Exhibition: Ways Of Knowing, 2024

In Ways of Knowing, Stephanie Santana’s prints and constructed mixed-media textile works explore interior worlds, mythologies, navigational tools and resistance strategies of African diasporic origins. The works are part of a larger body called The Wayfinding Series, which Santana began in 2022 and describes as ‘honoring Black women as wayfinders, planners, strategists, timeline jumpers and archivists.’ With it, she endeavors to visualize and understand what her Black matriarchal ancestors experienced on an intuitive and emotional level, and examine how their concerns are relevant in the present day.

Santana’s process is one of discovery and deliberation. Over time, the artist has assembled a working archive comprising personal photographs of her own childhood and cherished women in her extended family, along with historical vernacular photographs of anonymous Black matriarchs. The same women appear multiple times within a single work and reappear across multiple pieces. The artist describes her decision-making process on materials and techniques to employ as a sequence of ‘responsive encounters’ with these photographs. The images are transferred and translated several times over; they are screenprinted and monoprinted onto fabric that is then reused numerous ways using traditional quilting techniques. To this, she adds hand-stitched embroidery, much like a series of visual annotations that directly engage with both the figures on the surface and the colorful abstract forms surrounding them.