Claire Oliver Gallery is pleased to present Whole Cloth: Narratives in Black and White, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of work by Carolyn Mazloomi and the artist’s first-ever gallery exhibition. Through the medium of large-scale quilts, Mazloomi recounts the valiant lives of Black civil-rights activists, leaders and revolutionaries, often overlooked or oversimplified in our nation’s historical record, who played a seminal role in shaping American history in the twentieth century. As a Black woman raised in the segregated communities of the Jim-Crow South, these leaders—including John Lewis, Josephine Baker, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer—influenced every fiber of her being, and it is through her artwork that she strives to convey dynamic portraits of their extraordinary courage. Mazloomi understands that, in the wrong hands, the authoritative pen of history is likely to memorialize fraught and incomplete understandings of landmark events and figures. Therefore, with her needle, she quilts complex images that insist on authentic and thorough depictions of Black American lives that will carry these lessons from the past into the future. Centering her narratives through the medium of quilts, Mazloomi pays homage to the traditional textile craft, which conveys comfort, warmth and domesticity but whose complex narratives rendered in black and white convey charged histories.
“Quiltmaking is a tradition and a mode of expression that is both intimate and esteemed,” states Mazloomi. “Every human being has an intimate relationship with cloth. It is the first thing we are swathed in at birth, and the last thing that touches our body upon our death. Through the nuance of textile, difficult stories can reach audiences across identities and generations from a place of care, hearth, peace, and nurture.”
