Beasley is a former attorney who worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal defense fund, and approximately half of her work is political in nature. However, Floating Into the Heat of the Moon (above) was not intended to be political; it was simply meant to be a portrait of a young Black man, whom she envisioned in her mind. During The de Young Open panel discussion for our Virtual Wednesdays program, Beasley described her subject as having an “almost poetic, tender look with moonlight lighting his face and butterflies dancing above.” She intentionally gave him a neutral expression, inviting the viewer to create their own stories. Yet, cognizant of the current highly politicized climate surrounding the Black body, Beasley remarks: “Frankly, anytime you are showing the humanity of a Black man these days, you are necessarily entering into a narrative that requires a movement just to expound the simple proposition that Black lives matter.”
Watch D’Alessandro in conversation with textile artists here.
In the past few years, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have acquired African American quilts from both the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and the Eli Leon Trust, which included the works of quilt makers such as Rosie Lee Tompkins, Arbie Williams, and Sherry Byrd. In a recent interview with the author, Byrd commented on the difference between the more traditional quilt makers, such as herself and her mother and grandmother, and “the younger, more modern generation of ‘East Bay Quilters’ who appeared on the scene after the Great Depression and WWII up to the present.” Byrd explains, “This generation appreciates and embraces the quilt as an artistic canvas or platform to express the inner depths of their souls. They want to not only create a beautiful ‘eye candy’ composition that captivates many. Their goal is twofold: First, they want and need to create beauty, but second, they also need to express and ‘tell’ stories, old and new that embrace individual and grouped feelings, hopes, dreams, trials, tribulations, and injustices, and the list goes on. They are brave pioneers in a new territory of the quilt/art making horizon.”
Beasley’s Floating Into the Heat of the Moon beautifully illustrates Byrd’s observations on the work of contemporary African American textile artists, and in doing so, enables the Museums to tell a richer and more complex story about African American quilt making traditions and the diversity of Black experiences.
Like Beasley’s, Sherwin Rio’s work offers the Museums a new vehicle for examining our permanent collection and allows us to better contextualize social and political issues through the use of personal narrative. Rio is an interdisciplinary artist who, as he articulates, “uses metaphors within a Filipino American lens to deflate systems of opposition and separation within cultural and historic convergences”. He is a graduate of San Francisco Art Institute, where in 2018, he received both the MFA Outstanding Graduate Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Award in New Genres, among many other achievements. As Rio explains, “My work often does this metaphorical positioning using the Filipinx and Filipinx-American framework to understand history, omission, to weave in family stories, imagine a more dignified and hopeful future, and tie in Southeast Asian proverbs that I grew up with.”
