Wini McQueen brings another side of Africa to GCSU

Wini Akissi McQueen presented her exhibit “Ties that Bind: A TransAtlantic Journey” this past week in the Blackbridge Hall Art Gallery clad in a vibrant red, orange and black dyed dress with her hair hanging in thick braids down her back. The exhibit was curated by senior art major Ernest Rogers as his capstone thesis project and featured fabrics and clothes from McQueen, as well as a couple of piece garments from rural cities in west Africa.

“Ties that Bind” is centered around trips McQueen took to west Africa in an effort to learn more about the art of textile stamping, dying, printing and the making of piece garments. McQueen approaches fabric much in the same way that a painter looks at a blank canvas. Her objective is not about the weaving of textiles but the story the patterns, colors and prints tell.

“Wini’s work is very textural and colorful,” senior art major Rebecca Ezell said. “It’s different to see clothes hanging in the museum.”

“I work based on feelings,” said McQueen, “I live with these experiences and stories all the time.”

At her artist talk Wednesday, McQueen talked about an Africa that Americans do not see.

“I wanted to show another side of Africa,” McQueen said. “It is urban but also African in the midst of a tropical rainforest.”

She told of large cities with busy market places, schools and a wealthy social class in west Africa. It isn’t just famine, hunger, poverty and difficulties. There are abundant natural resources but no way to process them. There are wealthy people living next to tin shacks of the poverty-stricken lower class.

McQueen spent six months traveling through west Africa and teaching at an art and culture school. In the rural areas she met old men that sat in lines weaving fabrics and saw the natives piecing together scraps of fabric to make the piece garments that are common for the poor to make and wear. But McQueen also saw the hand-painted and printed textiles sold in the markets by adults and children alike and the stories these fabrics told.

They told of celebrations from poverty into wealth and well being. They told stories of the passing of time. They told stories of family.

Whether it be funeral fabric, “souvenir cloth,” or simply 50 yards of cloth featuring members of a family printed specifically for a family reunion, each piece of cloth told a story through colors, patterns, texture and subject matter. McQueen too tells her stories through the medium of fabric.

“(McQueen) wanted (students) to understand the comparison and contrast between our culture and theirs, that students there have no future of work in their art, they do it as an everyday thing,” Rogers said.

The gallery opening Thursday evening ended with an African dance group singing, dancing and drumming in front of Blackbridge Hall. McQueen and Rogers invited the group in an effort to fully show the African culture and spirit that are told in the fabrics and clothes in the exhibit. The performers were wearing bright yellow and orange dyed garments and a few had big feathered head pieces. The dancing and drumming was fast and frantic, but also joyful and exciting. Near the end of their performance, the dancers invited gallery attendees to join them in their music and dancing in a true cultural immersion of the African spirit.