“I think of artists as translators, channeling something intangible into form,” says Taylor Bythewood-Porter, the curator of Material Prophecies: Craft as Divination. On view through August 1 at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, the exhibition considers whether craft can do more than preserve tradition. What if it can also act as a tool for envisioning possible futures, and what new realities might be created through the act of making?
The exhibition includes works by Jackie Amézquita, April Bey, Calethia DeConto, Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Joel Gaitan, vanessa german, Sky Hopinka, and Lani Trock. Spanning clay, fiber, wood, and other earth materials, these artists contend with history—particularly its colonial inheritances—while reaching toward the prophetic.
At the entrance, a 20-foot-wide jacquard and sherpa tapestry by April Bey hangs as if from a clothesline, secured by elaborately decorated pins. The image of a Black femme, repeated within the dense foliage, gazes outward, while pink pineapple appliqués catch the light. The piece, I Know All About What You Want to Know All About (2024), belongs to Bey’s larger sci-fi series about the librarians of a decolonized Atlantica—a fictional utopia where Black joy and creativity flourish. As Bythewood-Porter explains, Bey’s work “draws on traditions of fabric as narrative, reimagined through her Afrofuturist world-building practice.”
April Bey, I Know All About What You Want to Know All About, 2024, jacquard, sherpa, crushed velour, metallic thread, beads, adorned clothespins, 80 x 240 in.
