Blue Star Contemporary’s two new spring exhibitions — “Threads Bare” and “Black Art Library” — will debut during regular opening hours on Friday, Feb. 4.
Though an opening reception and other events were previously planned to accompany the new exhibitions, the gallery has postponed those festivities due to the current level of COVID-19 cases in the community.
“Threads Bare,” a group exhibition assembled by BSC Curator and Exhibitions Manager Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray, will be featured in the main gallery space. The work from artists Preetika Rajgariah, Juan Carlos Escobedo, Mickalene Thomas, Audrya Flores, C. Rose Smith and Luis Valderas highlights the intersections of art and fashion using textiles or related materials.
“In an era where performances of identity are increasingly virtual, ‘Threads Bare’ highlights the significance of materiality and its foundations to these simulations,” BSC said in a news release. “The viewer enters a window to a profusion of histories, provoking questions of our present, and unearthing inherited complexities of American identities and pathways to acknowledgment, healing and envisioning the future.”
“Black Art Library” showcases a collection of written materials centered on Black artists and Black art history, including exhibition catalogues, children’s books, artist memoirs, artist biographies, art history texts and other art-related ephemera.
Curator Asmaa Walton created the library in 2020 as a tool to educate people of all ages and levels of expertise on Black art, which has historically been neglected in art education. BSC is the first arts organization outside of Michigan to host the Black Art Library, which Walton plans to eventually house in a physical space in Detroit that will act as a non-lending library.
“I want to create a space where people of all ages can come to spend time with these books and learn things that they did not have the opportunity to learn in school or at home,” Walton said in a statement.
“I want the Black Art Library to be a place local students can come to do research for a project, self-taught artists can be inspired by images that they see between the pages, and art lovers can spend a day falling in love with the work of an artist they had never even heard about before.”
“Threads Bare” will be on view from Feb. 4-May 8 in the Main Gallery, and “Black Art Library” will be on view from Feb. 4-Mar. 27 in the Art Learning Lab.
Free, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. and 2-6 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, Blue Star Contemporary, 116 Blue Star, (210) 227-6960, bluestarcontemporary.org.
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This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 8, 2022.
