In other words, it can revise the grammar of visual literacy away from its disciplining model toward a mode of visual engagement that encourages more critical ways of looking, allowing us to see the people we are looking at. One of the ways contemporary art has been an effective tool for social justice is through its capacity to entice viewers into a more considered mode of looking. I begin with a sentence from Patricia Saunders, the opening gesture of her 2016 essay on the work of Ebony G. From the material genealogy of Brodber’s sisal mat and the familial recuperation of Llanos-Figueroa’s tapestries to Clark’s pointed deconstruction of a Confederate flag, these artists use textile and text to challenge their audiences to rethink the origins and affordances of objects long overlooked, to see them anew as sites at which the emotional and political labors of black women’s lives are rendered not only visible but palpable. However, the work of writers such as Erna Brodber and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa and textile artists such as Sonya Clark confronts and deconstructs these reductive perceptions of both Caribbean women’s textile practices and their products as “mere craft.” I seek here to elucidate how these artists are foregrounding textile processes as sites where Caribbean women’s hands perform tasks of taking care, bearing witness, and rendering memory material-tasks whose implications are both political and spiritual. Accordingly, these textile practices and their products are routinely overlooked because of their apparent confinement within the spheres of the domestic and the feminine. Women are, further, the designated curators and caretakers of the textiles that enable and adorn domestic spaces: hand towels, tablecloths, doilies, antimacassars, and other such ornamental goods as well as more prosaic items of haberdashery. To be respectably feminine, one learns both to master at least one of these techniques and to acquire (or covet) the material objects so produced.

In the Caribbean, textile practices such as sewing, embroidery, crochet, and tatting have long served a double role within the gender education of female subjects.

Red House by Sonya Clark