9.2.2022
(3) Interview in Office Magazine of 2020, cited and discussed by Havana Xeros, “Anthony Akinbola: Gun Violence, Durags and Palm Oil Consumption,” ArtsHelp. com, 2022, www.artshelp.com/anthony-akinbola/. See also https://madmuseum. org/learn/anthony-akinbola. Accessed 8.14.2022.
(4) Carolyn L. Mazloomi, We Are the Story: A Visual Response to Racism, a Collaboration Between Textile Center (Minneapolis) and Women of Color Quilters Network, exh. cat. (West Chester OH: Paper Moon Publishing), 2021; textilecentermn.org/wearethestory/; textilecentermn.org/sacredinvocationsvirtualexhibition/
(5) Claire Oliver Gallery, “Adebunmi Gbadebo,” https://www.claireoliver.com/ artists/36-adebunmi-gbadebo/overview/.
(6) Gabrielle Leung, “Adebunmi Gbadebo’s ‘Portraits’ Grapple with Historical Legacy of Slavery,” hypebeast.com/2020/9/adebunmi-gbadebo-claire-olivergallery-a-dilemma-of-inheritance-exhibition
(7) “Meet Ruby Chishti, Visual Artist,” 2021 Shoutoutmiami.com/meetruby-chishti-visual-artist, and Kanwal Syed, “Ruby Chishti’s “Free Hugs”: Claiming Spaces Through Utopian Feminist Futures,” 2019, papers.iafor.org/ submission51177. Accessed 8.21.2022.
(8) Ishaan Orora, “New Exhibition Offers Glimpse into Mahatma Gandhi’s Philosophy, Ongoing Legacy,” August 6, 2022, news9live.com/art-culture/ now-witness-mahatma-gandhis-swadeshi-world-at-national-gandhimuseum-187686?. Accessed 8.29.2022.
Art for earth’s sake addresses plastic pollution, overconsumption and the urban environment. I strive to use materials that would be condemned to landfill, and use techniques of stitching and sewing to bring my artwork to life.”
–Natalya Khorover
The Social Fabric was curated by Amy Kurlander and organized by the Public Programs Department of ArtsWestchester. We thank Amy for her vision and research on this project. The exhibition and its commissioned works of art were made possible thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts’s Grants for Arts Projects program. We thank the ArtsWestchester Board of Directors, ArtsWestchester Arts Committee, Claire Oliver Gallery, NY, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, NY for their support and collaboration on this project.
This exhibition is made possible in part thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
ArtsWestchester’s mission is to create an equitable, vibrant and sustainable Westchester County in which the arts are integral to and integrated into every facet of life.
The arts are for everyone, amplifying the multi-ethnic and culturally diverse voices within our community. The arts offer opportunities for advancement and personal growth. The arts are a catalyst for systemic change, economic development, and community empowerment. The arts create life-affirming experiences, celebrating differences and finding shared values.
ArtsWestchester supports the arts in Westchester through leadership, funding, programming, education, advocacy, audience cultivation and professional development. We work to ensure the accessibility and diversity of the arts, at every level for every resident and visitor in Westchester County.
As ArtsWestchester looks to the future, and in recognition of the current needs of the communities we serve, we reaffirm and further commit to advancing social justice through our policies and practices. We acknowledge that this work is ongoing and commit to enacting a strategic vision that is proactive and responsive in shaping a just, fair, and equitable Westchester.
For more information about ArtsWestchester, please visit: artsw.org
Anthony Akinbola was born in Missouri and raised between Missouri and Nigeria. He uses readymade objects of cultural significance to explore intricacies of identity, contemporary cultural practices and connections between Africa and America. In his series of compositions made from durags, the artist raises questions about the commodification and consumption of Black culture in the contexts of global capitalism and the experiences of Black communities.
My sewn paintings are rooted in geometric abstraction. I am expanding upon and mending this lineage of painting through the use of textiles, making artwork that explores the elastic nature of queerness and honors my Filipino heritage.
Color, pattern and materiality are formally and conceptually interwoven. I use hand-dyed and commercial fabrics, re-purposed clothing and weathered canvas. The works resemble flags or quilts and they often carry physical traces of the bodies that wore them. As a found object, I love that textiles contain very personal and embodied histories. It is a material that we can all relate to. It’s a material that is both intimate and immense.
Color is vital to my work. I carry color within me. My relationship to color is not passive. It is political; it is personal; it is emotional; it is felt; and it is in my very being.
My use of color and pattern is deeply connected to beliefs that are rooted in the rich textile traditions of the Philippines. Colors and pattern are often imbued with a spiritual, healing and protective power. The more dizzying the pattern and the more colorful the textile, the more protection it offers to its wearer in warding off evil spirits. This faith (or superstition) in the power of color and pattern is not only fascinating, it is an essential source of inspiration and gives vitality to my work.
Drawing on knowledge and skills passed down through generations of family quilters, I create approachable work that playfully pushes controversial issues that have become social and political points of division. Working with a variety of mixed media and found objects, but predominantly with fabric, my work consists of sculptures and quilted wall hangings.
A collection of stuffed caricatures of assault weapons, rendered in flamboyant fabrics, bloated versions of the American flag, and online comments aimed at my gender, sexuality and mental health, appliqued onto protest banners, are some examples of my work that mirrors our political climate.
Large oversized housecoats made from found quilts and airbrushed t-shirts, cheeky state fair show ribbons, and quilts made from discarded domestic textiles are more recent works exploring gender and labor.
Conceptually, my work is narrative, pulling inspiration from my lived experience as well as from broader observations of society and culture. I reference craft without making it the focal point of the work, using its nostalgic powers, combined with humor, to subvert recognizable objects of Americana into something familiar in shape alone.
“My lifelong fascination with the tenacious and fragile nature of our own existence has inspired me to reinvent sculptural forms through a variety of materials that forge an impression of the collective human experience of love, loss and being human. My work explores gender disparities as a lived experience.
The creative process highlights the intangible, emotional value I see in discarded clothing; each piece holds a vast context and a witness of lives ripped and rebuilt. Recycling is central to my art practice which is quite similar to what is evident in nature all around us.
Besides the aesthetic appeal I want my work to transcend and evoke empathy. My recent work provides an urgent template for conversation… My figured garments embody the touch of proximity and togetherness, while challenging the heroics of masculinity and confidence of patriarchy.”
Excerpted from Shoutout Miami, “Meet Ruby Chishti | Visual Artist,” May 12, 2021, https://shoutoutmiami.com/ meet-ruby-chishti-visual-artist/.
My practice began out of a rejection of traditional art materials—paint, canvas, marble—because of their association with historical narratives that often exclude people who look like me.
“Adebunmi Gbadebo uses culturally imbued materials to investigate complexities between land and memory in the American South. Centering on deeply resonant materials such as indigo dye, soil hand-dug from plantations and human Black hair collected throughout the diaspora, the artist has formed a distinct visual idiom. The resulting works tend with care the stories of ancestors, families and individuals either long overlooked or too closely surveilled.”
From Adebunmi Gbadebo Studio, “About,” https://adebunmi.carbonmade.com/about.
I strongly believe in the importance of women’s work that has been long undervalued. Primarily, I employ the craft of patternmaking and sewn construction to create flexible forms that are recognizable clothing shapes, but have left garment function far behind. I re-imagine a familiar object by using unexpected materials and/or by altering the scale significantly. This allows us to see anew these objects that we live in and with.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the inclusion of written language. I think it began during the isolation of the pandemic, and amid the extreme misogyny that bloomed in the Trump presidency years. I started to be bothered by the muteness of my sculpture. I was full of thoughts that came out in words, so one day I stopped, threaded fabric through a typewriter and began to type.
I work alone in my studio, but find that I’m especially interested in presenting work that can be interactive, permitting touch and movement. Sometimes I install work in a gallery or museum or alternative space; sometimes it is used as part of a performance presentation. Words Untie Knots goes a little further, inviting interaction and performative participation. It’s an ongoing experiment. Wherever the work is installed, I want to wake the imagination of viewers. I want to encourage surprise, thought and reconsideration.
“I create story quilts to continue to pass the story on to others. These quilts are created in my heart and soul before I make them visible. There are so many hateful, hurtful and heartbreaking things happening in the world that I feel a need to make pieces that might show them in a beautiful, heartfelt way to take some of the ugliness away for a minute. I pray for a time that I might make only happy quilts.”
Sylvia Hernandez is a celebrated master quilter whose works address community and human right issues. She is currently the president of the Quilters of Color Network of NYC. She teaches at El Puente Academy of Peace and Justice and has worked with AgitArte, a social justice group that has led community educational and art programs in marginalized communities.
From Textile Center (Minneapolis), “Sacred Invocations. Quilts by Sylvia Hernandez, Brooklyn, NY,” https://textilecentermn.org/sacredinvocations-virtualexhibition/.
Arcadia Lost (aka Turning Up the Heat), is an installation sewn and assembled from single-use plastic with the help of the local and world-wide community. Single-use plastic is one of the most serious polluters of our environment, and one of the biggest contributors to climate change. An artful installation made from such a material is an invitation for the viewing public to see the message writ large.
At first glance, the installation will look like a fun, brightly colored explosion of exotic flowers, draping vines and flowing brook. As viewers walk inside for a closer look, they realize the material that the art is created from is the exact material that contributes to the pollution of our planet. The whimsical appearance of the installation belies the importance of the message, echoing the contradictions people encounter when weighing convenience with recycling and proper waste disposal.
I am a textile maker. My work focuses on realistic interpretations of people and nature, whether from memories, local history or visual images. Incorporated into my work are new and recycled wool, cotton and silk fabric, fleece, handspun yarn, silk fiber, metallic fibers, film ribbon, sari ribbon and more. I also use both natural and synthetic dyes to create colors as needed.
Textile art is received by the viewer in a different way than fine art, and there is science showing that a different part of the brain is stimulated when viewing a textile. It appeals to the senses, especially touch, and gives a feeling of warmth and familiarity before the brain even registers the visual image. Working in the simple medium of rug hooking affords me a strong connection not only to the fibers running through my fingertips, but also to the women who used this medium and other fiber mediums to express themselves during difficult times and with limited materials. Using this medium as a creative expression of my 21st century experience, I carry this tradition into the contemporary art world by taking the work off the floor to be viewed as art.
These Fiber Portraits are a culmination of my work as a figure and portrait painter and a fiber artist. My process was to make a painting directly from life, and then to depict the painting using fiber scraps and yarns. My intention was to recreate the expressive, painterly quality of the paint with fabric. I found that the qualities of the fabrics embodied the range of textures and colors of paint, from heavy texture to light transparencies to lines made by torn fabrics and yarn. Starting with raw canvas stretched on a frame, I drew the outlines. Then by sewing, weaving, fusing and layering the fabrics into the canvas, I molded the features. I modelled the dimensionality by using light and textured pieces to come forward while creating washes with the transparent fabrics for shading. Frayed edges were used to soften edges and make texture, very much like painting. This interplay of materials and processes allows for a rich textural quality of the surface to come through, which is at the heart of my work, be it in painting or fiber. The fabric pieces I used are remnants from my sewing classes, residencies in schools and fiber arts projects. As such, these pieces have an element of history in them for me.
My work draws from my experience as a Colombian-American artist, examining the relationship between nature and the humanmade, and engaging themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge.
In 2016, through an artist residency with Dieu Donné, I began experimenting with handmade paper-making, developing a way of layering pigmented paper pulp with various patterned and textured fabrics, and then sculpting the surface with water and stencils. Utilizing these techniques, I created the Latinx Farmworkers in the US Tapestries Series, which highlighted the extreme physical labor and hardship demanded by exploitative industrial agricultural systems, contrasted against the poetic life cycle of the crops themselves. This naturally evolved into the Willard Crops Series of paper collages. For this, I turned my focus to the crops which, like the workers who tended them, were subject to pesticides and chemical inputs to maximize profits. Imagining a solidarity between plants and workers, I pushed the sensual and joyous possibilities of the various materials’ forms to create vibrant vegetable portraits to honor the farmworkers for their unsung dedication to plant well-being.
Excerpted from Lina Puerta, “Statement,” https://www.linapuerta.net/statement/.
“The figures are rendered as ethereal and sentient beings. I tuft line-work with beige thread, outlining the bodies. I tuft line-work with beige thread outlining the bodies and then I fill with gold-flecked black thread. The bodies illuminate from the textile, as though constellations are captured from within. In creating the bodies this way, I am honoring my ancestors, acknowledging that they are with the stars. Everything they have given to this world, all past, present and future into one. Their struggles, their love, their bodies are now at one with the stars. We are imprints of our ancestors, learning and discovering through them to ourselves. We are impacted by histories; we are fragments of those who came before us. We are more than our bodies; we radiate an energy that is tethered to a lineage beyond comprehension. This is the foundation for my Ancestral Bodies series. Each textile captures a different message of light and love, and a connection to the stars... to our universe.”
https://www.simoneelizabethsaunders. com/blank-page/.
“Marginalized communities are often overlooked and omitted from history in general. The history I was taught did not have my ancestry represented. As a child of the hip-hop era, born in the ‘70s, growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I look at my work as almost remixing, cratedigging, but my crates are museums, private collections, and historical narratives. I remix my pieces according to my own way of writing history. The main thing I want the viewer to take away is to question what you think you know, what you’ve been told, and what you believe.”
[Cheaper to Keep ‘Em] examines power dynamics within relationships. It was inspired by Johnnie Taylor’s song “Cheaper to Keep Her.” From the gaze of the female’s face, the narrative from my vantage point speaks to the fact that women also contend with issues centered around their wealth, and having to make critical decisions to stay in failing relationships. I want to make clear the title is in reference to her keeping him.”
From Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, “Stan Squirewell,” https://www.claireoliver.com/artists/34stan-squirewell/overview/, and from the artist.
5 Year Plan is an experiment in Gandhian economics to introduce seva (service) into artist social practice. Our khadi artist books are collaborations of contemporary South Asian and other international artists, Gandhian service workers, cotton farmers, home spinners and khadi weavers. This is a no-profit/ no-loss project. We produce artist book editions made entirely of local homespunhandwoven khadi cloth, with each page featuring work by different artists. The project began in 2009 by Aaron Sinift with the mentorship of Mr. Vijay Kumar Handa and Mrs. Bina Handa of the Gandhi Hindustani Sahitya Sabha, New Delhi.
Gandhi believed in local self-sufficiency for India’s poorest and most economically vulnerable by providing meaningful employment through home spinning and weaving of khadi cloth. Today, about 5 million people in India sustain themselves through production of handloom cloth like the kind produced for these books. The vast majority are women supporting their families.
Seeds To Khadi is our current project to create an artist book edition grown from seeds. The book is a collective group portrait of organic cotton farming in the village of Umari, Maharashtra, India. About 33 artists have contributed work to create this varied, artistic portrait of a way of life in the present for millions of farmers in India.
