Exhibition Description

Carole Harris
Still. Moving.
September 16 – October 22, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 16, 5-7 pm

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Simone DeSousa Gallery is pleased to present Still. Moving., Carole Harris’ first solo exhibition with the gallery, including works ranging from 2013 to 2022.

Carole Harris is a fiber artist who has redefined and subverted the basic concepts of quilting to suit her contemporary context.  Her process is informed by her interest in material, and her compositions layer diverse textiles and techniques sourced from across the United States, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Taking into consideration her own relationship to each piece of fabric, the history of its making, and the sensory experience of each textile, Harris manipulates the textiles by fraying, ripping, and burning them, and then assembles them together into final layered compositions through both manual and machine stitchery.

Carole Harris’ works draw inspiration from the color, energy, movement, and rhythms of ethnographic textiles, as well as the music of, and changing rhythms and history of the city of Detroit where she lives.

Still. Moving. opens on Friday, Sept. 16, at the gallery’s Cass Corridor location, with a reception from 5 pm to 7 pm, and it will be on view through October 22.

Carole Harris (b. 1943, Detroit, MI) received a BFA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Harris has exhibited across the United States, in Michigan, and internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); Museum of African American History (Detroit, MI); The River Gallery (Chattanooga, TN); National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH); and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Harris’ work has been published in numerous books and her work has been reviewed by several newspapers and magazines. Carole Harris’ work was included in The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st Century America, which toured China in 2012, where she was a guest lecturer. In 2017 her work was included in Footworks at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne in France. Her work has received numerous awards and has been exhibited and published extensively, including a two-person exhibition Repetition, Rhythm, and Vocab with artist Allie McGhee at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in 2018, a solo exhibition at the NCRC Rotunda Gallery at the University of Michigan in 2017, and a solo exhibition at The Dennos Museum Center in 2019. Her work was included in the exhibition Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2019. In 2015 Carole Harris was awarded a Kresge Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.