Curatorial Projects: Liberation Textiles
Liberation Textiles: Our Social Fabric, Concord Art, Concord MA 2025, April 3 – May 11, 2025, Curated by Elizabeth Thach & Camilø Álvårez
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, August 1963
CURATORIAL ESSAY
Liberation Textiles: Our Social Fabric presents the work of thirty-four contemporary artists
who explore myriad aspects of freedom and what it means today, at a time that demands
an immediate urgency to revise both the ideas and ideals of freedom. It is a complicated
concept that does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum. The very act of making art is a
testament to human agency, so in a sense, all art bears witness to freedom. Pure freedom
is an abstract idea, and our experience of it is situational. We often understand it as a
direct result of experiencing its loss. When we are arrested for expressing political opinions,
we understand freedom of speech. When persecuted for religious, racial or sexual identity,
we understand a lack of personal freedom. When governments strip us of healthcare
autonomy, we understand a lack of bodily freedom. So, while this exhibition explores
freedom in the affirmative, the works also investigate the loss and want of freedom.
The small, intricately embroidered works of RAY MATERSON came into being against the
backdrop of incarceration. SONYA CLARK’s The Price references the horrific history of
human slavery with a wad of “bills” made of sugar cane fibers in the amount of $36,683,
the price that the artist would sell at slave auction in today’s dollars. But there are other
kinds of prisons. ERIN M. RILEY’s tapestry weaving Inaudible explores emotional trauma,
another form of confinement. NICK FAGAN’s Weak draws on the abstract expressionist
tradition but is crafted from sewn children’s sheets and repurposed moving blankets.
A patchwork of blobs elicits Rorschach inkblots and/or landscape elements, evoking an
emotionally charged internal landscape that hints at captivity. FELIX BEAUDRY’s knitted
stuffed heads have soulful, expressive eyes but are completely severed from a body, their
agency stripped away.
The commonplace experiences of powerlessness in the face of the human condition are
evident in MICHAEL C. THORPE’s Critical Contemplation. A comedic take on the
memento mori tradition, the quilted work features a skull wearing a banana peel: Humor
in the face of death is the ultimate expression of freedom. JAGDEEP RAINA’s work I Will
Dream of Peace offers a different interpretation of death. Incorporating traditional Punjabi
and Kashmiri images and techniques, Raina’s work references the pain and the trauma
of the immigrant’s life in exile from a native land and envisions peace and freedom in
death: “I will dream of peace. Take my ashes and spread them in the lake of light.”
YASMIN ARSHAD’s embroidery spells “HHAPPPPPPPPPPYY” repeatedly in different
colors of floss, like a mantra, or perhaps as evidence of something unfulfilled: the yearning
to be happy yet feeling thwarted by forces beyond one’s control. PAOLO ARAO resists the
social convention of the canvas rectangle and playfully puns on “No Wrong Angles” with
his title Know Wrong Angles, reminding us that knowledge gives us freedom.
We may understand freedom more strongly when we experience its loss, but how can
we as a society prevent such losses?
In exploring the various components of individual human freedom, we also seek collective strategies for resisting that which would subjugate
our spirit. An early example of textile resistance is the story of Penelope in Homer’s
Odyssey. After agreeing to remarry upon completion of her father-in-law’s burial shroud,
she weaves all day and then undoes her work by night, the ultimate stall, effectively
stopping time. There are heroic accounts of women knitting coded messages about troop
movements in plain sight during WWII. Craft is intimately known and yet the work and
labor of crafting is socially taken for granted, which positions it uniquely to recognize the
unsaid. PORTIA MUNSON has long explored the pervasiveness of cultural gender norms
and the dark side of subliminal messaging in advertising. Her altar-shaped installation
Blue Vanity is composed of blue feminine-coded figurines and disposable items marketing
cleanliness and water. By exposing the machinations of subliminal advertising and the
adaptability of marketing (advertising to women using the color blue, not pink), Munson
asks us, Can we be free if we are worshiping at the blue altar of vanity?
Developed over the course of human existence to create needed functional garments, fiber
work is slow and labor intensive. Crochet and knitting are based on repetitive actions
performed in a grid. Weaving is also grid based, composed of weft strands and warp
threads that come together to form a unified garment. SAMANTHA BITTMAN explores the
woven-grid structure as image. Stretched over canvas and selectively painted, her handwoven textiles accept the givens of the grid while also playfully subverting it. Along similar lines, TAYLOR DAVIS, HARRY ROSEMAN, JO SANDMAN, MICHELLE GRABNER, and
TOM STOCKER approach the material conditions of human existence and the physicality
of textiles with artistic subversion. While Davis lays a silver lamé bag full of sand against
the wall, Roseman playfully drapes plywood as if it were fabric; Sandman presses
painter’s linen with the massive force of the industrial press; and Grabner and Stocker
create visual fragments of fabric out of paint. All of these works exist in unique, liminal
places that force the viewer to re-evaluate assumptions and look with open eyes at/to the
world. Freedom requires that we pay attention.
And what are the collective implications of the social fabric that holds human lives
together to create a unified garment, weft and warp? We participate in elections, but we
also participate in economic systems, familial networks, and larger communities. While
these things constrain, they also support. In this vein, SAM FIELDS Cloth Collaborative
(DESTINY PALMER, LORETTA PARK, ROSIE RANAURO, KATHRYN REED, BECKETT
BRUEGGEMANN, STACY ARMAN, and COURTNEY STOCK) explores collective action by
bringing individual artists together in an educational working space that builds fellowship
and creates community. ELLEN LESPERANCE’s Celebration Sweater is a sweater made to
be shared and worn by people who have something they wish to celebrate. The sweater is
an art object and a symbol of individual celebration, but it allows the community to take
part in and collectively celebrate individual joy. SHINIQUE SMITH’s Chrysalis, a hanging
tangled coil made of fabric remnants, promises transformation and hope for something
new. NAPOLEON JONES-HENDERSON’s Decade of the Woman recalls a moment in
international history when the United Nations was seeking to call attention to women’s
rights. The yearning for transformative political change, while decades old, remains all too
relevant; and Jones-Henderson’s work reminds us that the labor to build a better world is
constant and unceasing.
Deliberate world-building requires open eyes looking both to the past and to the future.
Made of reconstructed felt and repurposed American flags, BRITTNI ANN HARVEY’s
textile sculptures are relics from a shared past that bear witness to what has been while
ushering us into a new reality. SUSAN METRICAN’s upholstered easel stands as a soft
and beckoning scaffold for something new. JULIA BLAND’s Blanket for Sharing evokes a
more generous and communal model. Communal life is a negotiation between individual
freedom and the needs of the social fabric that supports and makes individual freedom
possible. SHEILA PEPE’s crocheted Patience reminds us that world-building is a long
game. ELIZABETH THACH’s tightly crocheted work imagines a world where “mind”
triumphs over matter, and colorful bits of chaos and confusion coalesce into order
and meaning. The title, Mind/contemplative Life, references medieval aesthetic theory
where the appreciation of beauty is a step on the path towards spiritual enlightenment.
JEFFREY GIBSON’s Time Capsule (Dave Rowland’s Skateboard) is a collaboration with
Dave Rowlands, who Gibson encountered skating in the Pinewoods Reservation in South
Dakota almost a decade ago. Rowlands was nineteen years old and had already lived a
hard life, but Gibson was struck by his incredible optimism. An actual skateboard that
has been encased in rawhide and painted red, white and blue, the work seeks to preserve
this feeling of a young man’s optimism about the future, for himself and for his people.
And lastly, ANDY LI’s My House is an embroidered nylon canvas. One side reads “I trust
you with my house of cards and know you won’t let me fall appart,” while the other side
depicts a red and white tower of cards. A red, white, and blue composition poignantly
speaks to the uncertainties of our current political moment and affirms our underlying
interconnectedness. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
—-Elizabeth Thach and Camilø Álvårez
Exhibiting Artists
Paolo Arao
Yasmin Arshad
Felix Beaudry
Samantha Bittman
Julia Bland
Sonya Clark
Taylor Davis
Nick Fagan
Sam Fields Cloth Collaborative
Stacy Arman
Beckett Brueggemann
Destiny Palmer
Loretta Park
Rosie Ranauro
Kathryn Reed
Courtney Stock
Jeffrey Gibson
Michelle Grabner
Brittni Ann Harvey
Napoleon Jones-Henderson
Ellen Lesperance
Andy Li
Ray Materson
Susan Metrican
Portia Munson
Sheila Pepe
Jagdeep Raina
Erin M. Riley
Harry Roseman
Jo Sandman
Shinique Smith
Tom Stocker
Elizabeth Thach
Michael C. Thorpe