Xenobia Bailey

Funktional Vibrations at the 34th Street station

Xenobia Bailey (born 1955, in Seattle, Washington) is an American fine artist, designer and fiber artist best known for her eclectic crochet African-inspired hats[1] and her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas.[2]

Early life

Born Sherilyn Bailey in Seattle in 1955, in the 80s she changed her name to Xenobia for the warrior queen of ancient Palmyra[3] and made her way to New York. She began her professional life as a costume designer for the now defunct Black Arts/West, then studied crochet at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.[3][4]

Affirmative action took her to the University of Washington[3] where, she says, "the whole world opened up to me." She discovered ethnomusicology, the study of music and culture from around the world. She followed it with courses in tailoring and millinery at Seattle Central Community College.[3]

Work

Her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas consist of colorful concentric circles and repeating patterns. Her pieces are often connected to her ongoing project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk.[2]

Bailey's technique, of mostly circular rows of single crochet, forms a fabric classified as tapestry crochet in flat, geometric, highly-colored designs influenced by African, Chinese, and Native American and Eastern philosophies, with undertones of 1970s "Funk" aesthetic. Her signature stitch is a flowy line, as if it is dripping. She calls it the "liquid stitch".[3] Bailey has a hat shop on Etsy.com featuring her crown-like creations. Her hats have been featured in United Colors of Benetton ads, on The Cosby Show, and in the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing[5] (worn by Samuel L. Jackson as DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy). She credits her shift from hats to walls, to Chicago artist Nick Cave.[3] In 2000 Bailey received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Visual Arts.[6]

In 2003, her designs were commemorated in the form of an Absolut Vodka advertisement entitled "Absolut Bailey."[7] Bailey has been artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem,[8] the Jersey City Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

As an addition to her ongoing project Paradise Under Reconstruction, she created a hanging installation in 2006 called Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent. This piece was created to cover the topic of absent historical documentation for African enslavement in America.[9]

In 2016, Xenobia Bailey created a large-scale glass mosaic at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, she named the piece Funktional Vibrations. [10]

Collections

Her work is in the permanent collections at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Allentown Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts and in the Museum of Arts and Design.[11] Some of her crochet work was transformed into mosaics for the New York City Subway's 34th Street – Hudson Yards station.[12]

References

  1. ↑ "Style Makers; Xenobia Bailey, African-Hat Designer". The New York Times. August 19, 1990. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
  2. 1 2 Museum, Brooklyn. "Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent". Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "The Supernaturalist – Xenobia Bailey and How She Got That Way" article by Jen Graves, in The Stranger, November 2011
  4. ↑ "Tremendously Terrific Tapestry Crochet", article by Pamela, September 2014
  5. ↑ Otfinoski, Steven (2011). African Americans in the Visual Arts. Facts On File, Incorporated. pp. 9, 10. ISBN 9780816078400.
  6. ↑ (http://creative-capital.org/projects/view/208)
  7. ↑ Farrington. E., Lisa (2004). Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 253, 254. ISBN 019516721X.
  8. ↑ "The Bearden Project". The Studio Museum in Harlem. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
  9. ↑ "Brooklyn Museum: Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved 2016-09-14.
  10. ↑ "NYC subway art you need to check out". Retrieved 2016-09-13.
  11. ↑ Bailey, Xenobia. "Museum of Arts and Design Permanent Collection". Museum of Arts and Design. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
  12. ↑ Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "7 Line Extension". Retrieved 14 September 2015.
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