Material Progress: Curatorial Essay

Material Progress title wall, with Marla McLeod’s piece Self Portrait (2022). Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

By Christine O’Donnell

The exhibition Material Progress began its journey to the walls of ShowUp back in 2020 with the exhibition Mixed Messages and a wall of quotes from the Tiny Pricks Project. With the enjoyment of the experience, particularly in the run-up to the 2020 election, I made a vow to exhibit Diana Weymar and Tiny Pricks Project again in 2024. I held onto that promise as I watched the following four years play out, with 2020 casting its long shadow. As our society emerges from the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, the echoes of January 6th, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and the unmitigated waves of violence aided and abetted by lax gun control policies and police oversight continue to harm. Our citizens, on all sides, also suffer the thralls of political division, as - no matter where we sit on the political spectrum - we have suffered a sense of disdain and division due to our political perspective. 

Tiny Pricks Project, Installation view. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

The need for an exhibition that created space for consideration of how we, as a society, could proceed from such a challenging historical moment has felt imperative. We are a society that is suffering, and how could we answer that turmoil in visual art? We have been subject to so much division, hate, and rage. And yet, as author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said, “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.” 

“Material Progress seeks to make space for acknowledging the past, by featuring artists whose work addresses challenging themes around memory, history, home, and longing, while also offering proof of our shared human experiences as inspiration to finding a way to move forward together. ”

In addressing this pivotal civic moment and its emotional turbulence, it felt critical to identify a spectrum of the human experience at the core of what each of us brings to decisions. No choice is made in isolation. Rather, we drag a set of biases, experiences, histories, knowledge, all learned or inherited, behind us. The nature of memory and history, shared and personal, is part of how we will move forward as a country: it is what unites us, and what leads to decisions and biases that divide us. In this moment, Material Progress seeks to make space for acknowledging the past, by featuring artists whose work addresses challenging themes around memory, history, home, and longing, while also offering proof of our shared human experiences as inspiration to finding a way to move forward together. 

While seemingly different on the surface, the three artists in Material Progress–Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Marla L. McLeod, and Diana Weymar & her public art Tiny Pricks Project–each feature work evocative of personal and shared memories as well as the future. Each are foundationally rooted in looking back at one’s mark on the world, often starting with the building blocks of touchable textiles. Taking those materials so familiar to our bodies, cotton, linen, leather, and wool, they create artwork uniquely suited to their messages. With that intimacy, Material Progress offers a space for contemplation and inspiration for civic involvement. It presents personal and political histories and themes to pose the question: how does a society memorialize and hold onto the past while looking towards the future?

Tiny Pricks Project, Installation View. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

Textiles have been used as conduit for narratives for over a thousand years. For example, the Bayeux Tapestry, created in the 11th century, tells the story of William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066 (1). For Material Progress, rather than telling a linear narrative, the 18-foot-long wall featuring Weymar’s project and work has a different goal in mind. Highlighting just 150 pieces, black walls create a stark contrast with the napkins, handkerchiefs and ephemera. Thematically curated for the first time, the works are tightly packed on either end, loosening out to empty space towards the middle with four focused clusters. 

With overlapping pieces on the sides focused on themes that unite, such as love, grief, longing, children, art, and hope, the clusters in the middle are flashpoints of divisiveness: gay and trans rights, global warming, abortion, and voting. The starbursts and their isolation are punctuated by a central quote on specially woven fabric emulating notepaper. Diana stitched words by American historian Heather Cox Richardson, a voice many have turned to in this election season and “one of the most important intellectuals in the country.”(2) The quote reads: “If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost, if the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost.” The piece is framed in an acrylic box rather than pinned to the wall. With quotes to inspire and to memorialize our recent past, this wall invites viewers and readers to engage with a shared recent past, consider divisive issues and engage with inspiring voices. 

Marla McLeod’s work, which focuses on investigating “how history and race relate to the power of the black body by combating false narratives and exploring the creation of new ones” (3) looks at the same concepts through a lens of Blackness: sometimes through a personal lens, and other times more broadly. Both inspire, through their unflinching portrayals of challenging truths, a question of where one proceeds from such a place. 

Marla McLeod, Self Portrait, 2022. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

McLeod’s Self Portrait (2022), the first work one sees when entering the exhibition, reveals facets of her identity while placing them in relation to a wider historical context. In addition to a bejeweled map of her indigenous homeland, as a pedestal, the torso is covered in thin ribbons of the Declaration of Independence, annotated in the author's hand. Between lines of the Declaration such as “We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.” and “We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here.” McLeod adds, “They kidnapped our bodies and made us slaves. First physical, then mental.” She also annotates, above the document title, “They incentivized our slaughter and took our land.” McLeod’s work calls into question the Declaration of Independence. It reminds us of this essential piece of American history, so lauded in our past, may have freed some from tyranny and yet it simultaneously reinforced the enslavement and subjugation of others. With the document pasted across a body analogous to McLeod’s, the question of the relevancy of such documents and how we interpret them now is a clear unspoken inquiry.

Marla McLeod, American Dream, 2019. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

McLeod’s American Dream (2019) takes her powerful work and aids in turning statistics back into a visceral, emotional event for its audience. Three gold-painted plinths, representing the three branches of government, each with an evenly distributed matrix of burlap and black-wrapped strings hang down to the ground. For each string, a specific length is wrapped in black. As McLeod explains, “This piece is about the 229 black people shot and killed by police in 2018. There are 229 lines of twine hanging from three golden capitals. Each string of twine is 79.5 inches long and represents the average lifespan of an American in 2018 of the 229 people that were gunned down by the police in 2018.” Reading from the ground up, the lives stop where the black-wrapping ends. Marla’s hands held each of these individuals' lives as represented by strings, wrapping them one by one. Taking the data and translating it into a visual for an audience possibly numbed to statistics, the artist memorializes each person, and translates data back into tangible threads of life, cut short not by illness or chance, but by systemic state violence. 

Dina Nazmi Khorchid, I Put a Screen Between Us to Face Loss Less Profoundly 2, 2022. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

Textile artist Dina Nazmi Khorchid also addresses both individual and communal grief, often centered upon loss and displacement. Thematically central to many of her works is a pigeon. The bird represents a symbolic link between Khorchild’s childhood drawings of birds and her father’s letter reminiscing of the same. 

This letter became a cornerstone in my journey into art making and the creation of a metaphor - a pigeon - that appears and disappears throughout my work. It is in a constant state of searching, circling and landing. The pigeon, this messenger bird, has become my connection to past and present, to my younger self, my artist self and to him, my father.

 - Dina Nazmi Khorchid (4)

Through repeating motifs, this avian figure emerges as a proxy for themes of memory and loss. For example, in Khorchid’s I Put a Screen Between Us to Face Loss Less Profoundly, 2 (2022), the title is a direct allusion to the screen that allowed the artist to view an object (the “resting” pigeon portrayed repeatedly in the piece) with curiosity rather than feeling overwhelmed with emotion. (5)

Dina Nazmi Khorchid, I Put a Screen Between Us to Face Loss Less Profoundly 1, 2022, with Tiny Pricks Project in the background. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

This image of the pigeon in profile is featured in many of Diana’s work, breast-to-wing in rigid rows. It turns nature into a stunning pattern. In I Put a Screen Between Us to Face Loss Less Profoundly, 1 (2022), The same bird is silkscreened into a delicate linen and hung freely from the ceiling. Rather than tightly stretched, its gentle folds curve in on the images. The hand-pulled silkscreen stretching from the ceiling and spilling onto the floor, suggesting both how the piece is overwhelming the space, and perhaps the inherent nature of emotion.

With its repeated, cyclical, patterns, Khorchid’s work explores the nature of grief and memory through imagery and materiality, seeking to capture an essence and energy just out of reach of the visual. 

Dina Nazmi Khorchid, Resting Pigeons on Collapsed Tiles, 2023. Photo by Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

The jacquard Resting Pigeons on Collapsed Tiles (2023) is a pattern of mosaic tilework in fading black and grays overlaid with pigeons in profile, orange spots and scattered pale green clusters of leaves. The eye struggles to find a place to rest: drawn incessantly between the energy of the tiles, the vibrancy of the orange, the curvature of the leaves and the hidden birds. Like a pinball, one’s eye is catapulted back and forth around the piece between the nonrepeating layout. 

A tension is at play in contrast: one’s eye cannot settle, and yet it is a soft textile rendered in relatively muted colors. A viewer may seek to bring the image into focus, yet it never can be wholly resolved. Learning that the piece pays homage to Khorchid’s home in Beirut, Lebanon that was lost to the massive Aug. 4, 2020 explosion at a Beirut Port warehouse only adds to a sense of dislocation.(6) The piece captures in its restlessness an essence of space, or the feeling of a moment. One is confronted with the question, with destroyed tiles of the past in view, with a complex and hard to encapsulate history, and disasters left in our wake, where does one go from here? 

With pieces like these, we hope viewers will also be encouraged to ask themselves such questions. Few elections in modern history have offered our young nation the opportunity to self-define such a way as 2024 does. We are a society that is suffering. We have been subject to so much division, hate, and rage. And if we can look at both the nature of memory, at grief and pain, and how that may unite us, as well as the issues that divide us (as painful as that is), we may be better able to make decisions that can move us forward together. 

McLeod’s piece Aquila Yannic (I have A Whole World) (2020) surveys the exhibition with a steely and expectant presence. The future is waiting and watching. 

Marla McLeod, Aquila Yannic (I have A Whole World), 2020. Oil on canvas. Photo of Drake Curtis courtesy of ShowUp.

Notes

1. The Bayeux Museum https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/ Accessed Oct 19, 2024 
2. Chakrabarti, Meghna and Tim Skoog. March 29, 2023 Historian Heather Cox Richardson's notes on the state of America https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/09/29/historian-heather-cox-richardsons-notes-on-the-state-of-america

3. McLeod, Marla. The American Dream. Artist Website. Accessed 11/08/2024

4. Khorchid, Dina and Khorchid, Dina Nazmi, "A Room Full of Pigeons and Three Spectators" (2023). Masters Theses. 1120. https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1120

 5. D. Khorchid (personal communication, July 19, 2024)

 6. D. Khorchid (personal communication, July 19, 2024)

About the Curator:

Christine O’Donnell is a curator, art writer and historian, consultant, educator, and the founder of ShowUp, a nonprofit art activism focused space in Boston, MA. To all she does, she brings her knowledge of the art world, her decade spent as an educator, her time working in marketing and advertising, and the 12 years she spent living in Paris, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, with a B.A in French, O’Donnell speaks fluent French and conversational Spanish. Additionally, she holds an M.A. in Teaching from Tufts University, and an M.A. in Art History from the U.K.’s Open University. Her Master’s thesis focused on artists’ grassroots organizations and American museum critique in the late 1960s and early 1970s. O’Donnell’s skills as an art management consultant are sought out from as near as the New England Sculptors Association and Temple Gallery NYC, and as far away as ArtsActivism Papua New Guinea and galleries in Melbourne, Australia. 

As part of O’Donnell’s international scope, she is a partner at Very Private Gallery in Madrid, Spain. She is also a member of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), the Association of Women’s Art Dealers (AWAD), and Boston Art Dealers Association (BADA). Additionally, she trained as an appraiser with the International Society of Appraisers. O’Donnell balances her career with an active family life in the Boston area, with her husband and two school-aged children. 

Learn more on Instagram at @intlchristine and @showup.inc respectively.