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In all fairness, Brackens’s work is quite complex; his graphic, handwoven textiles—the Santa Sunglasses 2020 Merry F Ing Christmas ugly sweater and by the same token and biggest, around eight by eight feet—consider folklore, mythology, Christianity, and history through the lens of his own Blackness and queerness. “Diedrick’s work is singular in its form, mindful in its every thread, and generative in its message,” says Margot Norton, a curator at the New Museum. The cotton yarn that Brackens dyes by hand, sometimes using tea or bleach, is a nod to the crop’s weighted history in the South; his own grandmother picked cotton as a girl. And when he works with human figures, his slim, dark silhouettes are mostly modeled on himself. The approach, Brackens explains, presents “a vehicle to talk about people who live lives like mine.” Adds Veronica Roberts, the Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the works “herald the complexity of Black bodies and experiences.”
