Threaded Truths
by Jackie Houston & Shashari Kiburi
August 31 - September 27th, 2025
Threaded Truths: Current Explorations in Fiber. This exhibition is a snippet of my current explorations in fiber. My work is about connecting to the past, honoring my ancestors, and bringing their voices to the present. Quilting is an art form that communicates an act of love and patience. Quilts, past and present, are often given as gifts to honor a loved one and provide a functionality that conveys warmth and care. I take deep dives into history as a way to make sense of the present realities we find ourselves in. I have been exploring the idea of how and when Western society reduced our identities to a color and its development as a way to divide those who were enslaved and those who were not. I have been looking to the early US colonies and considering not only those who were known in history, but those who were unknown. I considered the unbearable travel endured by African peoples during the transatlantic slave trade. How much was lost when language, ritual, and sense of place was taken through forced slavery? These quilts are tributes to them. Textiles, specifically Indigo, have a rich and varied history throughout Western Africa, the region of my ancestors. Each quilt is sewn with either my Indigo fabric or a deep black dye to emphasize composition. Actively creating art, sorting through the ups and downs of the process itself, is also a metaphor for my own personal experience. Each quilt contemplates the past, abstract compositions revealing stories through color, line,and shape. The narrative quality of these quilts act like a portal or bridge, a connection to the commonalities we all share as human beings. I invite you, the viewer, to engage with my quilts and feel a connection to their own space and time.
Shashari Kiburi is a visual artist and educator working primarily in textiles. As a child she felt a deep connection to creating. Growing up in a sewing household, she sat by her mom’s sewing machine often, pulling the pins out of fabric as her mother made many of the clothes she and her siblings wore. While studying Anthropology at UC Berkeley, she had the opportunity to learn printmaking from painter Mary O’Neal. This work inspired a deep passion for abstract art and eventually led to using fiber as medium for storytelling. Shashari’s work in quilting came about when her children were young. It was a medium that she could fit into her busy life as a mother of four children. She was able to seamlessly apply her practice in drawing and photography with textiles. Drawing upon her ancestry she also dyes indigo fabrics as a foundation for her quiltmaking. Indigo puts her voice into each of the quilts and helps to close the gaps between her ancestors’ past and her present. She has shown her work at the Oakland Museum, the Steinbeck Museum in Salinas, Ca, the Ontario Museum, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, Ca, and Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco. Her work was recently published in Patchwork Deutschland, a quarterly fiber arts magazine and she recently contributed to the Modern Quilt Guild’s education resource library. Shashari currently teaches visual arts in Sacramento where she lives with her four children. Follow her current creative work on Instagram @ulaludie.
Jackie Houston; Art is the vehicle by which I express myself both politically and spiritually. It motivates me to express my feelings in a form to which others can relate. I want my work to be accessible to a large and diverse audience, even (perhaps especially) those who are not the usual gallery population. Although I have been an artist for more than 50 years, I discovered a whole new dimension when I found that the colors and patterns in fabric could animate my art in bold and exciting ways. Since then, I have explored themes of politics, family, music, and dance in fabric portraits. As an African American artist, my eyes and ears are open to the people and issues that engage my community. From rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls to young people chanting “Hands up, Don’t shoot!”, my quilts bring the viewer images that are not frequently found in the “soft art” of quilting. But my message is also one of contrast. If the outside world is steeped in violence and pain, I offer instead a portrait of my grandson in his own moment of baby “tragedy,” tears brimming, bubbles cascading from his mouth. He shows me, and so I show the world, that even in the midst of pain “Life Is Precious.” Similarly, rather than just focus on the beauty and grace of a dancer, I drill down to show the strength of the muscles, the severely curved arch that supports that grace. Frequently, I “hide” things within my work: images from the African savanna subtly placed on the face of Nelson Mandela, or the lyrics of a song by Louis Armstrong threading its way through my piece “Nawlins.”
