Whitney Biennial Textiles

Artist Tomashi Jackson, originally from Houston and now living in New York, focuses these art pieces, woven together with found objects, on housing displacement in New York. We are also experiencing housing displacement of people and structures in Dallas. Just as the artist’s density-layered abstractions of found materials are messy, older neighborhoods and older homes are often messy. In Dallas we have seen well-intended politicians wanting to eradicate these older homes because they are not up to a perceived minimum middle-class housing condition. These politicians in concert with affordable housing developers want to replace the messiness of diverse housing and conditions in the older neighborhoods with sameness—sanitized new apartments. The affordability component of these new apartments comes from subsidizing some or all of them for lower or moderate-income residents. Every new apartment complex means one less homeownership possibility or renting a larger less expensive apartment in an older building. In New York, the City is taking over neighborhoods with forced sales for new luxury residential development. There are many faces of urban renewal. Urban renewal is almost always pitched as a way to improve the lives of low-income residents. When in fact homeownership and renovating small houses creates wealth for low-income residents and perpetuates a diverse housing stock. Artist Eric N. Mack also explores texture with mixed materials that create a blanket or quilt that recalls those we see at the State Fair of Texas and all the qualities and meanings a quilt represents and conveys. *Whitney Biennial Textiles
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