Diedrick Brackens

Last updated
Diedrick Brackens
Born1989 (age 34–35)
Mexia, Texas
NationalityAmerican
Education University of North Texas, California College of Arts
Known forWoven Tapestries
AwardsBarclay Simpson Award from California College of Arts, Clare Hart DeGloyer Memorial Fund
Website https://www.diedrickbrackens.com/

Diedrick Brackens (born 1989 in Mexia, Texas; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an American artist and weaver. Brackens is well known for his woven tapestries that explore African American and queer identity. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Biography

Brackens spent his early years moving between Army bases whilst his father served in the military. He received his BFA from the University of North Texas in 2011. It was here that he was first introduced to the discipline of weaving. He then pursued an MFA degree at the California College of the Arts in 2014. [4] Under the teachings of textile artist Josh Faught, [5] his work on the exploration of queer identity inspired Brackens to explore his own themes of African and American history, as well as his own identity as a gay black man living in the southern United States. [6] He was a professor and head of the fiber program at California State University, Long Beach from 2015-2019. [7] [8]

Career

His work has been shown in multiple solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, (2022); [9] Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, (2021); Blanton Museum of Art (2020);[ citation needed ] Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita (2017); Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, Joan Mitchell Center Residency, (2016); and Johansson Projects, Oakland (2015). Group exhibitions include SOMArts, San Francisco (2014); Berkeley Art Museum (2014); 3rd Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2013); and Museum of Geometric Art, Dallas (2011).

Style

Brackens incorporates weaving and quilting techniques from across the globe as a base for his tapestries, initially beginning as a primarily sketch created from photographs from the internet or self-portraits.[ citation needed ]

Notable works

Bitter attendance, drown jubilee, 2018, is one of Brackens more acclaimed tapestries. [10] [11] Made from woven cotton, acrylic yarn and silk organza, the artwork depicts three teenagers as large catfish surrounding two silhouetted figures fishing. The figure on the right of the tapestry is seen cradling the larger of the catfish as a pair of golden handcuffs stand out in the foreground. The artwork is based on a real-life event that happened in Brackens home town of Mexia, eight years before he was born. [12] During a Juneteenth celebration, three young black teenagers were arrested and loaded onto a boat by the local law enforcement for possession of marijuana. When the boat capsized, the three men drowned as they unable to free themselves from the handcuffs in time. The police officers were brought to trial, although no charges were pressed. To this day, the effects of the terrible event that transpired has had a lasting impact on the community, further adding to the already heightened racial tensions. The legacy of racial injustice is a theme that appears throughout Brackens' works. [13]

Awards

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fiber art</span> Artworks made of fiber and other textile materials, emphasizing aesthetic value over utility

Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labor on the part of the artist as part of the works' significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mickalene Thomas</span> American painter

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derek Fordjour</span> American artist

Derek Fordjour is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator of Ghanaian heritage who works in collage, video/film, sculpture, and painting. Fordjour lives and works in New York City.

Lyle Ashton Harris is an American artist who has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation art and performance art. Harris uses his works to comment on societal constructs of sexuality and race, while exploring his own identity as a queer, black man.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Leigh</span> American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Charles Gaines is an American visual artist, whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in conceptual art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jina Valentine</span> American artist

Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.

Josh Faught, is an American fiber artist and educator, who creates sculptures, textiles, collages, and paintings. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, and addresses topics of craft and queer history. His fiber sculptures, influenced by both domestic crafts and art styles such as abstract and color field painting, are often either hung on the wall or stretched over scaffolding such as garden trellises; they are three-dimensional but forward-oriented. He is San Francisco based.

Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beacon, New York, United States. Dyson describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." Her work is informed by her own theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how spatial networks—paths, throughways, water, architecture, and geographies—are composed by Black bodies as a means of exploring potential networks for Black liberation. She is represented by Pace Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery.

Christina Quarles is a queer, mixed contemporary American artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness. She is considered at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists and her works shatter the societal manners of physical classification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nontsikelelo Mutiti</span> Artist from Zimbabwe

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a graphic designer, artist and educator. Her work focuses on web design, video, print, and book art. She often includes hair braiding in her design work, and is "interested in the nuanced differences between black cultures". Her work includes printed materials for Black Lives Matter. Since 2022, Mutiti has served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Troy Montes-Michie is an American interdisciplinary painter and collage artist.

Lina Puerta is a Colombian-American mixed media artist based in New York City. She was born in New Jersey and grew up in Colombia.

Melissa Cody is a Navajo textile artist from No Water Mesa, Arizona, United States. Her Germantown Revival style weavings are known for their bold colors and intricate three dimensional patterns. Cody maintains aspects of traditional Navajo tapestries, but also adds her own elements into her work. These elements range from personal tributes to pop culture references.

Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Rashaad Newsome is an American artist working at the intersection of technology, collage, sculpture, video, music, and performance. Newsome's work celebrates and abstracts Black and Queer contributions to the art canon, resulting in innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media. He lives and works in Oakland, California, and Brooklyn, New York.

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell is an African-American artist based in Brooklyn, who is a lens-based media artist, activist, curator, DJ, educator, performer and writer, known for their photography and videography. They identify as queer, femme, and non-binary, which has informed their art work. Terrell's work explores issues of history, displacement, femme identity, sexuality, and gender, amongst other issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Zicafoose</span> American textile artist

Mary Zicafoose is an American textile artist, weaver, and teacher who specializes in ikat, an ancient technique in which threads are wrapped, tied and resist-dyed before weaving. Zicafoose is the author of Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth (2020). Her works are part of private and public collections, including at least 16 embassies around the world as part of the U.S. Art in Embassies Program.

Igshaan Adams is a South African artist working on tapestries and textile-based sculptures, installations, and performance. His work has been included in the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, in 2022; and the 2023 Sao Paulo Biennial: Choreographies of the Impossible.

References

  1. ↑ "weavings". diedrick brackens. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
  2. ↑ Thai, Stephanie (2017-11-16). "Diedrick Brackens talks textile art, intersections of black and queer identities". Q Voice News. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  3. ↑ "Texan Artist Diedrick Brackens Weaves Black History Into His Tapestries". W Magazine. 12 November 2019. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  4. ↑ "Stars aligned". CCA. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  5. ↑ "josh faught". josh faught. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
  6. ↑ "Diedrick Brackens Deals in the Composite of Past and Present". www.culturedmag.com. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  7. ↑ https://www.vsf.la/usr/library/documents/main/artists/35/diedrick-brackens-cv.pdf VSF - CV of DIEDRICK BRACKENS
  8. ↑ "Weaving History". DIG MAG. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  9. ↑ "Diedrick Brackens: heaven is a muddy riverbed – Craft Contemporary". www.craftcontemporary.org. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  10. ↑ "Diedrick Brackens | Hammer Museum". hammer.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  11. ↑ "Bitter Attendance, Drown Jubilee". Issues in Contemporary Craft & Design 2020. 2020-05-09. Retrieved 2021-09-14.
  12. ↑ "The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing". Texas Monthly. 2021-05-24. Retrieved 2021-09-14.
  13. ↑ Staff, Sarah Elizabeth Adler | (2015-03-17). "Artist Diedrick Brackens uses textiles to tell stories of race, injustice". The Daily Californian. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  14. ↑ "Studio Museum in Harlem's Wein Prize Goes to Diedrick Brackens". Contemporary And (in German). Retrieved 2022-03-16.
  15. ↑ "The Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund". Dallas Museum of Art Uncrated. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.