Mending the Sky

Firelei Báez’s painting pictures a ciguapa—an elusive and cunning creature from Dominican folklore—painted overtop a 1930s-era map of New Orleans made by the Works Progress Administration.

Creating a bridge with her body, the ciguapa bends over an architectural plan of the Illinois Central Railroad Trestle to unite both sides of the tracks.

Crossing historical lines of segregation, this figure evokes the role of this railroad line—which runs between New Orleans and Chicago—in the history of the Great Migration, as well as the contemporary water management crisis unfolding on the Bonnet Carre Spillway.

As the artist has shared about this painting’s main figure, “She is quite literally bridging and forming space for communities to be able to carve out belonging and breathe.”

Lorna Williams creates intricately constructed sculptures that combine unexpected materials drawn from her own life and the world around her.

Her sculptures include materials ranging from hardware tools and bike parts, to root systems, cast teeth, music instruments, and ropes.

This sculpture considers how our ancestral roots help form our identities and ways of being in the world, considering the relationship between the stories we inherit and the mythologies we construct for ourselves.

Jamilah Sabur’s Un chemin escarpé / A steep path is a five-channel video installation that draws upon metaphysics, geology, and familial ties to reframe the landscape and history of the Caribbean.

Throughout, Sabur embodies a shape-shifting figure that passes through and communes with various sites and geographies.

In one sequence in the film, the artist navigates an animation of the Vema Fracture Zone, a part of an underwater mountain range that is pushing the continents away from each other to make the Atlantic Ocean larger.

In this phenomenon, Sabur sees the potential for a new planetary literacy, one in which submerged histories come into being and alternate geographies become possible.

Ana Hernandez created A Sense of Memory from wood she salvaged from the back of a bookcase she found behind the Canal Street Church in New Orleans.

Staining a stark grid atop this piece of found wood panel, she creates a pattern that goes against the wood's natural grain.

Burning symbols for musical repeats into the stained wood, she explores the recurring patterns and rhythms of nature, as well as the role of repetition in our thoughts, memories, and dreams.

Fused into the panel are two glass and metal forms that evoke the human body, contrasting our lived experiences with our inherited knowledge and wisdom, and asking how we might break these patterns to form something new.

Diedrick Brackens mines weaving as a potent metaphor for new ways of imagining individual and cultural identity.

If you feed a river features a split and doubled black figure, cut up and then pieced back together, who hovers on the margins of both sides of the weaving, encircled by catfish that swim beneath a broken but mended sun.

Catfish often appear in Brackens’s weavings as ancestral figures or spirit guides. Brackens builds new mythologies around these often ignored creatures, seeing them as metaphors for other marginalized groups.

As the split black figure reaches across the river to unite with their other half, we realize that the form hovering behind them is the river itself, working to bring the broken halves back together.

Heidi Hahn carves out new spaces of being and belonging for the women depicted in her work. Her layered, paraffin wax-infused paintings draw their viewers into intimate, psychologically charged spaces.

She often organizes her figures in poses that faintly recall famous paintings of women from art history, but painted as ethereal outlines—echoes of the often showy, sexualized poses more typical of how women are represented in art.

Emphasizing their interior emotional lives over their external physical forms, these women evade our efforts at full apprehension, engaging in a conversation just between the two of them—one reaching out for the other—whose meaning we cannot know.

Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist who explores synthesized sounds, textures, and rhythms using an acoustic cello. For Mending the Sky, Gillet wove together a soundscape using cello, drum machine, sounds in nature, loop pedal, poetry and storytelling.

Across a series of three solo performances, Gillet responded musically to the artists and ideas explored in Mending the Sky. Each of these solo performances took place within the exhibition, and streamed for free across NOMA’s social media channels to offer a wide audience an intimate musical experience at a time when few opportunities for live music existed.