The University Art Gallery presents Allegiance, an exhibition of complex and beautiful woven textiles.
The University Art Gallery presents Allegiance, a quiet and intimate exhibition of complex and beautiful woven textiles by Los Angeles-based artist Diedrick Brackens, on view from Oct. 25 through Dec. 13, 2019.
Diedrick Brackens will speak about his work at 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 8, in Convocation Hall. A reception will follow.
In Allegiance, Brackens plays with our expectations and associations, turning symbols, lyrics, and materials to new purposes. He refashions American and Confederate flags, he quotes and recasts the lyrics to the minstrel song “Dixie” and to the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy,” he makes the language of advertising both sentimental and subversive, and he—an African American whose antecedents picked cotton in Texas—self-consciously transforms that fraught material into beautiful textiles.
Richly allusive, many of the pieces on view in Allegiance meditate on flags, their uses and their dense networks of associations (Americana, heartland, heritage, freedom). The symbolism of flags is disrupted, teased, and softened, and these abstracted flags are seen as if through a veil. (Page image: "how to return" courtesy of Various Small Fires Los Angeles/Seoul and Erin Elizabeth Adams)
Brackens was awarded the prestigious Joyce Alexander Wein Prize by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2018, an award honoring individual African American artists who demonstrate great innovation, promise and creativity.
