Library Street Collective is pleased to announce our participation in Untitled Art 2024 (Booth C13) in Miami from December 4th through 8th, 2024. The gallery will present a collection of tapestries, quilts, weavings, and assemblages by artists Akea Brionne, Christy Matson, Gary Tyler, and Tyrrell Winston.

For over four decades, Tyler has been working at the intersection of art and social justice, teaching himself how to quilt to support the Angola Prison Hospice program, where he was a volunteer. At the age of 16, Tyler was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Though his case was the subject of international outcry, the artist spent 42 years in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana before being released at the age of 57. Although his artistic practice was born out of injustice, it eminently generates hope. Tyler’s applique quilts are created from photographs and news images, many of which were widely circulated in the media and in protests calling for the artist’s release. In his work, Tyler revisits these moments in time, reclaiming mediated images while asserting agency over his likeness and representation. Tyler is a 2019 and 2020 Art Matters Awardee, and the winner of the 2024 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize.

Matson’s woven, wall-mounted works combine the skill, sensitivity and craft of painting and hand weaving with the digital process of a Jacquard loom. Matson begins her process with watercolors, ink drawings, collages and other works on paper before moving to a computational process that translates her compositions into instructions for her loom; as she works the machine, Matson improvises by hand with trust and nuance. The jacquard allows the creation of organic curves and lines, and the artist feels that the process creates a bridge between the historical aspect of hand weaving and the contemporary use of industrial digital technology: “The painterly quality to the weaving is really amazing. I can almost see the brush strokes.”

Brionne is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist, working within Afro-Surrealism. Working in lens-based media and textiles, her work analyzes the impact of colonial systems on cultural storytelling, memory, assimilation, and the African Diaspora, primarily within American and Caribbean society. Brionne explores the artist’s relationship to the loss of ancestral knowledge, and the understanding of one’s self through cultural awareness that has been deeply severed by colonial expansion and domination. She illustrates moments of trying to “remember” through symbols and gestures that allude to folklore, mythology and biblical reference. Through memory, she works to process her family’s migratory patterns, from Belize to Honduras to New Orleans. While Brionne maintains an ongoing dialogue with her ancestors by decontextualizing images sourced from her family’s archive, recent work reflects a burgeoning interest in engaging with historical movements in painting. Traces of Cubism are apparent in the geometric, fragmented structures of her scenes, as well as nods to Diego Rivera as a stylistic influence in her figures.

Winston is known for his basketball wall sculptures that explore the concept of embedded history and the abstraction of an object’s physical past. Similarly, his net sculptures utilize a mass of found basketball nets that show the love and wear of seasons of time spent hanging in public courts. The idea began with a comment overheard while he was gathering paper and other debris for his collages near a Brooklyn park: “I heard a kid comment how much it bothered him that no one replaced basketball nets that were broken or missing on courts around the city. It was a lightbulb moment.” This was his chance to look up rather than down as he walked the streets, and he began to use the old woven nets in his work as he replaced them for the players in his community. These objects have embedded histories that are abstract and infinite; were they loved, forgotten, lost, stolen, passed down, thrown away? In an age where we’ve lost sight of material consequence, Winston’s net assemblages are a reminder that the things we discard don’t simply disappear, and that these objects can have new life through artmaking.