A new site-specific textile installation examines coded knowledge, resistance, and memory through quilting traditions and natural-dye processes.
Kapwani Kiwanga. Photographer: Angela Scamarcio
The Studio Museum in Harlem will present ‘BLEED’, a new site-specific commission by French-Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga, opening on 11 March 2026. Installed in the museum’s second-floor project gallery, the work draws on quilting traditions associated with the Underground Railroad and the symbolic languages embedded within their patterns.
Kiwanga’s installation expands these historical references through a monumental textile composition that translates the quilt pattern known as “flying geese” into large-scale, undulating forms. Historically believed to have served as coded guidance for enslaved people seeking routes northward, the motif becomes a visual and conceptual framework through which the artist reflects on systems of communication, migration and resistance.
Quilting traditions and encoded histories
The installation builds on the long-standing role of textiles as carriers of knowledge and memory within African diasporic histories. Quilts linked to the Underground Railroad are often seen as containing coded instructions for escape. By using the “flying geese” motif, Kiwanga revisits this encrypted narrative. She places it within a contemporary spatial setting.
Instead of presenting the motif in its conventional textile format, the artist transforms the geometric pattern into sweeping fields of fabric. These fabric forms fill the gallery. The composition turns the directional symbolism of the original quilt design into a meditation on movement, navigation, and collective survival.
Material processes and diasporic memory
Material processes play a central role in the installation. Kiwanga uses three natural dye techniques to create the palette of black, blue, and crimson. These colours result from processes that reference ecological materials and histories of labour in the Atlantic world.
Black fabric is produced by oxidising a pigment with salt water collected from the Atlantic Ocean, introducing the sea as both a material source and a historical witness. The deep red tones are derived from pokeberries, a plant native to North America whose use as a dye carries associations with both medicinal knowledge and historical acts of resistance. Indigo dye generates the work’s blue passages, invoking the plantation economies that relied on enslaved labour and the transfer of agricultural knowledge from West Africa to the Americas.
These dye techniques yield colours that shift over time, allowing the work itself to register the passage of time through material change.
Kapwani Kiwanga’s research-based practice
Kiwanga’s practice often engages historical archives, scientific knowledge systems, and overlooked narratives. She works in installation, sculpture, photography, film, and performance. Her work examines the structures through which histories are produced and transmitted. This research-driven approach often focuses on marginalised or suppressed histories. It places these in dialogue with contemporary social and political realities.
Through this approach, the artist has developed a series of “exit strategies”: works that reframe established narratives and invite viewers to reconsider systems of power and alternatives.
‘Kapwani Kiwanga: BLEED’ opens at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, on 11 March 2026 and runs until 1 April 2027. For more information, please visit Studio Museum in Harlem.
