Dindga Mccannon's Sixty-Year Career Explored At Fridman Gallery

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new exhibition at Fridman Gallery,“Yesterday and Today,” highlights the 60-year career of artist Dindga McCannon, a pioneer in textile assemblage, found-object quilting, and wearable art. The exhibition, on view through October 18, 2026, is located at 169 Bowery, New York, NY, and marks the first time her mixed-media quilts, paintings, and prints from the 1970s to the present are presented together.

McCannon's work is featured in significant museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Phillips Collection, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx, she began her artistic journey studying with Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew, and Al Loving at the Art Students League of New York.

Her creative process is described as intuitive and narrative-driven. McCannon collects materials, viewing her studio as an extensive archive.“Usually, I have some idea of what I want to do, what kind of story I want to tell, and then I start collecting things from my studio,” McCannon told Observer.“I've been practicing for close to 60 years, and I pick things up as I go around the world. Sometimes I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but if I see something interesting, I can't leave it. So I collect it.”

McCannon's work often integrates personal experiences with broader cultural narratives. For instance, her sculpture Carnival 2 (2022) was inspired by a trip to Venice, connecting to her experiences at carnival in Haiti in 1971 and her ongoing interest in costume and collective celebration. She combines items from her personal archive with materials from New York stores serving costume makers, creating a Harlequinesque tribute to the tradition across different regions.“I love costumes. I love the shine,” she stated.“Carnival is a collective celebration. It's celebrated in something like 50 countries, it's not just one country, it's worldwide.”

Her freestyle approach challenges traditional material hierarchies, positioning quilting, sewing, and needlework as central intellectual and political languages. While she grew up in a community with a strong quilting tradition, she differentiates her method from conventional quilting, which she finds too reliant on predetermined patterns.“I combine the medium of art with quiltmaking,” she explained. Her piece African American Suffragettes 1890-1940s (2026), a homage to these women, is her closest work to traditional quilting, utilizing an improvisational“crazy quilting” logic. This approach allows diverse fabrics, buttons, beads, and other elements to coexist, finding balance intuitively rather than through a fixed design.“Crazy quilting is more of a free-for-all. You can use buttons, beads, all kinds of things,” she noted.“You intuitively figure out the balance.”

McCannon began her career as a painter and printmaker, studying under Robert Blackburn at his Printmaking Workshop. Textile elements entered her work more spontaneously after she became fascinated by fabric scraps during a visit to an artist friend in Washington, D.C.“I would look at the floor and think, those scraps are kind of interesting,” McCannon recalled. These materials complicated her painted surfaces, leading to the hybrid language of painting, textile, and assemblage that defines her practice. An early work, Pat is Pregnant (1977), displayed at the exhibition's entrance, demonstrates her painting skill combined with fabric and other elements to enrich the pictorial space and narrative. The canvas depicts Pat Davis, a longtime friend and fellow artist in the Black artistic community.

McCannon's early artistic development was closely linked to Weusi, a Harlem collective that emerged from the Twentieth Century Art Creators. This earlier group organized sidewalk exhibitions to directly engage the Black community with art. Weusi was founded on the principle that Black artists should define their own audiences, institutions, subjects, and aesthetic priorities, rather than seeking validation from a white-dominated art world. In the late 1960s, Weusi members established Nyumba Ya Sanaa, or“House of Art.”

McCannon emphasized the freedom inherent in artistic practice.“One of the reasons I chose to be an artist is because of the great freedom you have,” she said.“There are a lot of other parts of your life where you have restrictions, you can't do this, you can't do that. But in my opinion, the artist in his or her studio has a freedom you don't have in other areas. You can do whatever you want.”

Source: Observer Arts

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