Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada, Peter Benson Miller, Helaine Posner, Tracy Fitzpatrick, Mark Robbins

"Long engaged with the botanical--palm trees, Tangier's native irises, weeds, and the ragged edges of the urban landscape--Barrada has lately explored the foraging and extraction of natural pigments and the dyeing of fabric, an ancient tradition codified in the modern period by, among others, the English textile designer and socialist activist William Morris in The Art of Dyeing (1889). Among Barrada's upcoming projects is the creation of a dye garden in Tangier--in the same spirit as the garden laid out by the Dada artist Hannah Höch in Germany--as an extension of her multidisciplinary community building projects, which date back to her founding of the Cinémathèque de Tanger eleven years ago. The new textile works shown in this exhibition--designed and hand-dyed by Barrada-- reference Frank Stella's series of fluorescent paintings from 1964-65, inspired in part by the Moroccan...