On Saturday, October 4 from 10am - 4pm, my studio will be open to the public for Nexus SF/Bay Area Black Art Week. Join me at CCA's expanded campus for an intimate peek into my studio practice and current projects as I prepare for the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition at SOMArts (opening November 2025).
Email me directly at hello@jasminenarkitawiley.com for studio access details and to confirm your visit.
When amalgamation (from The Spirits Mingle series) was summoned to Austin, Texas, I thought it would be wise to document it, preserve it, and share it, especially considering the wear and tear that comes with textiles over time. Thanks to seed funding, I’m thrilled to announce that my first edition of fine art prints has arrived.
The detail in the work is impeccable. You can see every stitch, fold, stain, and embellishment. It is as if the textile itself has been embedded into the paper. There are only 25 prints in this inaugural edition. A few have already been acquired, and a selection will be available for purchase at MASS Gallery in Austin during Heartstrings, a group exhibition curated by Taylor Danielle Davis.
If you’re interested in purchasing a print from me directly, email me at iamnarkita at gmail dot com or complete the contact form here.
amalgamation, 2025
digital print, 18” x 24”
Hahnemühle Photo Rag Matte Paper
Edition of 25, signed
Documented and printed at Scale Up Art in San Francisco
MASS Gallery is proud to announce Heartstrings, a group exhibition featuring seven dynamic artists who stitch history, culture, and materiality through the language of textiles and fibers. The show will run from March 8, 2025 to April 12, 2025, with an opening reception on March 8th at 7pm, featuring sounds by Do Not Disturb Collective at MASS Gallery, 705 Gunter Street, Austin, TX.
Heartstrings delves into the intersection of art, craft, and cultural narrative, offering a rich exploration of memory, heritage, and material practice. This show is a survey of fiber-based techniques such as quilting, weaving, and embroidery influenced by practices dating back generations. These artists transform textiles and recycled materials into evocative works that challenge traditional delineations between art and craft. Through these diverse practices, these artists illuminate the emotional and historical threads that connect us across time and space.
— Parable of the Sower
Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks (p. 115)
It was such an honor to share my work on indigo as a material culture that engages abolition during the 2024 Summer Institute with New York Metro American Studies Association.
Jordan Horton and I enjoyed a conversation at Textile Arts Center on the appearance of combs and afro picks as leitmotif in my surface designs. We discussed how I reveal the spirit in the mundane to transform both the object and the viewer’s gaze. An audio recording is available upon request.
“There is a long tradition of seeing in craft a meditative state of “no-mind,” as if the artisan were a hollow vessel into which ancient skills flowed, only to be poured out anew. Walter Benjamin envisioned the craftsman this way and placed him at the center of oral tradition on that basis. Storytelling is “an artisan form of communication,” as he put it; a weaver silently working in the workshop, plying a shuttle back and forth, seemed to Benjamin a perfect receptacle for ancient narratives: “The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm to work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”
Perpetual Motion by Glenn Adamson from Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft
The Museum of Modern Art
JOAN JONAS: GOOD NIGHT GOOD MORNING