Diedrick Brackens, “hape of a fever believer, installation view, Oakville Galleries, 2020, woven cotton and acrylic yarn.
“I‘ve inherited so many g h o s t s , ” Diedrick Brackens (b. Texas, 1989) explains in a recent interview with curator Legacy Russell. “There are all these people that I will never meet because of the virus, but I‘m always communing with them, trying to allow their voices to be made material.” The 32-yearold textile artist’s tapestries call openly on the words of queer poets, biblical allegory, Black American folklore, patterns from strip-woven Kente cloth, European narrative tapestries and the quilts of Gee’s Bend. With “shape of a fever believer,” seven tapestries woven in 2020 and displayed at Oakville Galleries this spring, Brackens specifically addresses not the COVID-19 virus but the 2016 CDC statistic, which states, “If current H.I.V. diagnoses rates persist, about 1 in 2 Black men who have sex with men (M.S.M.) and 1 in 4 Latino M.S.M. in the United States will be diagnosed with H.I.V. during their lifetime.” Brackens’s ghosts turn up as lifesized silhouettes, often in pairs, reaching out for, carrying and working to heal one another across highly saturated hand-dyed threads.
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