Sonya Clark, Pitchy Patchy, 1995, silk, cloth, wire (AC 2002.18) and Amalia Amaki, Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue #15, 1995, cyanotype on cotton (AC 2014.73), part of the installation ‘Interwoven,’ Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 2015.
Interwoven
MEAD ART MUSEUM, AMHERST COLLEGE, april 7 - may 31, 2015
This installation explores the interweaving of tradition, memory, and identity through works of art by four contemporary American artists of African and Afro-Caribbean descent: Amalia Amaki, Sonya Clark, Deborah Dancy, and Richard Yarde. Taking textiles as a material or conceptual point of departure, these artists link the fabric of self and society with histories of slavery, cotton production, and diverse textile traditions.
Cloth often evokes personal memory and embodied experience: threads spun and woven, fabrics worn and wrapped, fragments sewn and saved. Textiles also connect individual experience with broader cultural and historical narratives. As Sonya Clark explains, in her work, fibre-based materials enable her “to claim [her] place in the African textile continuum that was brought to the Western Hemisphere during transatlantic slavery and continually re-embodies itself in the African-American quilt-making tradition, African Caribbean carnivals, and the work of many contemporary artists.” Each of the artists in this installation powerfully examines how past and present, here and there, are necessarily entangled in an understanding of contemporary America.
