Top: Work by Margaret Roleke, Heather Hope Gendron and Lauren Flaaen in Soft Landing. Bottom: Detail, Sok Song. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Artist Nadine Nelson, whose work is also in the show, submitted the following citizen contribution.
Visualize the emotion wheel with its vivid colors and stratified emotions all separated by organized rings. At its core sits the primary frequency—raw, absolute, and undeniable—radiating outward into increasingly layered and precise iterations as you move from the center. Joy deepens into tenderness; anger sharpens into indignation; grief softens into longing. Each ring builds nuance, color, and specific truth into the material. Red deepens to crimson, then softens to rose.
Soft Landing, the group show exhibition organized by Yale MFA student Moshopefoluwa Olagunju and on view at 63 Audubon St. through May 6, works exactly this way. At its center sits a single powerful premise: material sovereignty, the right to determine what fabric means, who it belongs to, and what it can become. Move outward from the center, and you find 21 artists across a variety of disciplines, ranging from photography, sculpture, painting, fiber, and installation, each radiating different frequencies and truths from different cultures, different histories, different materials, and different techniques. All are circling the same sun, with textile, fabric, and cloth as the connection.
The sun and the nucleus are Gee’s Bend. In the rural Black Belt of Alabama, the women of that community have been making quilts since the time of enslavement, working with flour sacks, worn-out work clothes, and salvaged scraps. They developed a visual language so bold, symbolic, and innovative that even the blue-chip art world had to eventually reckon with their “material” brilliance. The women of Gee’s Bend worked improvisationally, following their own artistic paths, passing techniques and aesthetic knowledge from hand to hand across generations like a griot passes stories: not written down, not institutionalized, but alive in the body, alive in the textiles created.
That is the tradition Soft Landing inherits. The exhibition extends the understanding that textiles are not just decoration; they are legacy in transmission, front and center. In recent years, fiber and textile arts have moved from the margins of the art world toward the center, finally receiving the critical recognition they have long deserved. This exhibition is part of that shift. It insists on craft as intellectual practice, on domestic arts as political form, and on the fabric closest to our skin as the place where the deepest stories and histories are stored.
Passed Down Through Hands
Ana Espinal, Mother’s Grey Hair.
Laura Capriles, for instance, builds her embroideries slowly and deliberately, working with what she calls "repetition and slow gestures." Her works Frequency in Red / Puka Kutiy and Shadows in White / Yuraq Llantuy draw from South American weaving traditions, in which techniques and ways of knowing the world are passed between generations through women's hands, “like a memory settling into the material. " If you stand close, you can feel the insistence of repetition that refuses containment.
Sok Song works similarly, bringing Korean jogakbo, which is a patchwork assembled from discarded scraps historically used to wrap and safeguard food and gifts for loved ones, into direct conversation with the Gee’s Bend lineage. In works like Camo Between Han and Stitched Between Worlds, materials such as hanji, hanbok fragments, iridescent organza, and recycled textiles form what Song calls constellations of memory, moving between visibility and opacity. Two traditions, two continents, one understanding: you take what was left over and you make it last.
Work by Inkpa Mani.
Inkpa Mani carries this further into the terrain of survivance, a portmanteau of “survival” and “resistance” that connotes the continuation and resilience of Indigenous peoples. The Muki series is named after the Rarámuri word for "woman." Layers of calico fabric, soil, earth, pigment, stone, and cotton paper are treated to reassemble brain-tanned hide into compositions that bind land memory to body memory.
The calico is not incidental. Introduced under Spanish and Mexican colonial rule as a tool of assimilation, a way of marking and othering Indigenous people, it was transformed over generations into a symbol of Rarámuri cultural identity and resistance. The triangle designs in the garments reflect the trails of the Sierra Madre mountains. The land is always embedded in the material, a memory that colonization could not erase. A heavy basalt stone presses down on each composition. The work holds the weight without breaking. This is what survivance looks like. Mani describes the works as “both totems and future ancestors:” not merely surviving, but actively, continuously, and materially persisting.
Reclaiming The Image
Nadine Nelson's Caribbean Black Queens 1 and 2.
Fabric has long been used to assign identity and mark who belongs, who does not, who labors, who is served, who is documented, and who is declared. Several works in Soft Landing take that history directly to hand.
Caribbean Black Queens 1 and 2, by this artist, layers archival portraits of Black Caribbean women over large Madras textile backgrounds. Madras is a fabric deeply rooted in the history of Caribbean labor, colonial trade, and domestic service, which was ironically imposed as a uniform before it became a cultural signifier. For people like Jamaica's national folk hero Ms. Lou, and members of New Haven's own Caribbean Association, WeDehYah, Inc., Madras has become a national costume.
In the pieces, I flank these domestic figures with a halo of paint and jeweled embellishments. The works pull the central figures out of the past into iconographic presence for posterity.
Alexzandria Robin's Bubble Gum Western approaches the same question through 3D sculpture. A ball-jointed doll wears a garment assembled from antique quilt fragments. These fabric pieces have absorbed the touch of labor and memory across generations. The doll is inspired by Biddy Mason, the enslaved woman who walked from Mississippi to California, purchased her own freedom, and became one of Los Angeles' first female landowners and philanthropists.
Robin asks us to sit with the question the work refuses to answer simply: "How do you fashion yourself as a free person when freedom is newly yours?" The antique quilt, which was once someone else's warmth and sustenance, becomes an act of self-definition and self-fulfilling prophecy.
Reggie Woolery's Tronie # 4 and Tronie #5, both completed in 2025. The work on the right is Jeff Ostergren's Post-Roe Landscape (Combipack), 2024.
Meanwhile, artist Reggie Woolery dismantles the colonial gaze from inside its own tradition. A tronie is a 17th-century Dutch genre of painting that turned human beings, often women and people of color, into aesthetic objects for European consumption and objectification.
Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, for instance, is the most famous example: a face rendered for someone else's pleasure and possession. Woolery's Tronie #4 and Tronie #5, displayed in museum-style glass cases, present tattered embroidery hoops punctured with holes and saturated in indigo and violet. Beautiful in their decay, there is no face. The individual has been dissolved back into collective memory, and the fabric itself holds what was witnessed, offering the colonial gaze nothing to land on.
Nothing Gets Thrown Away
Grace Han’s Thank You / Take Care in the gallery.
One of the exhibition's quietest but most insistent themes is stewardship. There is an understanding that materials carry life beyond their original purpose and that the act of reusing, repurposing, and repairing is both political and practical.
With a bevy of fabric textures including hair, for instance, Christl Stringer's monochromatic green fabric collage Benediction addresses Black people's complex relationship to American land and how they tended it, cultivated it, and cared for it across generations and were never credited for doing so. The land and those who loved it are still here.
Grace Han’s Thank You / Take Care sews the mundane plastic bag into jagakbo patterns. The most disposable of objects in commercial life is transformed into a lineage of devotion. The bag held someone's groceries, was persistently reused long past its intended life, and, through the act of sewing, became something cared for, something considered. Young Grace Chi contemplates in Dusted and Cast a large floor sculpture made of scagliola and fractured textile fragments. Scagliola is an old Italian method of making plaster, glue and other material to mimmick marble or hard stone.
“The logics and constraints of the found/gathered/accumulated materials dictate the series of compositions that form the final piece.” This is a mantra Chi and many of the artists of Soft Landing share.
Soft Materials, Full Spectrum
The emotion wheel’s outer rings are where the show's range becomes most vivid and the colors push into their fullest hues.
Alec Dai’s photograph, mother and son hang fabric, his immigrant parents' home in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, every weekend with a red curtain symbolizing luck and celebration, and concrete poured over backyard grass where the American dream is reconstructed on immigrant terms. The fabric in his images is a symbol of his family's belonging and life in this country. It is a queer Chinese American childhood that is rendered with tenderness and precision. Ana Espinal’s photograph, Mother’s Grey Hair, she holds her mother's gray hair with white lace wrapped in tiny flowers around her hand in a self-portrait where fabric acts as a support system for the weight of personal history. Madeline Eldridge’s, Polyfill Frame, works with polyfill from a comforter shared with a former lover and far from a childhood pet. These specific materials are from specific moments of intimacy, honored as what she calls a point of reverence.
Raymond's, the body rehearses tomorrow, layers translucent fabric panels directly onto the wall without frame or resolution, building memory through partial impressions rather than fixed narratives. The body he writes about rehearses tomorrow through sensation and touch.
The emotion wheel turns harder. In Three Latuda Patients, Jeff Ostergren paints on Kevlar ballistic fabric using a pharmaceutical pointillist technique where each color is mixed with a specific drug, producing works on reproductive rights, gender politics, and the body under chemical and political pressure, all on a substrate designed to stop bullets. Margaret Roleke with Repair also works in Kevlar, fracturing and reassembling the American flag through sewing and embroidery. This is stitching not as restoration but as a witness to continue to work on something that is traditionally associated with comfort and be an active recorder of the social trauma our country tries to hide.
Michelle Beaulieu Morgan's Wamidal is punch needle tapestry that renders with humor and ferocity, addressing menopause and being comfortable in her own skin. Seemingly, she believes soft materials can hold the hardest truths, including the emotional baggage our society attributes to “women as no longer useful vessels. " Heather Hope Gendron in Pin Pricked depicts shapeshifting in needlepoint with a body becoming a plant, a man becoming a woman, and a woman becoming a garden; all liberating transformations turn a historically domestic woman's practice into something mythological.
Gabriellea Mazza’s Beata Divina Melodia shapes acrylic yarn and cotton around saints, goddesses, and magical beings, channeling the sacred into the familiar home. Lev lays down the experience of gender identity stitch by meticulous stitch in Resurrection, that serves as a reminder in thread of who they are and what they have come to feel in poetry lines that read “I never meant to take your wings." Lauren Flaaen in Flesh and Bone knows that textiles hold stories and emotional weight carried with domestic labor. She honors the overlooked hands with each repair and active preservation in her braided and knotted textile installation and soft sculpture ladder.
This is what material sovereignty looks like in full color spectrum, across 21 hands, radiating outward from a center that was always known: to choose your fabric and to decide what it means and what it becomes is the most fundamental creative act. The Gee's Bend quilters knew it. The griot tradition knows it. Every artist in this room knows it.
Come partake and read what the cloth has been trying to say in its myriad of forms and messages. Closing reception is on Wednesday, May 6, 5-7 p.m.