Charmaine Bee is a multi-disciplinary artist, and herbalist, working in the mediums of video, movement, sculpture, writing, sound and textile. Their work is an investigation of the historical manifestations of African diaspora spirituality as well as their own Gullah heritage. Charmaine’s textile pieces incorporate natural materials from the Sea Islands in South Carolina, such as rice and indigo, that were harvested and processed by Black women during the era of American slavery, until a historic hurricane in 1863 wiped out the plantations.
Charmaine’s untitled indigo piece #3, portal series (2017) incorporates over 2,000 unbleached tea bags, stitched together meticulously into a quilt-like structure, which was then immersed in indigo. Creating crocheted structures out of fibers such as tea bags and silks, their textile work activates spaces, acting as portals for dreaming and inquiry, transcending the expanse of walls through a monumentality of scale.
| Hours | Tuesday to Saturday: 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM |
| Venue | Emma Scully Gallery |
| Type | Art Exhibition |
| Duration | 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM |
| City | New York City |
About
Emma Scully Gallery
Emma Scully Gallery champions cutting edge contemporary collectible design. Located in a 19th Century townhouse on the Upper East Side, we present challenging work in a rich historic context. We represent and support the work of groundbreaking living artists, designers, and craftspeople. Critical to the gallery’s mission is the exhibition program where new work is commissioned around conceptual themes. This intellectual backbone of our collection, resulting from years of exhibition, is the question of how to deal with the challenges of creating for the today’s material society: the landscape of superabundance, the ecological cost of overproduction and the shift from the physical to the digital world. In promoting equity the gallery recognizes the need to facilitate production in order to support the broadest range of talent in the design community. The gallery therefore acts as manufacturer for a portion of the collection work.
