Group Show: Heartstrings at MASS Gallery (Austin, Texas)

 

MASS Gallery is proud to announce Heartstrings, a group exhibition featuring seven dynamic artists who stitch history, culture, and materiality through the language of textiles and fibers. The show will run from March 8, 2025 to April 12, 2025, with an opening reception on March 8th at 7pm, featuring sounds by Do Not Disturb Collective at MASS Gallery, 705 Gunter Street, Austin, TX. 

Heartstrings delves into the intersection of art, craft, and cultural narrative, offering a rich exploration of memory, heritage, and material practice. This show is a survey of fiber-based techniques such as quilting, weaving, and embroidery influenced by practices dating back generations. These artists transform textiles and recycled materials into evocative works that challenge traditional delineations between art and craft. Through these diverse practices, these artists illuminate the emotional and historical threads that connect us across time and space. 

butler

All that you touch, You Change.

All that you Change, Changes you.

The only lasting truth Is Change.

— Parable of the Sower

Afro Pick as Leitmotif at Textile Arts Center

Jordan Horton and I enjoyed a conversation at Textile Arts Center on the appearance of combs and afro picks as leitmotif in my surface designs. We discussed how I reveal the spirit in the mundane to transform both the object and the viewer’s gaze. An audio recording is available upon request.

artisan and storyteller

“There is a long tradition of seeing in craft a meditative state of “no-mind,” as if the artisan were a hollow vessel into which ancient skills flowed, only to be poured out anew. Walter Benjamin envisioned the craftsman this way and placed him at the center of oral tradition on that basis. Storytelling is “an artisan form of communication,” as he put it; a weaver silently working in the workshop, plying a shuttle back and forth, seemed to Benjamin a perfect receptacle for ancient narratives: “The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm to work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.” 

Perpetual Motion by Glenn Adamson from Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft

draw, erase, draw, erase

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” recalls Joan Jonas. “A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase — memory erased.”

The Museum of Modern Art
JOAN JONAS: GOOD NIGHT GOOD MORNING

Surface Design Journal (Spring 2024) : Place, Materiality & Performing Black Interiority

“It didn’t take long to notice the absence of Black people in Denver, Colorado. We were greatly outnumbered in the Mile High City, but with my portrait and interview series “Black in Denver,” I found myself part of a subculture of Black people practicing introspection, finding solace in nature, healing and incorporating aspects of African American religious traditions into their lives. It was within these pockets of community where I was introduced to ancestral magic, meditation and yoga as a spiritual practice. The room where I practice these daily rituals and the objects found within the space are represented in my solo show, i found myself in the mountains.”

read more

narkita, don’t remove the kinks from your hair, remove them from your brain, 2023. Performance. Photo: University of Colorado Denver Experience Gallery

Published in Surface Design Journal

two-headed woman

in this garden
growing
following strict orders
following the Light
see the sensational
two-headed woman
one face turned outward
one face
swiveling slowly in

—"in this garden," Lucille Clifton