Atlanta Artist Reclaims Queer History Through Fiber

The studio smells like sizing and old paper. Bolts of undyed linen lean against one wall. On a large wooden frame, a half-finished textile hangs—its surface dense with embroidered text, photographs transferred onto fabric, and what appears to be actual thread from vintage Pride banners. The artist, who has been working in Atlanta's arts community for over a decade, stands back and squints at the composition. She doesn't explain it. She lets the work sit in silence. This is how Atlanta's most arresting contemporary queer artist operates: through material, through labor, through the insistence that looking at art should require something from the viewer besides passive consumption. Her recent series, which debuted at a South Atlanta gallery space last fall, uses textile as both medium and archive. Each piece incorporates fragments—photographs, documents, fabric scraps—sourced from LGBTQ collections housed at local institutions and from private donations. The work is painstaking. Some pieces have taken six months to complete. "Textiles carry memory differently than paintings do," she explained during a studio visit. "People touch them. They wear them. They inherit them. There's this physical relationship to the material that's already embedded in what it is." Her approach stands apart from much contemporary queer art in Atlanta, which often leans toward photography, video, or installation work. She chose fiber deliberately—a medium historically coded as domestic, feminine, laborious—and made it into something monumental. The series emerged from a specific moment. In 2023, as anti-drag legislation began circulating through state legislatures and book challenges accelerated across the South, she started collecting materials from local LGBTQ organizations. Some had begun digitizing archives, fearful that physical documents might be targeted or destroyed. Others were simply clearing space. She acquired a box of photographs from a defunct Atlanta AIDS organization. Another box contained fabric samples from a Pride parade float built in the 1990s. A third held love letters, newspaper clippings, and zines. Rather than treat these as historical artifacts to be preserved in archival silence, she began to weave them into new work. One piece, roughly eight feet tall, layers a photograph of a 1981 Pride march against a background of hand-dyed linen. Embroidered across the surface, in meticulous script, are names—people lost to AIDS, people who moved away, people still living in Atlanta whose stories had been buried in boxes. The names are not centered. They're scattered, overlapping, sometimes illegible depending on the viewing angle. It's a formal choice that mirrors how memory actually works: not in neat rows but in fragments, in what surfaces and what recedes. Another work incorporates actual threads from a banner carried at a 1987 protest. She hand-stitched these threads into a new composition alongside contemporary materials—fabric from a recent Pride event, thread she dyed herself. The piece doesn't resolve the past into the present. It holds both in tension. Viewers have reported spending extended time in front of it, trying to parse what's old and what's new, what's found and what's made. Her practice has drawn attention from curators and collectors beyond Atlanta. A piece was recently acquired by a major regional collection. But she has deliberately remained based in Atlanta, teaching at a local arts institution and maintaining her studio in a building that houses several other LGBTQ artists and creatives. This decision matters. Atlanta's queer arts ecosystem has shifted considerably over the past five years. Some longtime galleries have closed. Others have scaled back their programming. Yet new spaces have opened, and a generation of younger artists—many of them artists of color, many working across disciplines—have begun establishing themselves. She is part of this newer cohort, though her work draws from an earlier era of queer activism and cultural production. There's no nostalgia in what she makes, but there is an insistence on continuity. The past is not behind us; it's woven into the present. This becomes especially urgent given the current political moment, particularly in the South. As legislation targeting drag performers, trans youth, and LGBTQ organizations proliferates, her work functions as both documentation and resistance. Not resistance in the sense of protest art—she doesn't make agitprop—but resistance through the act of preservation itself, through the labor of stitching memory into form. She's currently in production on a new series that will be shown later this year. The work is more ambitious in scale. She's collaborating with other artists—a photographer, a sound artist, a historian—to create an installation that will be immersive rather than object-based. Details remain limited. When asked about the concept, she deferred. "It's not ready to be spoken about yet," she said. "It needs to exist first." That commitment to allowing the work to develop before explaining it, to trusting the material to speak before language intervenes, is perhaps what distinguishes her practice most clearly. In a media environment that demands instant interpretation, constant explanation, and rapid consumption, she insists on slowness. She asks viewers to look closely, to sit with discomfort, to understand that some stories take time to unfold. In Atlanta, where queer history has been repeatedly erased, commodified, and flattened into narrative, that refusal to hurry feels necessary. The thread continues. The needle keeps moving.