By Mattea Gernentz

Last October, I had the incredible opportunity to virtually attend “Holding Space: Bridging Fiber Art and Racial Identity,” an event organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.—featuring Shenequa Brooks, Suchitra Mattai, and Fabiola Jean-Louis. These talented women all engage meaningfully with fiber arts in order to explore diverse concepts of identity, heritage, and beauty.

Shenequa Brooks received a master’s degree in design from Fashion, Body, & Garment at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under the mentorship of Nick Cave. She is the founder of Weave Your Dreams Into Reality Studios LLC and is known for her fascinating primary medium: synthetic hair. Of her art, she expressed: “My new body [of work] speaks on the stages of grief. Weaving synthetic hair tells a story about an experience shared with the women in my life that I love and hold dear to me. Braiding, Bantu knotting, and plaiting represent the hairstyles I grew up with and celebrate ideas of sisterhood, womanhood, sacred space, intimacy, identity, and beauty.” Her ongoing series, Black & Gold, of which an image is included here, “explores the complexities of the black woman with a hint of gold signifying regalness she carries no matter how heavy the load may be to carry.”

Her latest solo exhibition Woven Narratives was displayed at Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, Missouri, and she has also exhibited her works in Performing Labor at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA, The Space We Grow Into at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, and Mane N’ Tail at The Luminary in St. Louis, MO.

Represented by K Contemporary, Suchitra Mattai is a visionary mixed-media artist with an interest in memory and reimagining historical narratives, challenging and deconstructing colonial history, and providing a voice to those who have been silenced. She enjoys repurposing vintage saris in her art, breathing new life into previously used materials and, in doing so, connecting women of the South Asian diaspora from around the globe. During the “Holding Space” event, she discussed how these garments experience an intimate relationship with their wearer, bearing scents of perfume or even stains of perspiration. Clothes begin to form an extension or expression of our very being.

Motivated by her own family’s history in Guyana and India, Suchitra’s art emphasizes migration, colonization, and indentured labor. Her ultimate aim is reconciliation and a reflection of community—her vivid compositions resemble the diversity, togetherness, and polyphonic nature of a communal gathering. Suchitra received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, and her work can be found in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Taylor Art Collection, and more.

Born in Haiti, Fabiola Jean-Louis grew up in Brooklyn, New York and attended the High School of Fashion Industries. Her artistic practice blossomed from photography into experimenting with costumes and paper sculptures. She views her work as a form of visual activism, and her interest in Afro-futurism pervades her artwork. One of her latest series, Rewriting History, began in 2016 and features historical gowns fashioned from paper, Polaroids, and painterly photographs; it opened as a solo exhibition at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago in 2018 and has since successfully travelled to other locations.

Jean-Louis’ use of paper is an intentional and charged choice; paper is itself the substance of currency as well as a type of currency in its own right. It has also largely been upon paper that statements on the rights and worth of human beings have been arbitrated and preserved—for example, the Three-fifths Compromise in U.S. history. With this medium, she surrounds Black women with Baroque opulence and imaginatively reframes historical trajectories. She also explores the theme of appearance versus reality, creating captivating and intricate gowns using only paper—suggesting things are rarely as they seem and calling into question the traditional frameworks and assumptions we carry and operate within concerning the world around us.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, the recent exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits has met great acclaim and just closed its successful run earlier this month. This is the first solo exhibition of Butler’s work. Born in New Jersey, Bisa Butler was artistically gifted from a young age and went on to complete a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Howard University, graduating Cum Laude. In an interview, Butler spoke of the impact of this time, describing creative exercises in which students would be given black canvases rather than white ones upon which to begin their work, provided with opportunities to illuminate what Blackness meant to them and how these images might manifest differently than much of the art historical canon. In addition to her specialty of painting, Butler also began experimenting with collage and textiles. It wasn’t until her master’s degree education at Montclair State University, however, that the stars that would spell the ascent of her career aligned: she enrolled in a fiber arts class and fell in love, able to connect her own artistic practice with that of her mother and grandmother. For Butler, art appears to be profoundly linked to inheritance, but she also senses a deep responsibility for artists to reflect the unique times in which they live. Butler has been open about her mission to portray an uplifting view of Black culture, joy, and dignity. As she has expressed it, she wants her beautiful, expressive quilts to ultimately say, “See what we can do.”

Butler was a finalist for the Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize in 2019, and one of her portraits was featured as the cover for Time Magazine’s “100 Women of the Year in 2020” issue.

The domains of textile and fiber art have long been dismissed as lesser or excessively feminine forms of art, but these exemplary women are producing striking work that supersedes the shallow bounds of these outmoded expectations. Their art valuably participates in ongoing conversations about decolonization, equality, memory, and reconciliation. I am not a fiber artist, nor a voice of authority in these areas of discussion, but merely someone attempting to listen well to these experiences and to honor, appreciate, and share the extraordinary work being produced by incredible artists such as Fabiola Jean-Louis, Bisa Butler, Suchitra Mattai, and Shenequa Brooks.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.