Exhibit at Charlotte’s Mint Museum uses textiles to weave art and Black history

Diedrick Brackens has long worked with textiles, an interest first inspired at a young age when his grandmother taught him to sew.

Years later after college and with deeper research, the Los Angeles-based artist learned the medium had been with humanity since the beginning.

“But even more importantly to me, it’s a form Black folks have been expressing themselves in since arriving here,” Brackens, 33, said, referring to first Africans’ arrival to English-occupied North America in 1619.

Brackens’ skill with the technique of sewing and weaving is featured in his latest efforts at the Mint Museum Randolph and available for viewing now through Dec. 11. Called the “ark of bulrushes,” the exhibit combines textiles with visual storytelling through quilts, handwoven baskets, and more.

When viewers walk into the exhibit, one of the first images they may notice is a textile weaving of two black figures seemingly pulling at a gold chain.

The piece, titled “brotherhood is fragile,” is evocative but leaves viewers to pull their own meaning and story from it. It is a preview of how Brackens wants viewers to connect with the art pieces.

“I’ve always been interested in how we communicate without words,” he said. “Like the ways a simple gesture or a series of colors can start to tell a story, and that’s so wrapped up in textiles where we use shape, form, and color to communicate where we’re from, what we think about, and what’s important to us.”

The exhibit also displays the work of local and prominent North Carolina artists like Katrina Sánchez and Renee Cloud. Sánchez, based in Charlotte, is an interdisciplinary textile artist who was born in Panama. Cloud is a Charlotte native who combines text art and mixed media. Their work and others helps to flesh out the exhibit.

Brackens’ exhibit was first featured at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and its curator, Lauren R. O’Connell, also worked to build the narrative for Brackens at the Mint Museum.

“Oftentimes there’s areas of history that get told from one vantage point” O’Connell said. “Art has the ability to retell those stories with hindsight, and also to kind of remind people of these histories that are not always told or told correctly.”

Stories from the Bible, from Black history

Mythology and storytelling is at the heart of the exhibit.

Its title, “ark of bulrushes” draws from biblical history and the name of the basket that carried Moses as a baby. Further connecting to Black history in the United States, Moses also was the nickname of Harriet Tubman, the American abolitionist who rescued and saved enslaved people, helping them get to safe havens en route to the north in what became known as the Underground Railroad.

Threading these narratives was important in creating the exhibit, Brackens said. He knew he wanted to make reference to the Underground Railroad, freedom quilts, and coding.

“But then there’s all these ways the Bible functions as a source text, or a source code, for Black folks in thinking about their salvation and how to get through the hard times,” he said. “So there’s this historical linkage I was really trying to tap into.”

The themes and works in the exhibit were also expanded upon. Originally slated for the Mint Museum Uptown, it was moved to the Randolph location and it grew to include other work, says Jennifer Sudul Edwards, chief curator at the Mint Museum.

Brackens, his studio manager, and O’Connell also mined the Mint Museum’s storage to find other pieces that could further contextualize his work. The thread of storytelling also grew to include work focused on indigenous people as well.

“What started off as this focused show on Deidrick Brackens that was on loan from the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art became this larger consideration for Brackens as the most recent example of an extraordinary legacy of makers from this continent,” Edwards said.

Having the exhibit being presented in the South was also significant. Brackens is originally from Texas, where his family still resides. Southern culture and history has been influential on his work.

He said having the exhibit in Charlotte also was great because of the city’s craft history. The history of quilt-making and textiles spans centuries and cuts across ethnic groups and social class in North Carolina, according to the North Carolina Museum of History.

A 2021 study by the Wilson College of Textiles’ Zeis Textiles Extension reported North Carolina was home to 25% of all textile manufacturing employees in the U.S.

This type of familiarity with the craft helped to enhance the conversations around the work.

“People know what weaving is, they’ve seen a loom, they know someone who weaves, which is not a thing you always encounter everywhere else in the country” Brackens said. “So the reception of the work has been enriched by that.”

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This story was originally published August 16, 2022 at 6:00 AM.