Guest Curated by:

Ashley Stull Meyers (Portland, OR)

Work by MARIE WATT | DIEDRICK BRACKENS | JOVENCIO DE LA PAZ | KATE NARTKER

KATE NARTKER, Waves, 2019 from Alabama Contemporary Art Center on Vimeo.

Fiber and weaving are ancient media, a formative component of human technology. Artists have woven their personal histories into all sorts of materials throughout time. Techniques developed in weaving, quilting, basketmaking, and embroidery serve as vehicles for narratives and meaning across a myriad of geographies, races and cultures. Today, contemporary artists are innovating the medium and materiality of fiber to all new ends.

Guest curated by Ashley Stull Meyers through the Alabama Contemporary Art Center’s new Guest Curator Program, If You Have Ghosts includes four artists who engage with contemporary fiber techniques (both physical and digital) to recall their familial and ancestral histories. According to Meyers, these “West Coast artists explore themes of Blackness, Queerness, Indigeneity, labor, and motherhood.” The artists reanimate “ghosts” through “labor intensive objects and videos, inspiring conversation about generational longing, frustration, humor, and joy” (Meyers). The exhibition will include a range of works from digital projections, freestanding sculpture, and wall hanging textiles (woven, hand dyed, and/or printed upon).

If You Have Ghosts will be on display for three months at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center. Artist Marie Watt’s work draws from history, biography, protofeminism, and Indigenous principles, and addresses the interaction of the arc of history with the intimacy of memory. Diedrick Brackens explores identity through textiles inspired by his childhood in Texas and various cultural methods of tapestry-making. Jovencio de la Paz makes woven, dyed, and stitch-worked pieces that comment on temporality. Kate Nartker is an internationally displayed artists whose works center on digital tools and textiles.

OPENING RECEPTION: JANUARY 10, 2020 @ 6PM

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: