Bearing witness to what our foremothers gave us in “A Common Thread”
Adriana Chavez, Finding My Light. Image courtesy Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, photograph Mikayla Whitmore.
By Dr. Erika Gisela Abad
Ashanti McGee’s curated group exhibition A Common Thread at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art extends the understanding of the risk in bearing witness that Black, Chicana and Latina feminists claim when they/we tell our stories. While I was teaching WMST 473/673 Chicana/Latina Feminisms this past Spring, I consistently referenced the exhibit as modeling the testimonio praxis Chicana/Latina feminists critically discuss and practice across scholarship, blogs, and performances. As one of the first womxn of color centric exhibits in the museum’s documented history, it reflects narrative approaches to students’ rich cultural history at a time when citing federal and state policies shaping their/our evolving access to civil rights is becoming criminal across the United States.
Melisa Christ of Double Scoop writes, “[The exhibition] encompasses the idea of a continuous strand between the past and present, interweaving global diversity of cultures and peoples.” The thread woven across each artist’s print, video, and mixed media piece lies in the transience of their lives. The common threads between their artworks stress how often words are not enough to depict the love and responsibility of the intergenerational conversations of strength, struggle, and joy.
In the description of the exhibit, McGee explains that she “ha[d] noticed an increasing number of womxn who are picking up textiles to reconnect themselves to techniques they remember learning from their family members,” honoring the legacies of the domestic work they leave behind. A Common Thread speaks to this critically significant year of exhibits like Brent Holmes’s Behold a Pale Horse and Lance L. Smith’s In the Interest of Action, which each revisit ancestral stories to make visible the spiritual, material, and laborial practices of historically invisible Americans.
Centering womxn of color a year after the pre-quarantine 2020 Women of Color Arts Festival, McGee’s exhibit brings together a selection of artists (Las Vegas, Chicago, Washington D.C., Paris) who sew, weave, crochet, and otherwise piece together everyday items to tell distinct stories of their foremothers. Drawing from the archived material of their grandmother’s letters and dried flowers, Adriana Chavez’s Finding my Light brings her grandmother and her father’s labor in conversation with their critique of consumption. With the ongoing legacy of family separation, exasperated by the continued struggle to reunite mixed-status families separated at the border, Chavez’s work bridges the everyday remnants of plastic wrapping of food with the literal and symbolic references of the legacy their forebears left behind for them.
Chavez, in this way showcases the ongoing dialogue the Future Relics: Artifacts for a New World exhibit by the Gulch Collective [also at the Barrick] had started. Chavez’s Finding my Light asks the question, what light do our ancestors provide us and how do we recover it in light of what we cannot speak or name? Chavez’s mixed-media installation answers the question by reusing items that could be disposable and starting a conversation about what we weave and why we weave it. It is as fun as it is utilitarian in that Chavez, like most of their work, excavates the archive of what we leave behind, what we often discard, to produce new meaning. More than repurposing plastic containers for food storage, Chavez repurposes plastic food packaging and other textiles in order to weave a narrative of minimally considered histories. The used pattern template of clothing becomes an homage to her grandmother, something with which I can personally relate, recalling my own grandmother’s efforts to repurpose scraps to make me and my dolls’ clothing. Our foremothers worked with what they had, instilling us to do the same and yet, precisely because of what they taught us without meaning to, it is important to weave their lessons for a public that may often be tempted to look down at what it means to reuse. In transforming an intergenerational practice of repurposing what we have and rewriting its meaning, artists like Chavez, among others in the exhibit, pay homage to the artistry of their grit and resilience.
That homage isn’t always beautiful and layered. I remember when first crossing Ashley Hairston Doughty’s installation, N.O.Y.F.B., the racial divisiveness of this political moment became abundantly clear. The separate but equal cookies served on a plate on the table mirror the juxtaposition of making Juneteeth a national holiday all the while doing little to stop the state by state bans on critical race theory. The inherent division, while superficially may be perceived as a matter of taste and preference, highlights what Doughty articulates as an expression of being polite “when they don’t really mean it” (quoted from UNLV Instagram post 7/2). A neat and clean set table, it is upon closer inspection that the audience can see phrases like “BLESS YER HEART,” and “I’LL PRAY FOR YA!” framing little hearts on the patterned tablecloth. The invitation to tea and cookies functions as an invitation to reflect upon how we share our tables and our sweetness. How many poor or undocumented or people of color approach literal and metaphoric tables of goods reading between lines as finite and barely visible as the ones on Doughty’s piece? Recalling the experiences of the poor, immigrants, and people of color in this country, answering that question also requires reflecting on how many before us may not have seen that fine print until partaking meant sharing with others would be less possible.
And still, the purpose of the exhibit is to share. Tiffany Lin’s interactive exhibit invites place and an ongoing conversation about what we still have left to weave. the sky we built calls for participants to show up and document a part of themselves, a part of their present, embroidering the panels of the tapestry. In so doing, Lin’s piece invites the participants to consider ourselves as future foremothers with lessons of joy and care and fruitful work to leave behind. Considering what we leave behind, in conversation with the Gulch Collective’s Future Relics, it is unclear as to how much of what we leave behind will be understood by those who haven’t lived it. Still, as a student intern once told me, the emotional weight of the pieces in A Common Thread rests on what we, Las Vegas locals and transplants, grapple with at a time and in a society that has yet to know what to do with us. The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, in hosting exhibits like A Common Thread, make it clear. Let us tell our stories with the tools at our disposal, let us remember those who hoped for better in the generations to come as much as making sure the stories of overcoming adversity do not end with us.
Erika Gisela Abad, Ph.D, is a Queer Latina poet, born and raised in Chicago. Since August 2016, she has been a full-time Assistant Professor-in-Residence teaching for University of Nevada Las Vegas’s Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies Department. She interviewed artists Lance Smith and Brent Holmes regarding their earlier Barrick Museum exhibits for Art People Podcast. She was also recently featured in Seeing Color Podcast. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @prof_eabad.
A Common Thread runs from April 2 to July 24, 2021 at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas. Curated by Ashanti McGee, the exhibition features work by Adriana Chavez, Ashley Hairston Doughty, Yacine Tilala Fall, Noelle Garcia, Isar King, Tiffany Lin, Desire Moheb-Zandi, Lyssa Park, Ailene Pasco and features a poem by Southern Nevadan poet, Erica Vital-Lazare, and text written by Jocelyn Jackson, founder of JUSTUS Kitchen and co-founder of People’s Kitchen Collective. Presented by The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and the Las Vegas Womxn of Color Arts Festival.
There is a public closing reception on July 23, from 5-7:30PM.
Lyssa Park, Feminine Labor. Image courtesy the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, photograph Mikayla Whitmore.
Published by Wendy Kveck on July 19, 2021.