TJ Lambert/Stages Photography
Kerry-Harlan splits her time between Miami and Milwaukee.
Sharon Kerry-Harlan, a mixed-media artist, is merging the artistic traditions of her African ancestors with the vivid imagery and social consciousness of Afro-futurism.
“I keep an eye on what’s happening in the world and how it influences people around me while tapping into my ancestors’ legacy,” says Kerry-Harlan. “When I am working, I feel like I am melding these influences together on paper and through textiles.”
An exhibit of 78 pieces of the artist’s work is on display through August 25 in the James Watrous Gallery on Overture Center’s third floor. The collection features 53 pieces known collectively as the “Black Eyed Peas,” individual dolls made out of cloth remnants from the “scrap quilts” and other textiles that form a large part of Kerry-Harlan’s output.
“I like to eat black-eyed peas, and many of the earlier dolls had large black eyes, so the name seemed natural,” says Kerry-Harlan, a native of Miami, Florida, who currently splits her time between the Sunshine State and Milwaukee, where she formerly served as an adjunct professor in textiles at UW-Milwaukee.
TJ Lambert/Stages Photography
Kerry-Harlan’s “Black Eyed Peas” dolls are made from cloth remnants from the artist’s quilts and textiles.
Kerry-Harlan also creates bògòlanfini, a Malian textile art form better known as “mud cloth.” Traditionally, the textiles were patterned and dyed with fermented mud, giving them black, brown, copper and ochre shades. Kerry-Harlan follows a similar style, replicating traditional colors and patterns on bolts of fabric that she then uses in her art.
Kerry-Harlan got the idea for the dolls after seeing similar examples in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. The dolls, as well as the scrap quilts she sews, draw on both African and African American traditions, she says.
“I describe my art as abstract figurative work,” Kerry-Harlan explains. “I do a lot of whole-cloth pieces and collages of fragmented images that I put back together. It’s a perfect metaphor for my life.”
The artist has recently turned to a brighter color palette and portraiture in her imagery. She credits the 2018 Marvel superhero film Black Panther, which earned Academy Awards for costume and production design, as an influence.
“I normally don’t use bright colors, but the movie had an Afro-futuristic feel to it,” she says,. “It inspired me to paint with brighter colors and border the portraits with African cloth that I‘d been collecting for years.”
Some of the portraits have somber themes. “I Am Invisible” is a 4-foot by 5-foot textile image of a nude woman with her hand covering her face.
“I’d like people to understand from my art some of the more critical issues going on in the world,” Kerry-Harlan says. “It’s important for people to be ‘woke,’ as they say now. There is much that has to be thought about, addressed and answered for today.”
