An installation view of “Xenobia Bailey: Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk: The Second Coming." On the floor is the show’s centerpiece, “Sistah Paradise’s Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent.” Courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
In Xenobia Bailey’s “Shooting Star,” 2008, a kaleidoscopic grouping is given an arching comet tail. Courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
Xenobia Bailey: Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk: The Second Coming
by Holland Cotter
June 6, 2024
As in the case of Manny Vega’s work, the art of Xenobia Bailey has a prominent public presence in New York City. Her gleaming glass mosaic “Funktional Vibrations,” a 2015 Metropolitan Transportation Authority commission, arches, like a sky of shooting stars, over the entrance to the Hudson Yards subway station on 34th Street. Yet her current exhibition at the gallery Venus Over Manhattan is her first solo show here in some 20 years.
And like Vega, with his murals and beadwork, Bailey — born in Seattle in 1955 — has chosen to work primarily in a crafts-associated medium, namely fiber crochet. She came to it via a roundabout route, through the study of painting (Jacob Lawrence was one of her teachers), ethnomusicology, millinery and costume design. She learn hand crochet from the master needleworker Bernadette Sonona, and ended up putting this low-technology technique to extravagant use.
Bailey’s initial crochet pieces were body-scaled, based on African headpieces and hairstyles. (Some of her early designs can be spotted in Spike Lee’s 1989 movie, “Do the Right Thing.” An “Afrocentricity” hat, of the kind worn by Samuel L. Jackson in the film, is in the show.) The direction she was headed was Afrofuturistic, and her focus soon lifted off from wearables to producing the equivalent of fabric murals, which seemed to exist in spiritual realms proposed by performers like George Clinton and Sun Ra.
Here we visit that realm. Big, jazzily patterned crochet circles, crosses between mandalas and domestic throw rugs, predominate. Some hang alone on the wall, or, in “Sun Birthing” (1999), are joined together in a galactic cluster. Here and there, perfect circularity is varied. In “C-Trane Express Track” (circa 2000), a circle is stretched into propulsive ellipsis. In “Shooting Star” (2008), a kaleidoscopic grouping is given an arching comet tail. And in the early “She Bop-She Boom” (1996/1999), a grouping of connected circles serves as a bed of repose for a small, solid indigo female figure.
The dates of this last work indicate that it took three years to reach its finished state, and the show’s centerpiece, “Sistah Paradise’s Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent” took fully 16 years, from 1993 to 2009. You can see why. It’s a complex thing. Positioned in the center of the gallery, suspended over a flaming sun-shaped carpet, and ornamented with cowrie shells, its form is that of African royalty and priestly crown; its apparent function is as a meditative room-for-one-person shelter in which enchantments are cast and futures foretold. The words “Mystic Seer” are stitched over the entrance to this hand-sewn tour de force. Add “Artistic” to “Mystic” and you get Bailey’s identity exactly right.
Through June 15. Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 212-980-0700, venusovermanhattan.com.
