While these are issues that we've dealt
with for a long time, I think mythology
and interior design and fabric are not
necessarily the way we've always talked
about them, right? So when you think about
office and when you think about people
who've made huge leaps for us as human
beings and humanity
they said things that people had heard about before
But they said it in a way that they had never heard it before.
So Shanequa began working with fabric and she wanted to understand
the background of fabric and
I think was really interested when she
found out that Augusta had a long
history with fabric
Through my painting I'm telling stories, but I can use fabric to do that. I can use plates to do that.
The interior is something we're all very
familiar with. It's something that we sit
with every day, but we don't necessarily
sit with it under the guise of a social issue.
If you had gone down Broad Street
back in the 1880s and 90s at shift change
And by the way they worked six
days a week, 11 and a half hours a day
You would have seen women and children and
men coming out covered head-to-toe in white lint
For African Americans
especially, the cotton culture going back
into the antebellum period was certainly
one of the major parts of their history
So how do I bring that into the home? How do I bring that into your fabric
into what you wear every day, right? We don't
wear our issues or at least we think we don't.
So what if we were more overt
in kind of pushing those boundary levels.
She has done a very intricate
job of interweaving the history aspect of it
into this idea of everyday life as well as into this idea
of using a new medium
by which to tell this story
I have over the past five or six years used mythology
to talk about social issues and so when
I look at what happens with those of us
in african-american community or those
of us on the margins, a lot of times the
stories that you hear about us sound like myth
Initially dear probably came
an obsession only because it's an animal
figure that is often hunted and preyed
upon in the American society I felt like
that was a good way to be very didactic
with my audience. Since I've kind of
dealt shifted away from that and to see
it as this kind of caricature this
figure that could be anybody or anyplace
globally that it doesn't have to just
portray African Americans even though
that's what it is for me. There are
social issues that happen globally that
a lot of people deal with
