The first major career survey of work by renowned fiber and textile
artist Billie Zangewa
Published to accompany the exhibition presented by the Museum of the
African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, Billie Zangewa: Thread for a
Web Begun explores Zangewa's creation of literal and figurative
tapestries of the everyday lives and contemporary intersectional
identities of Black women. Through her hand-sewn silk collages, which
primarily depict Black women in the domestic sphere, Zangewa reclaims a
medium that was once relegated as "women's work" and delves into the
familiarity, beauty, and sociopolitical drivers of the seemingly
mundane. Beginning her career in the fashion and advertising industries,
Zangewa employs her understanding of textiles to portray personal and
universal experiences through domestic interiors, urban landscapes, and
portraiture. Through the method of their making and their narrative
content, Zangewa's silk paintings illustrate gendered labor in a
sociopolitical context, where the domestic sphere becomes a pretext for
a deeper understanding of the construction of identity, questions around
gender stereotypes, and racial prejudice.
This volume, packaged in a beautiful slipcase, showcases the past 15
years of Zangewa's work as well as new pieces made for this exhibition,
and although many of these decontextualized pieces are autobiographical,
all of them portray a sense of intimacy and exploration of
identity--connecting the pieces to each other through a larger narrative
about Black femininity and tugging on the thread of the viewer's own
lived experience.
