The Big Bang, the Jacquard loom, indigenous traditions, Afrofuturism, dream logic, the Northern Migration, the Industrial Revolution, and Detroit techno. It takes a remarkable fabric to weave all these threads together in one vibrant tapestry. But that deft narrative exploration is exactly what’s on offer at Warp & Weft: Technologies within Textiles, an exhibit opening this week at the Eastside Detroit art space, The Shepherd.
Indeed, the push and pull of technology and tradition on the creation of textile art is the tie that binds the works assembled at Shepherd by curator Allison Glenn.
Of course, we live in a time when we take for granted the ways digital technology mediates our daily experience. So it is that over the span and scope of the exhibit’s 30-plus works Warp & Weft poses prismatic questions: What constitutes technology? How do we understand its relationship to human creativity?
For her part, Glenn’s take on the exhibition’s themes emphasizes that technology exists on a spectrum rather than a binary. “When I think about technology, I’m constantly trying to understand what I mean by the term,” she says. “Simple technology typically refers to devices or systems that are easy to understand and maintain, but technology is really the application of knowledge.”
For Glenn, whether work is created with a TC2 digital loom or inherited ancestral knowledge, “they’re all valid forms of technological innovation.”
Closer to home, this exploration of technology’s applications is deeply rooted in Detroit’s industrial heritage. The exhibition draws parallels between the city’s automotive — and automated — past and the textile industries of Manchester, England. Detroit and Manchester are twinned cities in many ways, and here the focus is on their parallel industrialization and the massive ways they both helped shape the modern world. Many of the works in Warp & Weft dig into those connections while showcasing how contemporary artists are using both ancient and cutting-edge techniques to tell new stories.
Case in point: One of the exhibition’s most powerful pieces addressing this industrial legacy is Tiff Massey’s “White Out, you in red, black, and green.” The large-scale work examines the complex history of gingham fabric, which was used to identify enslaved people in the American South. The cotton for these textiles was picked and processed by Southern slaves and then shipped to Manchester’s mills for processing before being returned to America. Massey’s piece goes right at this brutal legacy. Her 12-foot-by-10-foot red and blue gingham-derived work replaces the white checks from traditional gingham patterns and replaces them with mirrored surfaces. The effect, says Glenn, “is to implicate viewers in this historical narrative by literally reflecting them into the work.”
The exhibition’s scope extends beyond visual art into sound, with legendary Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance participating in a unique way. UR members Cornelius Harris and John Collins will explore connections between the Jacquard loom — considered a predecessor to modern computers — and the electronic music tools that enabled techno’s development.
On the night of the opening, Harris and Collins will lead a discussion and demonstration of these connections using UR records, tracks, and sonic elements to illustrate how layered sounds create texture within musical compositions, mirroring the structural interplay of warp and weft in textile construction.
This connection to Detroit’s musical heritage emerged organically during a conversation at Submerge, Underground Resistance’s headquarters. ‘I was sitting in the office talking to [Harris] and [Collins] about some projects I’m working on,” Glenn recalls, “and when I mentioned this project, they just started riffing. When they began diving into warp and weft as it relates to machines and sound, I knew we had to get them involved.”
“It’s fascinating how these technologies speak to each other across time,” Glenn notes. “The relationship between the Jacquard loom and the first computer, and how that enables the creation of techno music — these connections are intrinsic to the fabric of our city.”
The exhibition also features work that pushes the boundaries between analog and digital creation. Kamau Amu Patton’s “Static Field” employs a multi-faceted technological process that results in a layered, nuanced piece that is as haunting as it is visually kinetic. Patton begins by pointing a camera at its own output, creating a feedback loop that generates visual static reminiscent of old CRT televisions. That static? It’s a remnant — the literal afterglow — of the Big Bang. Patton captures these patterns through a custom-modified printer that requires constant human intervention, with assistants having to continuously wet the canvas during the printing process. Packed into the resulting large-format work is a layered meditation on the place where cosmic time, human touch and technological innovation… vibrate together.
“We often think about technology from a Western lens — making things quicker, faster, or removing the human element entirely,” reflects Glenn. “But when you look at textile traditions, you find different kinds of technologies — ways of reworking systems, materials, and forms that allow for the reconfiguration of ideologies themselves.”
This tweaking and reworking of systems isn’t always driven by hardware and software-based “technologies,” either. Angélica Serech’s gorgeous “Sembrando palabras en mi segunda piel” both embraces and departs from the rich tradition of narrative embroidery of her indigenous Guatemalan background. That tradition uses motifs, patterns, and knotwork to carry coded meanings. For her piece, Serech and her sister developed an evolution of traditional systems with the resulting work highlighting both new formal territory as well as reverent connection.
In another synthesis of the traditional and the modern, Nicholas Galanin, Maikoiyo Anabi Alley-Barnes, and Nep Sidhu create otherworldly garments (robes, headdresses, masks) that spring from their diverse ancestries in the lands now called North America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, respectively. The material reads as “metal” and, indeed, is partly re-purposed puffer jackets as well as newly crafted textiles. The effect is a striking marriage of organic and synthetic, traditional and futurist, referential and utterly new.
Perhaps the exhibition’s most ambitious merger of traditional craft and digital technology comes from artists Alisha P. Wormsley and Kite. Their installation transforms the building’s former church confessional booths into “dream chambers” — meditative spaces where visitors are invited to rest and record their dreams through a custom-built interface. The software translates these dream narratives into digital quilt squares, incorporating symbols from both Lakota tradition and African American quilting patterns. These individual dream-inspired quilt squares will be digitally stitched together into what the artists call a “Detroit cosmologyscape” — a sort of digital tapestry of the city’s collective unconscious.
The massive Shepherd space is ideal for an exhibit like this, where many pieces are massive, reward consideration, and benefit from space. In fact, the dynamic of interpretation and storytelling is purposefully woven into the curatorial approach — and the labels and stories that will accompany the pieces, says Glenn. Warp & Weft is envisioned as a conversation — Across material, across time, across technology, and, crucially, across cultures.
“It’s an opportunity for people to learn, if they want to,” says Glenn. “It is an opportunity for accessibility, you know? That’s the whole point. It’s not to make it obtuse. It’s to make meaningful connections across and between objects and connect them to our lives. … They’re so layered, and there’s so many references that are very specific to these artists.”
Warp & Weft arrives at a moment when many artists are returning to tactile, hands-on practices — perhaps in response to our increasingly virtual lives. “There’s this return to the haptic, to evidence of life, proof of humanness,” Glenn reflects. “When you can’t even get a human on the phone anymore, there’s something powerful about work that carries the direct imprint of human touch.”
This tension between human touch and technological mediation runs throughout the exhibition. Even as some works embrace digital tools and contemporary materials, they remain grounded in age-old questions about how we create meaning through material culture. The show suggests that technology isn’t simply about efficiency or automation — it’s about systems of knowledge that can be inherited, transformed, and reimagined.
In an age of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, Warp & Weft reminds us that some of humanity’s oldest technologies — the loom, the needle, the shuttle — remain powerful jumping off points for deep connection. By bringing together artists who are pushing the boundaries of textile traditions while remaining connected to their historical roots, the exhibition suggests that the future of technology might be found not in abandoning the human touch, but in finding new ways to amplify it.
Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles opens from 5-8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 25 at The Shepherd, 1265 Parkview St., Detroit; lscgallery.com/the-shepherd. Runs through May 3.
