DIEDRICK
BRACKENS

Diedrick Brackens works primarily through tapestry, drawing on a wide range of textile traditions that include West African weaving practices, European techniques, and the quilting traditions of the American South. Rather than treating tapestry as a fixed or self-contained format, he often constructs his works from multiple woven sections that are later joined together through stitching, echoing the strip-based construction of many African textiles. This method simultaneously acknowledges historical lineages and disrupts the conventional rectangular integrity associated with traditional tapestry.

His compositions unfold through a dynamic interplay of chromatic fields and simplified forms that hover between abstraction and figuration. Human and animal bodies, mythic beings, and symbolic motifs emerge from these woven surfaces, generating narratives that often feel dreamlike, allegorical, or only partially revealed. Weaving becomes not merely a medium but a narrative structure through which personal memory, collective history, and cultural mythology are intertwined.

Brackens frequently draws inspiration from African and African American literature, poetry, folklore, and oral traditions, often centering moments of intimacy, vulnerability, and tenderness between Black men. His process begins with the hand-dyeing of cotton, a material chosen in conscious recognition of its deep entanglement with histories of enslavement, labor, and migration. Alongside commercial dyes, he employs unconventional pigments such as tea, wine, and bleach, creating rich tonal variations that reinforce the layered temporalities embedded in his work.

The resulting tapestries offer nuanced reflections on Black identity, cultural memory, and familial inheritance. References ranging from religious iconography to folklore and fantastical creatures coexist within compositions that carefully balance figuration and abstraction, assemblage and collage. Through these intricate woven structures, Brackens constructs complex visual arguments that bridge historical absences and present realities, filtered through a distinctly poetic and magical-realist sensibility.

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, Texas, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 2011, and his MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2014. Selected solo exhibitions include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2026); The Holburne Museum, Bath, and Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah (2025); Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2024, 2021, 2020); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2023); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston (2022–23). His work is part of the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.