Sown Together: New Voices in Contemporary Textile Art brings together textile works that explore identity, memory, migration, and the African diaspora through innovative material practices. Drawing on the dual meanings of sown and sewn—homophones that evoke both the planting of seeds and the joining of fabric—the exhibition considers textile as both material and metaphor. Just as seeds are planted to cultivate future growth, featured artists in the exhibition weave together ancestral memory, familial ties, and lived experience to advance new perspectives on Black identity and belonging.
Rooted in the Indigenous and diasporic traditions of fiber and agriculture across the Atlantic, these practices reflect an enduring relationship to the land and to the natural materials it provides. For generations, weaving, quilting, beading, embroidery, and other textile traditions have served as vessels for cultural knowledge, resilience, and creative expression. This lineage continues to evolve through the work of a contemporary generation of artists who remain anchored in tradition while expanding its possibilities into new forms.
Partnership
More than twenty-five years ago, Harvey B. Gantt and Hugh McColl shared a vision for a contemporary Charlotte with arts and culture at its center, a city shaped by creativity, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas from around the world. Today, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and McColl Center continue that legacy, bringing artists from across the region, the nation, and the global diaspora into conversation with Charlotte's communities. Sown Together embodies that collaborative spirit, honoring the enduring traditions of textile art and the cultural legacies of Hugh McColl and Harvey B. Gantt.
Curatorial Context
Sown Together emerged through the convergence of two complementary curatorial initiatives. Dr. Anita N. Bateman, Vice President of Creative Direction at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture had begun developing an exhibition examining contemporary textile practices when McColl Center proposed a collaborative partnership informed by a spring residency led by artist and McColl Center President and CEO, Asa Jackson. That residency brought together a cohort of fiber artists to exchange ideas, collaborate, and lead workshops rooted in shared learning and cultural exchange.
Six of the artists featured in Sown Together participated in the McColl Center residency. Their inclusion expanded the exhibition's original framework, bringing additional regional perspectives into dialogue with artists already selected by the Gantt Center. Together, their work reflects the richness and diversity of contemporary textile practice while celebrating the histories that continue to shape the field.
Co-curated by Dr. Anita N. Bateman and Asa Jackson, Sown Together exemplifies the possibilities of institutional collaboration. By bringing together artists working across generations, geographies, and traditions, the exhibition considers textile as both artistic medium and cultural archive, illuminating the enduring role of fiber in shaping histories and communities.
About the Artists
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola (b. 1991)is a first-generation American raised between the United States and Nigeria. In his practice spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, Akinbola employs ordinary items from his life as readymades. Commonplace objects of African-American dress, leisure, and ceremony are each an opportunity to explore the conceptual strategies of his artistic predecessors, from Beuys to Hammons, but also assert his own circumstance and tradition. Hair products, textiles, figurines, and taxidermy are each a candidate for presentation, alteration, or combination. The artist’s Camouflage paintings, which can extend over 40 feet in length, are made from thousands of individual garments; each is a durag hand-sewn in his studio from fabric sourced by the artist. Objects capable of holding contradictory meanings for different viewers are incorporated as found materials, exploring the mutability of symbols and the fetishization of cultural artifacts.
In 2024, Akinbola was named Artist-in-Residence at Dragon Hill in France and in 2022, Akinbola was selected to be in The Artsy Vanguard, an annual feature spotlighting the most promising artists working today. That same year, he was also awarded the Silver Arts Project residency in New York.
Akinbola has exhibited his work in group and individual shows at renowned institutions such as the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; The Queens Museum, New York; the Randall Recreation Center, Washington D.C.; the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh, PA; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria; the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; and the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY, among others.
The artist received a BA in communications and media from SUNY Purchase College. His work is included numerous collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, West Palm Beach, FL; The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK
Joke Amusan (b. 1997) is a German-Nigerian artist based in London, England. Her art practice illuminates the multifaceted experiences of Black womanhood. Through her exploration of identity, heritage, and migration, she creates immersive installations and sculptures – challenging preconceived notions and perceptions. Her art serves as a conversational bridge: inspiring women to come together, share their stories, and unapologetically embrace their authentic selves.
Amusan has exhibited internationally, in renowned galleries such as Tate Modern, The ICA, and The African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta. In recognition of her practice, she received the Thameslink Art Award in 2025, was a finalist in The Ingram Prize in 2023, and was nominated for the “Female Founder” award in The Independent Awards in 2022.
April Bey (b. 1987) grew up in the Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles as a visual artist and art educator. She is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno NV; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; The National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica; The Modern Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA; The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas, among others.
Her work is in the public collections of California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT; Escalette Collection, Chapman University, Orange, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau, The Bahamas; Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Fullerton College Art Gallery, Fullerton, CA, among others.
William Evans ( b.2000) is an interdisciplinary artist from the American South working across sculpture, textiles, and visual communication. His practice draws from craft, digital design, and material experimentation, often using familiar objects to explore how cultural meaning is embedded in everyday life. Humor and critique operate as guiding tools in his work, shaping tactile forms that invite reflection and dialogue.
Evans earned an MFA in Art (Sculpture) from The Ohio State University, where he was a Global Arts + Humanities Graduate Fellow and a recipient of the Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship. He also holds a BFA in Sculpture and an AB in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia.
His work has been exhibited at Denison University Museum (Granville, OH), Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA), and Urban Arts Space, where his MFA thesis exhibition, A Stitch in Black America, was presented.
MarieAnn “Flower” Fluker ( b.1983) is an Afro-Filipino multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community storyteller based in Hampton, Virginia. Working primarily through textiles, installation, and participatory experiences, her practice explores memory, cultural preservation, identity, and the ways stories are carried through people, place, and material.
Working with reclaimed fabrics and textiles, Fluker transforms discarded materials into contemporary works that honor ancestry, family, and collective memory. Through stitching, layering, and mending, she reflects on what is inherited, what is forgotten, and what can be reclaimed through the simple act of making. She approaches cloth as both archive and language, preserving stories that often exist outside written history.
Her practice extends beyond the studio into community spaces, where making and storytelling become acts of connection. Through workshops, installations, and public engagement, she creates spaces where people are invited to reflect, share, and recognize the value of their own lived experiences.
Entirely self-taught, Fluker is guided by intuition, curiosity, and a deep respect for traditional textile practices. Whether creating large-scale installations or facilitating conversations around a table, she believes art can strengthen communities, preserve culture, and remind us that the stories of everyday people are just as worthy of being remembered as those found in history books.
Fluker has exhibited throughout Hampton Roads and currently serves as an Artist in Residence with the Contemporary Arts Network. As her practice continues to evolve, she remains committed to creating work that preserves cultural memory, honors lived experience, and ensures that the stories we carry today become the legacies we leave tomorrow.
Enam Gbewonyo (b.1980) is a British-Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist working predominantly in textiles, performance and film. Through the guise of textiles, she constructs immersive, otherworldly experiences that chronicle Black womanhood, countering racism and sexism through a lens of healing and celestial expansion. Through her work, Enam fabulates liberatory stories rooted in ancient handcraft technologies, as well as the ancestral and spiritual. By centering her personal and familial histories, she reveals universalities in Black women’s experiences.
Gbewonyo holds a BA in Textile Design from the University of Bradford, UK, and an MFA from Stanford University, USA. She is represented by TAFETA gallery in London, UK. Her work has been presented internationally at MUNCAB (Salvador, Brazil), SFMOMA (San Francisco, USA), Fondation H (Antananarivo, Madagascar), Bemis Center (Omaha, Nebraska, USA), Gagosian London (London, UK), Fondazione Imago Mundi (Treviso, Italy), the Royal Academy of Arts (London, UK) and the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), to name a few. She is a recipient of the Cadogan Contemporary Art Scholarship Award (2025), the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2022), the Dentons Law Firm annual art prize (2022) and the New Art Exchange Future Exhibition Prize (2022). Gbewonyo is also a fellow of the Bemis Centre, Black Rock Senegal (Dakar, Senegal), Fondation H (Antananarivo, Madagascar) and Sacatar (Itaparica, Brazil) artist residencies. Notable features include Artsy, Christies.com, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, The Guardian, Nataal and Roundtable.
Asa Jackson ( b.1988) is an American artist and arts leader based in North Carolina. As a multidisciplinary artist, Jackson’s work explores the cross section of textile from various countries, peoples, time periods, and personal histories. His works are often anthropological studies, representing the lives of myriad people, their collective and individual stories. By cutting and sewing fabrics together, Jackson metaphorically mixes cultures, time periods, people and places into unified works of art.
Jackson studied sociology at Boston University. He then moved to New York in 2010, where he was featured in several exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the Samuel Owen Gallery in Greenwich, CT. Jackson then opened 670 Gallery in Virginia, leading the gallery as its director from 2014-2017. He has since been featured in numerous exhibitions, including more recently a solo at Les Yeux Du Monde in Charlottesville, VA, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery in Luxembourg, EXPO Chicago , Art Brussels , and the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, NC. His work is a part of various prominent collections including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Capital One Corporate Collection, The Mint Museum, the University of Virginia, and The Rockwell Museum. Jackson is the co-founder of the CAN Foundation, a not-for-profit arts organization in Newport News, VA, with a focus on building sustainable careers for the creative class. He served on the board of the Virginia Commission for the Arts from 2018-2023 where he acted as chairman for FY 2022. In January 2025, he became President and CEO of the McColl Center in Charlotte, NC.
Kandy G Lopez (b. 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring cultural identity, representation, and power through fiber art, portraiture, painting, and mixed media. Born to Dominican parents, she draws from her experience navigating multiple cultural landscapes.
Lopez holds a BFA in Painting and a BS in Marketing/Management from the University of South Florida and earned her MFA in Painting from Florida Atlantic University in 2014. Her background in both fine arts and business informs her meticulous material investigations and strategic engagement with art institutions. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Arts at Nova Southeastern University, where she integrates critical theory with hands-on material practice.
Lex Marie (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and painting. Rooted in her lived experience as a Black mother raising a son in the Washington, DC area, her practice examines how Black childhood is shaped by adultification, discipline, surveillance, and systemic inequity. Marie transforms everyday and reclaimed materials such as school uniforms, pencils, belts, report cards, hospital blankets, into charged objects that expose the hidden curriculum embedded within American institutions.
Her 2022 solo exhibition, Let Them Kids Be Kids, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington confronted bias within educational spaces. Her work is featured in America Will Be! (2026) at the David C. Driskell Center. Marie’s practice moves between personal archive and public history, using familiar materials to make visible the quiet systems that shape identity, belief, and possibility for Black children.
Ambrose Rhapsody Murray (b.1996) is a self-taught artist, born in Jacksonville, Florida and raised in Asheville, NC. Through sewing, painting, material experimentation, film and collaborative projects, they create stories to investigate our relationships to the colonial undercurrents of our lives, the charged symbology of black feminine bodies, and the ephemeral and layered qualities of memory and remembering. Ambrose was transformed by Black Studies while at Yale College where they received their BA. Through their work, Ambrose seeks to bring physical form to the ideas and theories they have been struck by from Black feminist writers and visionaries. Their work and practice are rooted in ethea of care, reverence, intimacy, time-travel, healing, grief and attending to the stories of the dead. Their work has been exhibited across the US as well as abroad in Berlin, Mexico City, London and more.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe (b. 1993) is a neurodivergent Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Nnebe’s practice mobilizes vernacular forms and everyday infrastructures—foodways, nail salons, native languages—to construct counter-archives of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality.
In their play with spatiality and coded visual lexicons, her work demonstrates how social positionings shape regimes of perception and comprehensibility. Cutting across installation, sculpture and lens-based media, they establish their own conditions for legibility: Black women’s emotional lives, labour, and knowledge emerge not as subjects to be deciphered but as the epistemic ground through which meaning itself becomes possible. Nnebe is the recipient of the 2026 Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Visual Arts from the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a 2025 alumna of the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands; a 2023-24 Awardee of the G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA in Lagos, Nigeria; and was nominated for and selected as a 2024 Artist-in-Residence with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) at El Espacio 23, a contemporary art space founded by Jorge M. Perez in Miami. Nnebe is based between Canada, the Netherlands and Nigeria.
Josie Love Roebuck (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist from Rising Fawn, Georgia. Roebuck received her M.F.A from the University of Cincinnati (2021). She received her B.F.A with an emphasis in drawing and painting, from the University of Georgia (2019). Josie Love Roebuck is currently a Visiting Teaching Professor at Northern Kentucky University. Roebuck is a storyteller- a weaver of perspectives and identity. Her work delves into the depths of human pain, while simultaneously highlighting the healing journey that follows. Through the act of sewing, her canvas morphs into paper and her needle to a pen, and the stories—her own and those shared with Roebuck—are brought to life. She has exhibited her work internationally at The Exhibitionist Hotel (UK), Denny Dimin (HK) and Kunstheille Krems Art Museum (AUT), and nationally: Brave Lee Programs (NY), Art Gallery (OH), Phillips Auction House (NY), Charlie James Gallery (LA), Kavi Gupta Gallery (IL), Expo Chicago (IL), Akron Art Museum (OH), Ann Arbor Art Center (MI), New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art partnered with University of Southern Indiana (IN), Denny Dimin Gallery (NY), Roy G Biv (OH), Christie's at Rockefeller Plaza in collaboration with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (NY), NADA House (NY), LatchKey Gallery (NY), Contemporary Arts Center (OH) Portrait Society Gallery (WI), Dutoit Gallery (OH), Untitled Art Fair with Denny Dimin Gallery (NY/online), Yeiser Art Center Gallery (KY), Site: Brooklyn Gallery (NYC), BSB Gallery (NJ/online), Tabula Rosa (OH), Lupin Gallery (GA), Strohl Art Center (NY), and Fowler-Kellogg Gallery (NY).
Nastassja Swift ( b.1992) is a multi-disciplinary artist and a Virginia Commonwealth University alum, holding a BFA in Painting and Printmaking, and Craft and Material Studies. Most recently, Nastassja was selected as the 2024 Textile Society of America Brandford/Elliott Awardee. She is a 2023 recipient of the Center for Craft: Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, a VMFA Fellowship and a Virginia Commission of the Arts Fellowship, among many others.
Nastassja has exhibited and presented her work in institutions nationally and internationally including VCUQatar, Carl Freedman Gallery in the UK, and multiple cities across the U.S.
Her work has been acquired into several collections, including, most recently, the Tweed Museum of Art of the University of Minnesota. She has participated in several residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, the Wassaic Project in NY, MASS MoCA and has been invited as a Distinguished Fellow at the Penland School of Craft
Cyle Warner (b. 2001) is a Caribbean-American multidisciplinary artist whose practice is woven from the poetics of spatial relations. The work threads through the archival, the elemental, and the enduring - constructing conditions for space and object to become indexes for recall, and through that recall, recognition. Warner earned a BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts (2023) and attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art (2022). His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2026); Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn (2022, 2023); Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal (2022); and Oolite Arts, Miami (2022), among other galleries and institutions. Warner is currently a Van Lier Fellow at Abrons Arts Center (2024–26).
Andrew Wilson (b.1991) received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013 with a concentration in Jewelry/Metals and his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Wilson’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions including: The Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOMArts, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Palais de Tokyo, Minnesota Street Projects, Jonathan Carver Moore, the Metropolitan Museum of Design Detroit, Scarab Club, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and many more. He has received such awards and honors as: the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, an Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Emerging artist Program at the Museum of the African Diaspora and participated in residencies including the McColl Center, Galveston Artist Residency, Black (Space) Residency, the Ebb and Teena Haycock Public Art Endowment, Pentaculum, Chulitna Lodge and more.
He has worked with notable artists like Fred Wilson and Carrie Mae Weems on projects including: The Spirit that Resides in Havana, Cuba and The Future is Now Parade for the opening of The REACH in Washington D.C, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, Sharjah Biennale 2023 and more. His work has been collected by Carrie Mae Weems, The Flood Family Collection, Michigan State University, University of New Mexico and more.
Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Wood is an interdisciplinary artist whose work contemplates realities around black female ontology that do and might exist. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint and internet avatars Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials. Together, Qualeasha navigates both an Internet environment saturated in Black Femme figures and culture, and a political and economic environment holding that embodiment at the margins. For her, what are intuitive combinations of analog and cybernetic compositional processes make for a plainly contemporary exploration of Black American Femme ontology.
In 2024 Wood had a solo exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture, Charlotte, NC. She is currently included in Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY;Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, IL; and Threaded, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA. Her recent exhibitions include Manic Pixie Magical Negro, Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York, NY (2023); The New Bend, Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA (2022-3); It’s Time For Me To Go, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2022); Alter Egos | Projected Selves, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2022); and Dancing in Dark Times, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK (2021). Her collections include Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Dean Collection, New York, NY; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.
About the Curators
Dr. Anita N. Bateman is the Vice President of Creative Direction at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, where she guides the comprehensive creative vision for the Center's collections, exhibitions, public programs, educational initiatives, marketing, and key internal and external partnerships.
Bateman holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture and a Master's degree in Art History from Duke University, and a bachelor's degree in Art History from Williams College. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the RISD Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art. Her academic research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
Bateman was a 2024 Museum Next Generation Laureate (FRAME and Villa Albertine), the Fall 2022 ARCAthens Curatorial Fellow, and a 2022 Graham Foundation grantee for the publication Where is Africa (Center for Art Research and Alliances), co-edited with Emanuel Admassu.
Asa Jackson