return to

TAMAZGHA
Morocco
and heterogeneous textile history. The weaving tradition in
is a country with a rich

the geographic area that corresponds to this modern nation

state dates back at least as far as the Paleolithic era. The
environmental and climatic conditions of the region
necessitated variations in styles, from the heavy pile rugs of
the High Atlas mountains to the flat weaves of the Sahara
or the Glaoui rugs that blend the two distinct styles
together.

Yet, beyond a textile’s structure, is a culture woven into its

fabric. As anthropologist Cynthia J. Becker points out, the
many styles and motifs characteristic of Moroccan textiles
emerged as markers of tribal history and identity, though
the meanings of these symbols and styles have been fluid
over time, shifting as traditions are handed down from one
1
generation to another.
1 Cynthia J. Becker, Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity, University of Texas Press, 2006.
 The study of these shifts is art history– an evolving
story of connections within and across cultures:
the present, necessarily, built upon the past. And yet,
so often this linear understanding of history forgets the
position of its observer, and so neglects the very active
interactions back, not just forth. Even worse, as a
paradigm, linearity hinders our ability to trace the
repeated cyclicality of those interactions.

Return to Tamazgha is an exhibition that not only

seeks to examine those return exchanges, but also
actively provides a platform for them to exist.

We see this as an opportunity to explore the hybrid

2
history of Imazighen culture, both public and private.
2
Here we are not using, “Berbers” which is a pejorative term from the Latin Barbarus, to refer to these
North African nomads. While they often refer to themselves by tribe name, the accepted term(s) they use
as an overall descriptor is “Imazighen” or “Amazigh” (adjectival form) which means “Free people.”
 Indeed, the area occupied by these North African tribes
has been the site of international trade and
cultural exchange since before the Phoenicians.

The Imazighen, as we call them today, have been party to

many of the major movements in western world history
from the Roman Empire to the Byzantines,
from the Umayyad Caliphate to the Alaouite Dynasty
with French colonization in between.
 At the same time, Imazighen cultural
practices, largely maintained by women (and
the remoteness of tribal regions), have only
slowly changed even as they have been
appropriated and disseminated globally.

Most notable recent examples

of this could include the adoption by
Le Corbusier of the Beni Ourain rug style
for his "Modern" interiors, a now near
ubiquitous design flourish.
 The same holds for the incorporation of
various sartorial elements like fibulae into
couture collections by Yves Saint Laurent
(himself, born in Algeria) and other designers.

Not dissimilarly, domestic Boucherouite "Rag

Rugs" point to both the influence of the Arab
urban population and the growing prevalence
of machine made textiles from south and east
Asia, say nothing of the spell they cast on the
3
New York Times’ Holland Cotter.

3
See https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/arts/design/23rags.html
Part of our aim in the show is to highlight these
varied histories within the work of the Moroccan
weavers.

Our other more pressing objective is to look at

the present, showing changes currently
happening in Morocco (shifts like female
empowerment, rural to urban migration, the
recent creation of an alphabet for the Amazigh
language, the expansion and availability of
technology, etc) by providing an open ended
platform for these weavers to directly dialog
with “contemporary” artistic practices.
Following closely the practices of
textile based artists, we looked for
a collection of works by artists that
reflects several different themes/
motifs within that medium.

They present a broad look at

what's happening in textile based
work today. By looking at the
practices of the Moroccan
weavers, we’ve come up with the
following four categories to
examine their interconnectedness:

>> Memory
Personal / Cultural

>> Aesthetic
Design as a reflection
of environment / moment

>> Social Roles

Critique and commentary
on society

>> Technique
Exploring new
methodologies / motifs
In addition to this, we are pursuing avenues to visit these
artisan groups (many of whom Alia is already friendly and
familiar with through her social enterprise, Kantara) in order to
collect oral histories and introduce formally the other artists'
work for them to respond to. We plan to present the works by
Moroccan and non-Moroccan artists together in groupings
under the above four themes along with introductions and
context, and bios/oral histories for each of the weavers.

We envision the physical exhibition beginning with

representative examples of “traditional” work by the women in
Morocco in conjunction with contextual didactics. This will be
followed by thematic clusters arranged into the above
taxonomies that juxtapose the works by Moroccan and non-
Moroccan artists, interspersed with video and textual oral
histories from both sets of artists.

We hope to collaborate with Moroccan institutions such as the

Ministry of Artisan Affairs and the artisan-run marketplace,
Anou. We will seek out funding to support travel for two of the
Moroccan artists and a translator, to attend the exhibition
opening in hopes that we may use the exhibit as an even
broader platform for cross-cultural exchange.
 CONTEMPORARY
ARTISTS
Robin Kang, M/S/T Meg Lipke, A/T
Natalie Baxter, M/S Jenny Rask, M/S/T
Junpei Inoue, A/T Tanya Aguiniga, M/A/S/T
Takuji Hamanaka, A/T Erica Krane Fink, A/T
Judit Just, A/T/M Ruben Marroquin, M/A/T
Windy Chien, T/A Victoria Manganiello, M/S/T
Liene Bosque, M/A/S/T Melissa Dadourian, S/A/T
>> Memory (M) Denise Treizman, M/S/T Françoise Grossen, M/T/S
Personal / Cultural
Alta Buden, M/S/T Katie Gong, T
>> Aesthetic (A)
Design as a reflection Rachel Hayes, A/T/M David B. Smith, A/T
of environment / moment
Samantha Bittman, A/T Julia Bland, A/T
>> Social Roles (S)
Critique and commentary Sophia Narrett, M/S/T Tahir Carl Karmali, M/S
on society Bisa Butler, M/S/T Amber Robles Gordon, M/S
>> Technique (T)
Baseera Khan, M/S Diedrick Brackens, M/A/S/T
Exploring new
methodologies / motifs Phillip Stearns, M/A/S/T Adrian Esparza, M/T
Robin
KANG
Building upon her West Texas roots,
Robin Kang’s textile works are a
beautiful chimera of the past and the
future. Combining ancient weaving
motifs with her jacquard loom she
creates woven tapestries that reflect
upon the overlapping spaces of
computing history, feminism, mysticism,
and emergent technology.

m/s/t
Natalie
BAXTER
Natalie Baxter’s works explore various
social tensions in American life. By
fashioning soft sculptures out of various
textiles she creates works that allow an
accessible entry point into the problems
of place, identity, and gender.

m/s
Junpei
INOUE
Junpei Inoue is a multidisciplinary artist
working between Tokyo and Brooklyn.
He is the editor and chief of Pan
Magazine. His work explores various
materialities, in his recent works he
creates intricate yarn-based works that
are both hand woven and then hand
dyed using careful applications of
acrylic paint.

a/t
Takuji
HAMANAKA
As a classically-trained Japanese woodblock
printer, Takuji Hamanaka employs a self-created
set of rules as the impetus for his new creations.
His works explore the possibilities available
through such a confined practice, while their
vibrancy demonstrates the possibilities of
dimensionality in 2D representation.

a/t
Judit
JUST
After studying fashion design, sculpture and
textile art, Judit Just’s works reflect the rich
history of textiles she inherits from her mother
and her native Spain, while bringing in a
contemporary sensibility to these ancient
techniques.

a/t/m
Wendy
CHIEN
Windy Chien makes art that activates space
and crafts objects that elevate the daily rituals
of life. Her installations focus on the
possibilities of space and she uses rope as a
three dimensional stand in for line, immersing
viewers in a multi-planar experience. Her
knotted works portray both a mechanical
fascination and a strong sense of design
aesthetic while playing on the mixed histories
that have given rise to their forms.

t/a
Liene
BOSQUÊ
Liene Bosquê’s works exist at the
intersection between people and
place. Her recent textile works
reveal architectural and community
histories through site-specific
engagements with structures in the
built environment. She investigates
the passage of time through the lens
of presence and absence.

m/a/s/t
Denise
TREIZMAN
Remixing the surreptitious detritus of her daily
life, Denise Treizman’s sculptures exist in flux
as precarious structures that explore material
relations. Playfully, they refashion place as
non-place in their anachronistic juxtapositions
and examine how value can be converted in
the alchemy of experience and surprise.

m/s/t
Alta
BUDEN
Drawing on the field of
evolutionary biology, her
childhood experience with
New Age Mysticism, and past
scientific work at the Field
Museum of Natural History,
Alta Buden’s works explore
our relationship to the
environment. She focuses on
site specific “recordings” using
various media to document an
ever evolving landscape.

m/s/t
Rachel
HAYES
An internationally acclaimed artist,
Rachel Hayes works describe the
balance between power and fragility
through her large scale fabric structures,
while they simultaneously incorporate
various processes like sewing, painting,
quilt making, into their exploration of
architectural narratives. Her abstract
works manage to speak the language of
painting through sculpture, while being
textile-oriented and articulated.

a/t/m
Samantha
BITTMAN
Samantha Bittman’s optically
enchanting works use a mixture of
painting and weaving to highlight the
similarities between the grid based
structures of both ancient weaving
techniques and modern image making
in pixel based software.

a/t
Sophia
NARRETT
Sophia Narrett builds up intricate worlds
and delicate social situations in
embroidered compositions. Her works
often depict power relations between
genders in subtly subversive if tragically
beautiful ways.

m/s/t
Bisa
BUTLER
Building on lessons inherited from her
mother and grandmother, Bisa Butler’s
quilt-based works portray figures and
situations strongly tied to her
community and African American
identity while poignantly demonstrating
the power of representation and textile
heritage.

m/s/t
Baseera
KHAN
Baseera Khan is a New York-based artist whose
work shares experiences of exile and kinship
shaped by economic, pop cultural, and political
situations. She mixes consumerism with spirituality
and treats decolonial histories, practices, and
archives as geographies of the future.

m/s
Philip
STEARNS
Using an impressive array of technological
techniques for manipulating and
visualizing data, Philip Stearns’ work takes
advantage of the similarities between
computers’ binary language and the
jacquard loom to bring to life his woven
compositions.

m/a/s/t
Meg
LIPKE
In her recent works
Meg Lipke explores the
boundaries of
abstraction in relation to
form by creating
provocative
compositions that
challenge the strictures
of shape, dimension,
texture. She builds
upon her family history
in the textile industry to
make objects that
critique the domestic,
while slyly hinting at the
female form and
feminist sculpture from
the 70s.

a/t
Jenny
RASK
Jenny Rask’s works explore finitude and
materiality. Fascinated by the state of
incompletion or of indeterminacy she
employs an array of techniques to create
sculptures built from everyday detritus that
highlight the precarity of this liminal state.

m/s/t
Tanya
Aguiniga
Engaging the languages of community activism and public art, Tanya Aguiniga leverages craft as a tactic to generate
dialogs around identity, culture, and gender. Aguiñiga is also the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between
Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national
transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness
while simultaneously documenting the border.

m/a/s/t
Erica
KANE FINK
Erica Kane Fink’s makes bold works focused
strongly on the spontaneity of process and
exploration of craft.

a/t
Ruben
MARROQUIN
Ruben Marroquin’s explorations of history and
politics evince themselves through his novel
application textile, thread, and embroidery.
His works can be both abstract and
representational functioning at the junction of
painting and fiber.

m/a/t
Victoria
Manganiello
Victoria Manganiello’s works seek to physically
control and manipulate space. With an interest in
the interplay of the natural and synthetic material
and the expanded use of the loom, the artist
transforms her raw materials to create complex
woven paintings and sculptures that challenge
the historical definition of craft.

m/s/t
Melissa
Dadourian
Melissa Dadourian’s “Soft Geometry”
series juxtaposes hard-edged geometric
abstraction with the female form.
Translating colors and shapes into knitted-
textiles, her 2D wall pieces question the
femininity typically associated with the
practice and delicate materials by
conveying the works through aggressive
geometric forms.

s/a/t
Françoise
GROSSEN
Françoise Grossen creates these cumulative sculptures inspired by inchworms, placing each on bespoke rectangular
pedestals, to highlight their uniqueness even as they speak the language of tapestry and carpet. They are indeed built
upon each other as she challenges the flatness of line with volume creating an additive structure itself unique and
strangely familiar.

m/t/s
Katie
GONG
Through a unique process
of steam bending wood,
Katie Gong is able to
create woven and braided
sculptures that interrogate
our perceptions of the
medium. Through their
connection with nature,
and their particular forms,
her works inspire with a
mixture of ingenuity and
insouciance.

t
David B.
SMITH
David B Smith makes fabric-based photo-
sculpture that explores fantasy, loss, commodity,
and connection in American culture.
To gain access to the back-end of cultural
memory, he playfully rearranges iconography
using pseudo programming code - comprised of
digital and analog fragmentation, accreditation,
and reorientation. He isolates patterns, crosses
wires, and entertains poetic interpretations,
making the once familiar strange and unsettling,
yet oddly cozy.

a/t
Julia
BLAND
Bland intertwines traditions
of painting and weaving to
confound the boundaries of
abstraction and
representation, geometry
and symbolism, and
ornamentation and
structure.

a/t
Tahir Carl
KARMALI
Through a careful deployment of materials and techniques Karmali’s works are able to tackle specific narratives within
a larger critique of the displacements in the shifting global economy
This project in particular “uses cobalt oxide extracted from Lithium-Ion Batteries and Raffia. Cobalt is a commodity
that is extracted through mining and recently become a crucial material needed for rechargeable batteries. Cobalt is
very often sourced from the Congo through mining practices that infringe on human rights laws – this perpetuates
colonial and neo-colonial perceptions of acquiring raw material from Africa. The following works are made by
dismantling phone batteries to extract the copper, cobalt oxide and aluminum to create a dye. The raffia is then dyed
in this solution and then stitched together with the copper. The dying technique refers to a Congolese method of
creating Kuba cloth, though modified to create motifs of rock strata to discuss both ideas of mining and repeated
histories.

m/s
Amber
ROBLES-GORDON
Blending gender, ethnicity, along with her social and cultural experiences Amber Robles Gordon’s work speak to that
hybridity which presages the future. Her works evoke femininity and healing through their relationships with color
and light, transcending form. Incorporating found objects and discarded materials she is able to simultaneously
critique society’s negative engagement with the environment.

m/s
Diedrick
BRACKENS
Brackens’ category-jamming textiles
interweave elements of European tapestry,
West African weavings and Southern quilting
techniques. His works, somewhere between
painting and sculpture, folk and fine art, rest
partly on the wall and partly on the floor.
Combining elements of domestic craft with
various artistic traditions, Brackens
sometimes opts for commercial colors, other
times, he creates his hues from tea, wine and
bleach, yielding a fleshy shade that alludes to
bodily fluids and the gay vernacular.

m/a/s/t
Adrian
ESPARZA
Adrian Esparza creates hybrid objects deconstructing the Mexican serape of his native El Paso into abstract
geometric forms that recast to narratives of mid-century explorations of form in both art and architecture.

m/t
MOROCCAN
CONTEXT
The weaving traditions of Morocco are a testament to
how these women weavers live their lives, celebrate their
Amazigh identity, and sustain their ancient craft in the
face of a globalizing world.
In a country where the majority of rural women are illiterate, weaving has
survived for centuries without textbooks or trade schools.
About
Older the Artisans
women weavers train younger girls,
passing down the skills orally,
generation after generation.
 It is common to find
women in rural Morocco
with looms in their kitchens,
sheep in their backyards,
and recently-dyed wool
hanging from their
clothes lines.
About the Artisans

These ladies live in agrarian societies

where they split their time
between working the fields,
taking care of the household,
and weaving their rugs.
Because these women learn the craft orally,
weaving is closely connected to ancient tribal
boundaries throughout the country, with each rural
area championing its own unique weaving style.
 The result is an incredible diversity of rug designs,
each showcasing the specific artistic traditions
central to the identity of the tribal regions of Morocco.
the
TEAM
Julian
JIMAREZ HOWARD
Curator

Julian is an artist and independent curator

based in New York. He is a Co-Director at
artist-run peripatetic curatorial collective
Associated Gallery, and was the founder/co-
director of OUTLET Fine Art. He has
exhibited his work throughout NY and
internationally, most recently in the Artist Led
Initiatives section of the 2018 Dhaka Art
Summit. His curated exhibitions have been
featured in The New York Times, New York
Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artnet News,
Artinfo, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary
Art, Bushwick Daily and many others.
Both Julian's curatorial endeavors and
artwork primarily focus on topics of intention,
articulation, and reception.
Alia
KATE
Producer
Alia Kate is the owner of Kantara, a fair-trade design
business that specializes in Moroccan rugs. Since
2008, Alia has worked directly with the same weaving
cooperatives in rural Morocco and is committed to
fostering economic development of the women artisans
through ethical trade.
Alia has cultivated a career that revolves around social
innovation, international development, and experiential
education. Some of her past experience includes
managing the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit
Leadership at Claremont McKenna College, launching
the Social Innovation Program at Sequoyah High
School, and most recently, working as Director of
Advancement at Claremont Graduate University. In
each of these capacities, Alia has engaged thought
leaders in different sectors throughout Los Angeles.
She is a graduate of Oberlin College and was recently
selected as an inaugural fellow in Coro’s Lead LA
leadership and professional training program. Alia is a
member of the board of directors of Fulcrum Arts.