December 15 - February 10, 2024
From Art League Houston:
“Art League Houston (ALH) is proud to present Flag Diary – What Protects, an exhibition and workshop program by Houston-based artist Marley Foster. The first in a series of community protest quilts, Flag Diary – What Protects invites community members to participate in and witness the creation of a community quilt that tests how these complicated objects help us process the personal while also speaking the language of public discourse.
Quilts are offerings of love, markers of time spent, objects meant to comfort and protect. Their language of fabric patchwork speaks to adaptability generated by necessity and the meditative beauty of arranging, as well as to the construction of flags and protest banners seen throughout American history.
The protective words embroidered on the What Protects quilt are all revelatory of personal and political structures, have everything to do with the political nature of bodies, and are typically invisible (or, more accurately, intentionally erased from public visibility and therefore from our own personal interactions). The first, self-made, side of the quilt will be installed on the side of the ALH building. During the exhibition, community members’ patches will accumulate in the sculpture garden, before they are assembled into the quilt’s other half.
This new side of the quilt made of community patches will be hung alongside the other in the sculpture garden, a pair of subversive flags marking time and developing a patina as they are affected by weather, grime, and passersby. Following the exhibition closing at Art League Houston, they will be assembled into a single, fully realized quilt.
Visual languages of quilted americana – slow, subtle, intimate – and contemporary American protest – gestural, in your face, national – will operate dually over time as this work is installed publicly, made communal and multiplied, then returned to domestic form. Foster intends this work to bring the already political nature of quilts to heightened visibility – using it as an offering to her community and a tangible resource for working through the relationship between familial history and community politics.”
Reception: December 15, 2023 | 6–8 pm
1953 Montrose Boulevard
Houston, 77006 TX
(713) 523-9530
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