Artist Malene Barnett Celebrates the African Diaspora With New Work

Breaking boundaries and blending mediums and techniques in art, textile design, and activism, Bed Stuy-based artist Malene Barnett celebrates the experiences and traditions of the African diaspora in her work.

After helping boost the profile of fellow Black creatives with the founding in 2018 of the curated collective Black Artists + Designers Guild, the well-established textile designer was eager to get back into the studio. She soon added clay and glass to a repertoire that already included drawing and painting.

“The materials are really driving what I create,” Barnett says. She was interested in finding a material that had “unlimited possibilities of what it could be.” When she started working with clay, she “felt a spiritual connection” with the medium.

Clay sculpture, woven paper portraits, and works in clay that straddle painting and sculpture incorporate historic and modern techniques from the African diaspora to tell the stories of her ancestors. Recent pieces focus on four generations of her family and their migration from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to the U.S.

Sculptures resembling vessels draw on a variety of “ancestral processes” such as hand building, mud architecture techniques in Ghana and Nigeria, African headwraps and adire indigo dyed fabric.

Cracks and fissures distinguish glaze-painted bas-relief portraits of family. “Thinking about what happens during a migration and the things you leave behind,” she began to cut out parts of the silhouettes.

“I allowed the cracks to work with the story I’m telling because there are so many cracks, gaps, and spaces when we talk about archives,” says Barnett, who next heads to Jamaica on a Fulbright scholarship and is working on a book with Artisan. “Being part of the Black diaspora is a constant reinvention; you are constantly putting pieces of history together.”

[Photos by Malene Barnett]

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Brownstoner magazine.

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