Hand-dyed canvases and strips of fabric deemed significant by the artist: Kwesi Kwartengs's "Amafra Fo."
Our civic leaders like to say that forty different languages are widely spoken in Jersey City. Take a walk from the Heights to Greenville, and you’ll probably hear them all. Ethnic and cultural diversity is one of our town’s strengths. We’re right to be proud of it.
Getting people to travel from one section of the city to another is a different matter altogether. If you were here in the ‘00s, you may remember the lament of the late councilwoman Melissa Holloway: “the Downtown will not go Uptown.” We’ve come a long way since then, but it can still be a challenge to convince people to investigate parts of the city that they don’t know. Our fluency doesn’t mean much if we aren’t talking to each other.
Creators (and amateur anthropologists) who do get out and around in North Jersey never have any trouble finding and gathering cultural artifacts. Local artists often express their fascination with the complex ethnic composition of our communities by placing items associated with one ethnic tradition right next to items associated with other traditions. Unexpected proximity becomes a statement in itself. Some of our art shows can feel like a stroll through McGinley Square: polyglot, boisterous, steered by the dynamics of misapprehension and the energetic guesswork that happens when people from different backgrounds attempt — with some desperation — to understand each other and engage in acts of fruitful commerce. The feel of these exhibits can be frenetic, but the artists’ intentions are almost always harmonious.
Kwesi O. Kwarteng is overt about his aims. The fiber artist comes right out and tells us that the textiles that he’s working with are culturally significant. By that, he means they’re representative of styles and practices from their places of origin: West Africa, the Near and Far East, South America, our own post-industrial backyard. In “Woven World: A Tapestry of Social Interconnectedness,” now on view at the Art House Gallery (345 Marin Blvd.), he lines up pieces of fabric side by side, parallel as stripes on a flag, granting no particular prominence to any one, encouraging the eye to take in the totality without obstruction or interruption, as we do when we chance upon a rainbow. Even as the artist makes his stitches visible, Kwarteng and curator Shantel Asante-Kissi shoot for emotional seamlessness. These fabrics may have come to Jersey City from different corners of the earth; on Kwarteng’s portrait-sized canvas, we see unity.
At least at first we do. Once we adjust to Kwarteng’s rhythms, we begin to notice that the fabrics are quite different. Ghanaian folk patterns, Southwestern symbols, thick weaves to ward off the Korean winter; each has a distinctive personality. The artist has sequenced them so they shake hands and rub shoulders even as they remain discrete. The assembly of fabrics peeks out from between large colored sheets with undulating edges like the bowed bottoms of theater curtains. The hand-dyed patterns on these sheets give them a the look of a topographic map, or hills seen from above. Here we’re shown the land — wrinkled, weathered, but essentially uniform. Beneath it, behind it, underpinning it, animating it and giving it its distinctive spirit is a flashing river of diversity: multi-ethnic, multicolored, bright as a mosaic.
Kwesi O. Kwarteng at Art House Productions
In “Friendly Paths,” the curved lower edge of a red sheet covering the top quarter of the canvas echoes but doesn’t imitate the upper limit of a larger blue sheet covering the bottom. Between them, a thick band of bright fabric flows: peacock patterns, arrowheads, red sofa stripes, fraying scarf-like strips, all assembled by Kwarteng without a bit of dissonance. In “Nyanko Nua,” the top and bottom sheets are broken by holes. From beneath the cut-out regions, colored fabrics shine at us like lakes seem from an airplane. The fiber artist leaves meandering trails of stitches across his landscapes — winding tracks through the folds that always seem to end up at the river of flashing color. He never lets us forget the threads that hold his harmonious pieces together. There’s labor visible here, but there’s hardly any sign of strife.
Is this how we are? Or is it merely a dream of what we’d like to be? Maybe it’s a little of both. But the humility and plainspoken directness of Kwesi O. Kwarteng’s pieces make them feel more descriptive than aspirational. This aren't merely works of imagination. Kwarteng is sharing something he believes he’s seen, or at least something he knows he’s felt. You may come away from “Woven World” wondering if Kwarteng’s vision of coexistence is unrealistically rosy. Shouldn’t cultural collisions generate more tension than we see here? More rips in the sutures and tears in the fabric?
Or perhaps, after close examination, you’ll conclude that the artist’s expression of cross-cultural dialogue is all too accurate. These fabric strips don’t really blend with their neighbors. That’s merely the way that it looks — and it only looks like that because of the illusionist’s skill at handling textile and the optimism and purity that these pieces radiate. Juxtaposition isn’t the same thing as exchange. Just because one item is next to another doesn’t mean we’re looking at an actual relationship. The proximity between the Downtown and Bergen Hill doesn’t mean there’s traffic, or understanding, between the neighborhoods.
Yet, sometimes, noticing similarities and resonances between things that don’t seem to go together is a solid starting point for a real conversation. Textiles are, after all, common to societies worldwide, and a master craftsman can show us how weavers have approached a common human problem in strikingly similar ways. Kwarteng shows us how an African print can comment, highlight, and amplify the effect of an Asian pattern when they’re placed next to each other. He surprises us with a visual language rendered in stitches and thread and the global rhythms of sewing; he’s pointing us toward places where our lives and the lives of strangers might intersect. The rest is up to us.
I’d like to think we’re doing pretty well. For a place of our size and density, there’s not as much ethnic tension in Jersey City as doomsayers might expect there to be. The Downtown has been going Uptown; not as often as we’d like to see, but a little more with each passing year. Right now, there are extremely powerful men in America who are trying to convince us that the multicultural experiment has failed — that people of radically different backgrounds, with different languages and different experiences, simply can’t coexist. Hudson County is our proof that this is a lie. We’re far from perfect. But we’re getting along, wading into the river where all strips of fabric from all traditions are granted respect and a place in the tapestry, stumbling forward toward the city, and the world, that Kwesi O. Kwarteng believes we deserve.
(“Woven World” will be on view at Art House Productions until February 23. That’s Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. It’s a free show.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
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