Exhibition on View: December 16, 2023 – February 10, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, December 15, 2023, from 6-8 PM
Artist Talks: Saturday, December 16, 2023, starting at 2 PM
Sculpture Garden
Art League Houston (ALH) is proud to present Flag Diary - What Protects, an exhibition and workshop program by Houston-based artist Marley Foster. The first in a series of community protest quilts, Flag Diary - What Protects invites community members to participate in and witness the creation of a community quilt that tests how these complicated objects help us process the personal while also speaking the language of public discourse.
Quilts are offerings of love, markers of time spent, objects meant to comfort and protect. Their language of fabric patchwork speaks to adaptability generated by necessity and the meditative beauty of arranging, as well as to the construction of flags and protest banners seen throughout American history.
The protective words embroidered on the What Protects quilt are all revelatory of personal and political structures, have everything to do with the political nature of bodies, and are typically invisible (or, more accurately, intentionally erased from public visibility and therefore from our own personal interactions). The first, self-made, side of the quilt will be installed on the side of the ALH building. During the exhibition, community members’ patches will accumulate in the sculpture garden, before they are assembled into the quilt’s other half.
This new side of the quilt made of community patches will be hung alongside the other in the sculpture garden, a pair of subversive flags marking time and developing a patina as they are affected by weather, grime, and passersby. Following the exhibition closing at Art League Houston, they will be assembled into a single, fully realized quilt.
Visual languages of quilted americana - slow, subtle, intimate - and contemporary American protest - gestural, in your face, national - will operate dually over time as this work is installed publicly, made communal and multiplied, then returned to domestic form. Foster intends this work to bring the already political nature of quilts to heightened visibility - using it as an offering to her community and a tangible resource for working through the relationship between familial history and community politics.
About the Artist
Marley Foster (she/her) is a sculptor and educator from Houston, Texas. Alternating between labor-intensive sewing practices and intuitive collage and photography, Foster interrogates the material history of domestic objects through her experiences coming of age in the 2010s South. With humor and self-awareness, her materially-rooted pieces explore intersections of home, femininity, queerness, whiteness, and american-ness.
Foster is a recipient of the 2023 Idea Fund award, in support of community quilting workshops accompanying her current body of work, Flag Diary - What Protects.
Foster earned her MFA in Sculpture in 2021 from the University of Houston, and her BA in both Studio Art and English from Rice University. In addition to her studio practice, Foster works as an educator and installation artist dedicated to using creativity and community engagement as tools for social change in the South.