CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/4/2020

Chiffon Thomas's work subverts and surprises in 'Young, Gifted and Black'

"A mother who had no mother" (2018) by Chiffon Thomas—one of Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30, 2020—is reproduced from Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists. "Thomas exploits embroidery’s elemental nature with visceral works resistant to reductive, chauvinistic typologies that have relegated the medium to the art-historical margins," Gordon Dearborn Wilkins writes in the book. "Drawing on an archive, both material and immaterial, of family snapshots, memories, and cultural references, the artist tells a richly autobiographical story of their family and of their upbringing as a queer African American in 1990s and early 2000s Chicago. Thomas channels memories of family members engaged in largely quotidian activities into sketches that are then broken down and transformed into highly textured, sinewy expanses of embroidery thread, acrylic paint and manufactured textiles. Thomas’s hybrid works, like the arresting 'A mother who had no mother,' reject the imposition of the frame as gathered fabric cascades off Thomas’s canvas of choice—commercially available window screens… Monuments to everyday domestic dramas, Thomas’s embroidered works serve as vessels of personal and collective memory, each thread a tangible link to the past and an assertion of the medium’s radical potential to subvert and surprise." See more Holiday Gift Books for Art Lovers here!