Diedrick Brackens is an American textile artist known for his large-scale figurative weavings that pair a deep attention to the technical aspects of craft and an interest in African diasporic storytelling and myths, as well as narratives from literary fiction and the artist’s personal biography. Attentive to the techniques and innovations of diverse craft traditions, Brackens infuses his works with trademark characteristics of traditional West African textiles, including Kente cloth and Asafo flags, and quilting traditions from the American South, such as those of the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The artist depicts histories of labor, migration, and domestic scenes, especially intimate moments of love and care.
Brackens’s mind of my mind consists of three panels created using a floor loom and varied weaving techniques, including double-weave, double-weave pickup, and strip weaving. The composition centers a figure with raised arms—a gesture that suggests a form of ecstatic, even divine, inspiration. The hands appear to be generating a red circular field from which the two flanking figures recoil in ambiguous positions of awe or fear. Brackens subverts traditional European tapestry techniques through his meticulous placement of imperfections, such as the swapped red and green along the top left border or the extended tassels along the piece’s bottom edges. Deep hues of red, black, and green display Brackens’s laborious hand dyeing technique while evoking the Pan-African flag designed by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Marcus Garvey in 1920. The title mind of my mind is drawn from Octavia E. Butler’s 1977 novel of the same name, and which narrates the rise of a society of telepathic humans. In this work, Brackens renders an iconic scene with layered symbolism, inviting the viewer to enter a visual world that synthesizes faith and fiction through innovative craft technique.