“Diedrick Brackens: darling divined”

Making his museum bow, Diedrick Brackens, a Texas native who lives and works in Los Angeles, employs textile art to weigh in on the often complicated intersectionality of black and queer identity. Combining a wide range of weaving traditions (from Africa, Europe and the Deep South) as well as unconventional techniques (dyeing fabrics with wine, tea, and bleach), Brackens depicts silhouetted images of black men—singly and in pairs—as protagonists in an allegorical narrative about the wages (psychological and cultural) of crossing lines separating race, gender and sexual orientation.