Diedrick Brackens
2025 Artist Editions in Handmade Paper
STATEMENT:
“A stand of plants wreaths a figure bent to the earth at the waist, balanced on fingertips and tiptoes. The plants bloom with large white orbs that seem to illuminate the dusky sky. These stylized forms represent cotton plants.
In the American context, cotton bears a long and painful history and is deeply embedded in the transatlantic trade and enslavement of Black people. In the Southern States, cotton still dominates the landscape and fuels economies. Its depiction can evoke a range of emotions for American viewers, often conjuring familiar caricatures.
A core aspect of my practice is engaging with this culturally loaded material to honor the Black souls who worked this land for centuries without choice or recourse. In addition, it is important to me to reimagine our relationship with the natural world—and with cotton, a material so embedded in our daily lives that it has become nearly invisible. I seek to enliven the viewer's perception of it as sacred, as a core to living and the human experience.”
Silhouette figure posed on a green ground of stylized cotton plants with blue-purple background.
Silhouette figure posed on a green ground of stylized cotton plants with blue-purple background.
Diedrick Brackens, soft sovereign night, 2025.
Stenciled linen and cotton pulp paint on pigmented cotton-abaca base sheet, 20 in x 20 inches. Edition of 16.
Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989 in Mexia, Texas) explores the intersections of identity and sociopolitical
issues by creating handwoven tapestries that reexamine allegory and narrative through material,
autobiography, and the broader themes of African American and queer identity, American history and
memory. Brackens’ recent solo shows include his first European show at Kestner Gesellschaft,
Hannover, Germany, as well as shows at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, Craft Contemporary, Los
Angeles, CA, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada, and the New
Museum, New York, NY. He is the recipient of the US Artist Fellowship, 2021, Louis Tiffany Comfort
Grant, 2019, Marciano Artadia Award, 2019, and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein
Artist Prize, 2018.
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