Name Xenobia Bailey | ||
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Xenobia Bailey - The Hudson Yards Project
Xenobia Bailey (born 1955) is an American fine artist, designer and fiber artist best known for her eclectic crochet African-inspired hats and her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas.
Contents
- Xenobia Bailey The Hudson Yards Project
- Xenobia bailey
- Early life
- Work
- Century 21 Bed Stuy Rhapsody in Design A Reconstruction Urban Remix in the Aesthetic of Funk
- Collections
- 2002
- Honors and awards
- References
Xenobia bailey
Early life
Born Sherilyn Bailey in Seattle in 1955, in the 80s she changed her name to Xenobia for the warrior queen of ancient Palmyra and made her way to New York. She began her professional life as a costume designer for the now defunct Black Arts/West and earned a BFA in Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Affirmative action took her to the University of Washington where, she says, "the whole world opened up to me." She discovered ethnomusicology, the study of music and culture from around the world. She followed it with courses in tailoring and millinery at Seattle Central Community College.
Work
Her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas consist of colorful concentric circles and repeating patterns. Her pieces are often connected to her ongoing project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk.
Bailey's technique, of mostly circular rows of single crochet, forms a fabric classified as tapestry crochet in flat, geometric, highly-colored designs influenced by African, Chinese, and Native American and Eastern philosophies, with undertones of 1970s "Funk" aesthetic. Her signature stitch is a flowy line, as if it is dripping. She calls it the "liquid stitch". Bailey has a hat shop on Etsy.com featuring her crown-like creations. Her hats have been featured in United Colors of Benetton ads, on The Cosby Show, and in the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing (worn by Samuel L. Jackson as DJ Mister Se ñor Love Daddy). She credits her shift from hats to walls, to Chicago artist Nick Cave. In 2000 Bailey received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Visual Arts.
In 2003, her designs were commemorated in the form of an Absolut Vodka advertisement entitled "Absolut Bailey." Bailey has been artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Jersey City Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
As an addition to her ongoing project Paradise Under Reconstruction, she created a hanging installation in 2006 called Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent. This piece was created to cover the topic of absent historical documentation for African enslavement in America.
In 2016, Xenobia Bailey created a large-scale glass mosaic at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, she named the piece Funktional Vibrations.
Century 21: Bed-Stuy Rhapsody in Design: A Reconstruction Urban Remix in the Aesthetic of Funk
In September 2014, Bailey partnered with students from Boys & Girls High School in Brooklyn to design and produce furniture to furnish a home for the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses.< Sixty students, aged 14–17, designed three pieces for an imaginary couple moving into 21st century Brooklyn using recycled materials.
Collections
Her work is in the permanent collections at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Allentown Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts and in the Museum of Arts and Design. Some of her crochet work was transformed into mosaics for the New York City Subway's 34th Street – Hudson Yards station.
2002
Honors and awards
In 2000, Xenobia Bailey won a Creative Capital grant for her project, Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk.