Xenobia Bailey
American, born 1955
Sistah Paradise and the Egungun from the series Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk – Phase II, 1999
Tapestry crochet, acrylic and cotton yarn, wire, beads
Purchase: The Reverend and Mrs. Van S. MerleSmith, Jr. Endowment Fund, 2000. (2000.17.1)
Xenobia Bailey’s crocheted sculpture brings together two African healers—Sistah Paradise (from Senegal) and the Egungun (from the Yoruba of West Africa)—to present a narrative of resistance and renewal.
The feminine form of this sculpture is based on Sistah Paradise, a fictional mystic who used her magical abilities to free enslaved Africans. She would spin mystical thread from plantation cotton and crochet an elaborate tent, where enslaved people could drink from her tea set and be transported back to Africa. Bailey also includes bright color, mixed patterns, and concentric circles to reference the Egungun, ancestor spirits manifested through clothing who bestow blessings and protection on their lineage during annual festivals in Yoruba communities.
Bailey sees her sculptures as meditative tools for addressing generational trauma stemming from enslavement and the forced assimilation policies that followed the American Civil War. Bailey references this repressive period, known as Reconstruction (1863–1877), in the title of her series Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, which subverts histories of oppression and provides viewers with a safe haven for exploring their African identity.
Nitza Tufiño
American, born Mexico, 1949
Pareja Taína (Taíno Couple), 1972
Acrylic, charcoal and polyurethane on Masonite
El Museo del Barrio, Museum Purchase through the support of George Aguirre, National Endowment for the Arts, Boricua College, the Reader’s Digest Foundation and individual contributions.
Nitza Tufiño found inspiration for this couple’s stylized features in the rock carvings made by the Taíno, an Indigenous people of the Caribbean. The man has a green coquí, or frog, on his chest, and a face that echoes Taíno depictions of the sun god. The woman’s face draws from the same design vocabulary, but resembles a gas mask, perhaps alluding to the Vietnam War.
Like other artists of Puerto Rican heritage in New York City during the 1970s, Tufiño used Taíno imagery to celebrate and empower her community. She became one of the leading artists in the Nuyorican Movement, a group which included poets, musicians, and artists creating work about the Puerto Rican experience in New York.
Glendalys Medina
American, born 1979
Atabey, 2022-2023
Plywood, nails, thread, chalkboard paint, ink, oil paint, and wire
El Museo del Barrio, Courtesy of the Artist
“The Indigenous people were the first graffiti artists.” – Glendalys Medina
Medina’s Atabey draws inspiration from rock carvings by the Taíno, an Indigenous people who lived and still live throughout the Caribbean. In doing so, Medina follows in the footsteps of an earlier generation of Nuyorican artists—like the makers of the neighboring works here who used Taíno imagery to offer diasporic Puerto Ricans a sense of identity and pride.
Medina creates a rich range of allusions with this work. Webs of string and wire suggest the speakers of a boombox, recalling the hip-hop culture that the artist grew up with in the Bronx. Nails evoke central African power figures, while the color gold to refers to Spanish colonizers’ desire for the precious metal as well as their descriptions of the “sun-kissed” Taíno complexion.
Wanda Maria Quiñones
American
Untitled (Taíno symbols), 1977
Linen batik
El Museo del Barrio
This textile draws inspiration from petroglyphs, or rock carvings, by the Taíno,
an Indigenous Caribbean people.
Do you notice any symbols in this textile that also appear in the artworks at left?
Angel Suarez-Rosado
American, born 1957
White Fence, 2003
Found objects, wood, paint
Purchase: The Ardath Rodale Art Fund, 2021.
(2021.7a, b)
Puerto Rican-born, Easton-based Angel Suarez-Rosado plays with expectations in his installation White Fence. On approach, we see a white picket fence that suggests an uncomplicated American domestic ideal. Passing through, we encounter hybrid symbols of violence, pain, and great spiritual power.
Suarez-Rosado is a practitioner of Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion that merges elements of West African Yoruba faith with Catholicism, and was a means for enslaved Africans to maintain their identity in the Americas. In its use of sharp metal objects, nails, and tools, White Fence recognizes Ogun, the god of iron and war in the pantheon of Yoruban deities. Nails hammered into the surface of the fence recall nkisi, central African power figures whose forms were the result of both creation and use, contributed to by a sculptor and a priest, who used the figure to heal illness, settle disputes, and punish wrongdoers.
Artist once known
Javanese (Indonesian)
Sarong, ca. 1928
Cotton batik with block-printed wax resist
Gift of Mrs. Calvert Ellis, 1986. (1986.47.3)
Indonesian women perfected this resist-dyed art—called batik—over the course of centuries. To create the elaborate patterns seen here, the maker added the designs using copper blocks and
hot wax. These waxed areas would remain white when the textile was dyed, creating striking contrast.
In multicolored textiles like this one, the process would be repeated for each color.
Traditional batiks often feature birds, flowers, butterflies, as well as geometric borders.
This sarong combines these motifs in a new bouquet arrangement, a style called buketan that was popular
in European trade markets from 1900 to 1930.
Bertram Hartman
American, 1882–1960
The Huntsman, ca. 1924
Watercolor
Purchase: The Gift of John and Fannie Saeger, 2003. (2003.11)
This watercolor was inspired by Indonesian batiks – resist-dyed textiles – that the artist encountered in New York in the 1910s. Hartman was enamored with the intricacy of batiks and hoped to emulate
their sharp edges and stylized motifs, as seen in the batik textile on view at left.
He designed batik wall hangings and wool punched rugs based on his watercolors in
the hopes of reviving American interest in traditional Indonesian textiles.
American, 1906–1965
Untitled, ca. 1933
Oil on canvas
Purchase: Leigh Schadt and Edwin Schadt Art Museum Trust, 1998. (1998.8)
This abstract painting was inspired by a trip to the Virgin Islands in 1931–1932. Smith was drawn to the area’s unique tropical biome
and incorporated nautical imagery in his artwork during this period.
Elements of coral, shells, starfish, and barnacles informed the shapes,
colors, and textures seen here.
Although at first glance this painting appears purely abstract, from a distance the lines
and patterns transform into a rocky landscape or even a topographical map.
Richard Redd
American, 1931–2017
Elemental Landscape, 1975
Linoleum cut, edition: 20
Printer: the artist
Gift of Karol Roberts Gnerlich, 1977. (1977.22.2)
In this landscape, Richard Redd delved into the mythological nature of the elements:
fire, water, earth, and air. For the artist, the four elements were both physical and
spiritual substances that created all matter on earth. To capture the lifegiving character of these elements,
he created organic shapes with a marbled surface that ebb and
flow across the three prints to imitate stratified rock, vegetation, volcanic channels, and microorganisms.
Nancy Etcitty
Diné (Navajo)
Weaving, 1974
Cotton and wool tapestry weave
Gift of Hampton C. Randolph, Sr., 1984. (1984.38.2)
This pictorial weaving offers a bird’s-eye-view of a Diné community featuring hogans (traditional Diné dwellings),
herds, farming tractors, and the natural mesas of the American Southwest.
The composition visually and spiritually maps the weaver’s sense of belonging and deep connection to the land.
In Diné culture, weaving is intrinsically linked to kinship, cosmology, and Hózhó
(beauty, balance, and harmony). According to Diné legend, the first weaver was
Spider Woman (Na’ashjeii Asdzáá) who wove together the cosmos and bestowed
the knowledge of weaving to the Diné. Over the centuries, Diné weavers have honored the process of weaving – from sheepherding and wool production to designing and working on the loom – as a way to enact Hózhó and bring themselves closer to the local landscape.
Angela Fraleigh
American, born 1976
And then we’ll walk right up to the sun, 2016
Oil, acrylic, and marker on canvas
Purchase: Priscilla Payne Hurd Endowment Fund, 2019. (2019.11)
The art-historical canon typically portrays women as one-dimensional figures to be lusted after, as victims of violence, or as passive background decoration. Allentown artist Angela Fraleigh retrieves such women from the sidelines of respected historic works, giving them new life in her monumental paintings.
In And then we’ll walk right up to the sun, Fraleigh excerpts figures from two paintings by nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was known for imagery that affirmed Western fantasies of the Middle East as a place of sensuality, violence, and submissiveness. While Gérôme used these women as foils for white subjects, Fraleigh makes them the focus of her composition. Her work encourages us to explore their agency and possible subversion—with the white protagonists removed from their scene, what might they choose to do?
Stephen Antonakos
American, born Greece, 1926‑2013
Terrain #13, 2012
German double deep 22 KT gold leaf on
Tyvek, crumpled
Gift of Naomi S. Antonakos in Memory of Ida Tuttle
Spector, 2023. (2023.21)
Stephen Antonakos
American, born Greece, 1926–2013
Saint Nicholas, 1989
Gold leaf on wood with neon
Purchase: The Estelle Reninger Fund, 2022. (2022.20)
Pioneering sculptor of light Stephen Antonakos began his innovative work with neon, which he would continue throughout his career, in the early 1960s. The striking lines of brightly colored neon tubes defined space in public art projects and composition in paintings on unstretched canvases. In the early 1980s, when Antonakos began to make panel paintings, he moved the neon behind the form, so that what once was a hard line now became a soft glow, an almost tangible mass upon which the panel floated.
Antonakos’s Saint Nicholas recalls his early years in a small mountain village in Greece, where tiny chapels served people’s religious needs in a hushed candlelit setting. Resembling a Byzantine icon in its wood panel format, use of gold leaf, and reflective glow, the Neon Panel evokes the potential of the spiritual in the abstract.
Iman Raad
Iranian, born 1979
Until We Hardly See, 2019
Patinas and screen print on copper, edition: 35
Printers: Pedro Barbeito and Jase Clark, Experimental Printmaking Institute, Easton, PA
Publisher: Experimental Printmaking Institute, Easton, PA
Purchase: Priscilla Payne Hurd Endowment Fund, 2019. (2019.12)
A mirrored bird proliferates like a digital glitch in Until We Hardly See, evoking both seventeenth-century South Asian nature paintings and twenty-first-century technologically mediated visual culture. Iman Raad has explained that these works “mainly evolved after my migration to the United States. Living a hybrid life … I have experienced a stammering communication with, and a shattered understanding of my surroundings, and of myself in the eyes of others.”
Raad’s reality-disrupting subversion of form is supported by his unorthodox application of technique. The copper plate, typically a surface from which to print, is here printed on. The dreamlike setting of the image is the result of chemical modification of the metal surface with experimental homemade patinas of salt, vinegar, and Miracle-Gro®.