Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Threaded Truths: Memory, Power and the Fabric of Resistance. The presentation brings together the work of eight international artists, Remy Jungerman, Kapwani Kiwanga, Georgina Maxim, Jordan Nassar, Ernesto Neto, Faith Ringgold, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Hank Willis Thomas, and Billie Zangewa. These artists transform fabric into a medium of resistance, connection, and cultural reckoning. The works confront colonial legacies, examine indigenous and diasporic knowledge systems, and respond to urgent political and spiritual realities.
Featured Artworks
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Faith Ringgold’s Jazz Stories: Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow #4 –Nobody Will Ever Love You Like I Do, 2004 is part of her Story Quilt series, a genre the artist pioneered in the early 1980s. The work weaves images and text in the tradition of quilting passed on through the female line of her family from her great-great grandmother who was born into slavery.In African Bird Magic (Gabela Helmet Shrike), 2025 Yinka Shonibare employs hand-stitched quilting to depict animals native to the African continent. Part of a wider series concerned with environmental destruction and the broader impacts of climate change and its disproportionate impact on the Global South. Remy Jungerman’s Pimba SEMOISI III, 2025 traces pathways of patterns from his own heritage, Maroon culture in Suriname, the African Diaspora, to 20th-century Modernism.
In Untitled, 2025, Hank Willis Thomas transforms U.S. flags and prison uniforms into quilts that confront nationalism, incarceration, and systemic violence, turning symbols of state power into acts of mourning and resistance. Billie Zangewa’s hand-stitched silk tapestry, reclaims scenes of everyday life, framing domestic intimacy and Black femininity as sites of strength and quiet rebellion. Jordan Nassar draws from Palestinian tatreez embroidery, merging traditional craft with imagined landscapes to explore diaspora, longing, and cultural inheritance. In They are both good and bad, 2021, Georgina Maxim reconfigures discarded clothing into intricate hand-sewn compositions, layering personal and collective memory into textile forms that speak to resilience, grief, and transformation. Ernesto Neto examines the possibilities of fibers, exploring how textiles can shape space, embody ritual, and open new sensory and political terrains.
Kapwani Kiwanga in her Triangulation series creates quilts out of cotton treated with pigment and salt water from the Atlantic Ocean. Kiwanga extends the intangible components of her narrative compositions continuing her investigation into stories related to the transatlantic slave trade. For the artist the sea is itself an archive and witness of this violent past. Kiwanga’s use of symbols on the textiles allude to the safe houses along the Underground Railroad which were often indicated by a quilt hanging from a clothesline or windowsill in order to help enslaved people to escape north, to Canada and freedom. These quilts were said to be embedded with a code, so that by reading the motifs sewn into the design, an enslaved person on the run could know the area’s immediate dangers or even where to head next.
