Arts Paper | Arts Council of Greater New Haven

Jarelis Calderon

"E Pluribus" & One Artist's Vision Of A Welcoming America

Jarelis Calderon Photos. All artwork by Muriel Stockdale. The gallery walls seemed to bloom with color. Flags stretched across nearly every wall of the space, each one different from the next. Some shimmered with fabric, others beckoned, layered with intricate patterns, beads, embroidery and objects connected to the cultures they represented. In the center of the room hung the largest flag of them all, covered in traced outlines of hands. Hundreds of them overlapped across the fabric, creating a patchwork of people who had each left a small piece of themselves behind. For artist Muriel Stockdale, whose solo exhibition E Pluribus runs at City Gallery through Sunday, the flags are more than colorful works of art. They are a way to think about identity, culture and what it means for people from different places to build a life together. For more than two decades, Stockdale has been turning those ideas into fabric compositions, creating more than 60 flags representing different cultures and collecting the stories, traditions and materials that give each one meaning.