With “Darling Divined,” Textile Artist Diedrick Brackens Plumbs His Southern Roots

“IT FEELS LIKE A HOMECOMING,” Diedrick Brackens says. After a successful showing last summer at the New Museum, the Texas-born, Los Angeles–based artist’s first solo New York museum exhibition, Darling Divined, comes to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin this month—opened at reduced capacity and with timed slots for patrons. “I’m excited to be able to take my family to see my work,” he continues. “I mean, I think there’s some family who still don’t quite know what I do.”

In all fairness, Brackens’s work is quite complex; his graphic, handwoven textiles—the biggest, around eight by eight feet—consider folklore, mythology, Christianity, and history through the lens of his own Blackness and queerness. “Diedrick’s work is singular in its form, mindful in its every thread, and generative in its message,” says Margot Norton, a curator at the New Museum. The cotton yarn that Brackens dyes by hand, sometimes using tea or bleach, is a nod to the crop’s weighted history in the South; his own grandmother picked cotton as a girl. And when he works with human figures, his slim, dark silhouettes are mostly modeled on himself. The approach, Brackens explains, presents “a vehicle to talk about people who live lives like mine.” Adds Veronica Roberts, the Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the works “herald the complexity of Black bodies and experiences.”

They also insert Brackens into a rich tradition. Early in his practice, West African kente cloth and medieval European Unicorn tapestries were important points of reference. Later, his discovery of figures like Hannah Ryggen—a Scandinavian textile artist most popular between the 1930s and 1960s—clued him in to the medium’s potential to speak to now. When he started, 12 years ago, “it was unusual to be weaving”—there was and still is a quaintness to the medium—“but I think the computer just was not in our lives the way that it is now,” he says. To live in the coronavirus era, when many of us are forced to be even more plugged-in than usual, “heightens the experience of doing things by hand.”

Increasingly, his inspiration comes from life—“like, going out into the world and seeing things and then getting curious,” he says—and it leads him right back to Texas. (The region’s catfish in particular are a frequent motif.) “It loves its children,” Brackens says of his home state. Returning there, he reflects, “I will feel all the love that I think comes with having a connection to that place.”