When textile artist Stephanie Santana became a mother about a decade ago, she started thinking about how to pass along her family history to her son. For several years, she experimented with the concept of textiles as historical records, screenprinting old family photographs onto various fabrics. Then, several years after graduating from a textile design program at the Fashion Institute of New York, Santana began researching her great-aunt Miriam Matthews, who had served as a member of the American Library Association and the California Library Association’s Committee on Intellectual Freedom during the McCarthy era. When Santana learned of her great-aunt’s fight to prevent the establishment of a board of censors at the Los Angeles Public Library system, she delved further into this historical period. This resulted in a series of quilted works that “draw connections to broader themes [of censorship and erasure] that we’re dealing with now,” Santana says. These latest screenprinted quilts are the focus of her solo exhibition Call & Response, currently on view at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn until June 29.
Santana starts each work by deciding its central themes, either by reading bell hooks’s writings or practicing “free association with my grandfather’s photographs or Library of Congress images or my great-aunt’s archives,” she says. Once she has images in mind, she screenprints them onto fabric—usually cotton because of the “softness to it after you wash it”— with a water-based ink. From there, she assembles them into a collage and sews the pieces into a quilt using a machine. (Santana says she has experimented with digital printing, but “screenprinting has more longevity, just in terms that the types of inks that I’m using—I’m intentional about the materials so that [my works] can be archival.”) The finished artwork is at once a document of her family’s history, a testament to Black women as record keepers, and a textile collage rife with symbolism. Santana hopes that her work inspires people to look into their own family histories—and to recognize how that history informs their present day.
