Threading Truths: Memory, Power, and the Fabric of Resistance

The Little Things captures an intimate domestic moment through Billie Zangewa’s signature hand-stitched silk collage technique. The work reflects her ongoing exploration of domestic life, self-care, and gendered labor, transforming the everyday into a radiant meditation on care, intimacy, and vulnerability. Rooted in her broader practice, Zangewa’s compositions confront the historical objectification of the Black female body while exploring identity, motherhood, and personal relationships. Having begun her career in fashion and advertising, she brings technical mastery to collages that merge craft and narrative, elevating quotidian scenes into spaces of reflection and subtle power. Zangewa’s work has been recognized through solo exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe (2023), John Hansard Gallery (2023), Brighton CCA (2023), and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2021). Her silk collages are held in major collections including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, MoAD, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

In Pimba SEMOISI III, Remy Jungerman deepens his dialogue with textile traditions as conduits for memory, identity, and spirituality. Made with cotton textile and kaolin clay (pimba) on wood panel, the work reflects his exploration of Afro-Surinamese ritual practices while drawing visual parallels to Western modernist abstraction. Its geometric precision resonates with the quilting traditions of his Maroon heritage in Suriname, newly informed by his recent retreat with the master quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. There, Jungerman immersed himself in a lineage of improvisation, tactility, and storytelling through fabric— influences that subtly reverberate through the work’s layered surfaces and rhythmic patterns. Internationally celebrated, Jungerman represented the Netherlands at the 2019 Venice Biennale and has exhibited at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum and Brooklyn Museum, with works in collections such as the Stedelijk and the Hood Museum of Art.

Georgina Maxim has emerged as a leading voice in contemporary textile art with her intimate approach to material, where sewing, weaving, and mending become gestures of memory, kinship, and time. Grounded in the Shona practice of dhunge mutunge, the work embodies both care and labor, transforming fabric into a repository of personal and generational histories. Each stitch carries a rhythm of reflection, enacting a search for her mother and self, which the artist describes as “a good deed to the heart.” The result is a layered surface holding both the traces of making and the resonance of memory, offering a poignant meditation on love and loss. Maxim exhibited in the seminal group show Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican, which will travel to the Stedelijk Museum in September. 

In Master of the Eclipse (2024), Jordan Nassar expands his exploration of Palestinian identity, heritage, and imagined geographies through the meticulous practice of hand embroidery. Collaborating with craftswomen in Hebron, Nassar designs compositions that integrate traditional tatreez motifs, sections of which are embroidered by the women before he completes them with fictional terrains — rolling hills, vibrant skies, and distant horizons. These landscapes evoke a utopian vision of Palestine, shaped by longing and memory within the diaspora. Working with cotton on cotton rather than paint, Nassar blurs boundaries between craft and fine art, situating his practice within broader discourses of cultural transmission and authorship. His abstractions resolve into visionary landscapes, creating a tension between Western painterly sensibilities and non-Western textile traditions. Nassar’s work has been widely recognized with exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, ICA Boston, and the Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, and is held in major collections including the Whitney, Guggenheim, and MCA Chicago.

In African Bird Magic (Gabela Helmet Shrike), Yinka Shonibare continues his exploration of postcolonial identity, cultural hybridity, and environmental fragility through vibrant textiles. Crafted from patchwork, appliqué, quilting, hand-dyed silk, linen, cotton, and Dutch wax print, the work reflects his long-standing use of birds as metaphors for migration, transformation, and freedom. The Gabela Helmet Shrike, native to Angola and threatened by habitat loss, underscores the disproportionate impact of climate change on the Global South. By merging historical references with contemporary materials, Shonibare creates layered narratives that illuminate the interconnectedness of cultural histories and the precarity of the natural world. Internationally acclaimed, he has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, Tate Modern, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, with works in major collections including MoMA, the V&A, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.