For the New York edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, De Buck Gallery presents a dual-artist presentation, highlighting the quilting practices of Tina Williams Brewer and Stephen Towns. The work will be on view from May 17-23, with a VIP Preview May 17-18. The fair will be globally accessible on 1-54 Online, powered by Christie’s as well as in De Buck Gallery’s Online Viewing Room.
Tina Williams Brewer’s powerful textile pieces explore history and generational healing through spirituality and a celebration of African American culture. Williams Brewer, who began quilting in the early 1980s, considers each piece to be a story quilt which she layers with multimedia elements including photo transfers, print-making, beading, and intricate stitch-work in an intuitive creative process that she believes is guided by the forces of her ancestors. Each unique piece is also charged with symbolism, as Williams Brewer utilizes iconography, colors and materials that reference African history, folklore and spirituality.
Williams Brewer is also deeply inspired by motion, dance, and performance. This lyrical selection of quilts includes two pieces from her “Diaspora Series,” which investigate the migration patterns of the African diaspora through medallion compositions layered with imagery of ocean currents. Williams Brewer’s quilts often examine motion as a broader symbol for the ebb and flow of life, but the “Diaspora Series” in particular looks at the motion of water in connection to the history of human migration.
A standout piece in the booth is I Come From The Root, Over Yonder (2017) which will be featured in 1-54’s special exhibition Knotted Ties, on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza from May 15-26 in tandem with the online fair.“Drawing together the works of female artists using textiles, Knotted Ties contemplates the pluralism of the medium as well as narratives portrayed and expressed through fabric and thread,” according to a statement by 1-54.
In conversation with Williams Brewer, De Buck Gallery is thrilled to share an intimate selection of Stephen Towns’ quilts from his most recent body of fiber work, A Songbook Remembered. As the artist looks forward to his upcoming solo exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in 2022, the gallery takes a look back at the origin of Towns’ quilting practice.
This booth highlights four exquisite works that harken back to the artist’s first ever quilt piece, Birth of a Nation. Created in 2014 in dedication to his sister, Birth of a Nation is a striking homage to Black women that was featured in “Rumination and a Reckoning,” his 2018 solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
In these current works, Towns continues to honor the legacy of Black women, depicting four narratives that celebrate women as liberators, mothers, creators, and protectors. Intricate beadwork and hand-stitched textural fabrics bring these important stories to life.
This selection of Towns’ quilts explore themes of rebuilding amidst destruction, most embodied in Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho (2020). The quilts also explore history and spirituality, through the dynamic imagery of Go Down Moses (2020), Towns’ portrait of Harriet Tubman and Mary Had a Baby (2020), a touching reimagining of the Madonna and child narrative.
Ancestral music is at the heart of Towns’ series A Songbook Remembered, which was created in 2020 and is drawn directly from the poetry of African American spirituals. This powerful work also represents a deeply personal and emotional evolution within Towns’ quilting practice, as he turned to both spiritual music and back to the process of quilting as acts of comfort during the uncertainty of COVID-19. Towns’ intricate stitch-work is guided by songs of joy, hope, resilience, and protest and the creative process itself functioned, for the artist, as an act of remaining present in a time of chaos.
