Texan artist Diedrick Brackens weaves black history into his tapestries:
, which the New Orleans Museum of Art has acquired, has great tension: Two dark figures appear entangled with white ones in what could be a romantic or a violent interaction. The palette is darker: a slate black sky set off by a bright moon with catfish, again, swimming in the water below.“I’ve been thinking about catfish for a while, relative to Southern identity and heritage—how much they’re in the landscape and food.
Brackens’s catfish offer a way of updating motifs from Renaissance tapestries, which generally feature more stately animals like horses or unicorns. But that’s far from his only historical reference, as he works to combine different cultural traditions, including the stripes associated with African weavings, especially kente cloth, and the improvised patterning of American crazy quilts.
Brackens uses both commercial and natural dyes for his tapestries—Lipton black tea is a favorite. “It’s connected for me to being black, queer, and Southern. In Southern slang, ‘tea’ is another way to talk about gossip. ‘Come over, what’s the tea?’ ‘Spill the tea.’ ” His choice of cotton, too, is loaded, because of “its relationship to slavery—it being a king crop in the South and in Texas.
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