Stephanie Santana

When textile artist Stephanie Santana became a mother about a decade ago, she started thinking about how to pass along her family history to her son. For several years, she experimented with the concept of textiles as historical records, screenprinting old family photographs onto various fabrics. Then, in 2019, one year after graduating from a textile design program at the Fashion Institute of New York, Santana began researching her great-aunt Miriam Matthews, who, as the first credentialed Black librarian in California, fought censorship during the McCarthy era. This prompted Santana to make a series of quilts featuring her family’s photographs to “draw connections to broader themes [of censorship and erasure] that we’re dealing with now,” she says. These latest screenprinted quilts are the focus of her solo exhibition Call & Response, currently on view at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.

Santana starts each work by deciding its central themes, either by reading bell hooks’s writings or practicing “free association with my grandfather’s photographs or Library of Congress images or my great-aunt’s archives,” she says. Once she has images in mind, she takes scraps of fabric—usually cotton because of the “softness to it after you wash it”—and assembles them into a collage. She hand-sews the scraps into a quilt, then screenprints the images onto it with a water-based ink. (Santana says she has experimented with digital printing, but “screenprinting has more longevity, just in terms that the types of inks that I’m using—I’m intentional about the materials so that [my works] can be archival.”) The finished artwork is at once a document of her family’s history, a testament to Black women as record keepers, and a textile collage rife with symbolism. Santana hopes that her work inspires people to look into their own family histories—and to recognize how that history informs their present day.

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