Curatorial + Public Education
Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South
Step into the world of quilting with Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, on view November 16, 2024 – April 13, 2025. Featuring over 50 handmade quilts from MMA’s permanent collection, alongside several quilts and fieldwork collected by renowned photo-documentarian Roland L. Freeman, this exhibition explores how Black, Southern material culture is manifested through quilts and Black quilters’ lived experiences.
Curator Dr. Sharbreon Plummer combines thorough research, innovative interpretation, and community engagement to form a cohesive, experiential study of American art through a Black feminist lens. In a time where interest in Black quilt traditions ebb and flow, Of Salt and Spirit asks: how we champion those who have remained rooted in their purpose and significance? This show facilitates a conversation about the dynamism of the South, how we honor place and preserve the past, present and future.
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Select Press
9.5.2024 | NY Times
9.10.2024 | Art Daily
10.22.2024 | NY Times
11.10.24 | Wall Street Journal
11.25.2024 | Cultured Magazine
Elle Magazine,November Issue: P. 40
12.18.2024 | MS Free Press
The People’s Quilting Bee
The People’s Quilting Bee is an emergent project developed by Drs. Sharbreon Plummer and Jess Bailey. This project honors and amplifies communally engaged quilt history as integral to quilting today while further unraveling how quilts have been tethered to a problematic Americana aesthetic. The current lecture series and online quilting circle launches Fall 2023. Guests will share their knowledge and experience of topics that are integral to how we understand quilting in the past and in our present such as through a deeper consideration of materials, diaspora, indigenous knowledge, and queering quilt legacies. Participants will leave with a renewed understanding of both the diversity and vitality of quilt histories in passing down artistic traditions.
Learn more here.
Stitch x Stitch
Stitch x Stitch is a project situated within a long historical conversation between quilting and social justice. Textile artists have long engaged with quilting and community crafting practices to advocate for the abolition of criminalization and incarceration. Abolitionist quilters have used imagery and embroidered text, as a means of swaying public opinion and troubling state level policies that promote notions of “order and justice” through criminalization. Through politically charged work, artists have long highlighted the intersection of racial capitalism and trauma and the disproportionate impact of police violence, criminalization and incarceration on communities of color. We seek to explore how quilting can serve as an embodied, liberatory practice and the role it plays in facilitating new forms of liberation. We also wish to interrogate definitions of "healing," both productive and problematic, and its intersections with quilting and work of the hand.
The inaugural convening was held July 2022 along with a subsequent exhibition through August 2022 at Weinberg Newton Gallery.
Mirrored Migration
Mirrored Migrations is a conversation about the national and global influences of the South on contemporary Black Womanhood. Featured artists LaToya M. Hobbs (Arkansas), Lovie Olivia (Texas), Jessica Strahan (Louisiana) combine their personal, multifaceted journeys of womanhood and perspectives of the world with reflecting on the traditions, communities and magic that exists within the place(s) they call home. Plummer brings together these artists to meditate on the South as a vessel, which she describes as “a womb filled with its comforts and complexities. The passage through which our ancestors fought and endured to protect their lives and legacies.” The work of these artists reflects stories of survival and preservation often lost in the folds of history.
Artistic
Manifesto for An Embodied Practice
In a world where the bodies, stories and likenesses of Black women are repeatedly exploited, manipulated and left vulnerable, I have found myself repeatedly questioning how to create moments and spaces that prioritize safety, restoration, solace and ancestrally informed care. This response came at a time in my practice where I sought to deepen my exploration of how we could be represented through less literal means. Manifesto for an Embodied Practice was created as an arts-based research accompaniment to my dissertation, Haptic Memory, which centered on Black women’s creative work in fiber and textiles and my development of a Black feminist material culture theoretical framework.
Divest & Take Care
A Time For Action was an experimental interdisciplinary micro-festival running for six nights at the Blaffer Art Museum, confronting urgent political circumstances with an expansive performative language.
Divest and Take Care was developed as a rebellion against the harm and white supremacist ideologies upheld by the nonprofit industrial complex. As an artist and arts worker, I found it necessary to cultivate a space during the pandemic where we could collective engage in divesting from systems that don’t serve us, while simultaneously deciding how we take care of ourselves and one another. This personal dedication was then activated by the act of burning each declaration and the reclamation of power.
Reminiscence.
Reminiscence is a dedication to the Black working class that created homes where they found them. The foremothers/fathers that taught us how to craft community, no matter how displacement shape shifts.
Reminiscence was the culminating experience of a residency at Rogers Art Loft (Las Vegas).
