Join us at the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair, booth A1, for a signing of The Quick with D'Angelo Lovell Williams and Diedrick Brackens. The Quick is a compendium monograph, and supplemental site of collaboration, to the exhibition of the same title curated by Ashley Stull Meyers featuring the artwork of Diedrick Brackens and D’Angelo Lovell Williams.

On view at the lumber room in 2022, The Quick facilitated conversation between Black creatives across distance on the subjects of queerness, Blackness, intimacy, familial bonds and little-cited domestic forms of co-working toward a craft. The book contains images of past work, family album photos and poetry from the two artists, a forward by the curator and epistolary contributions by Dr. Derrias Carter, Essence Harden, Kemi Adeyemi, Montinique McEachern and Salimatu Amabebe.

D’Angelo Lovell Williams (b. 1992, Jackson, Mississippi) is a Black, HIV-positive artist expanding narratives of Black and queer intimacy through photography. They earned their BFA in photography from Memphis College of Art in 2015, an MFA in photography from Syracuse University in 2018, and are a 2018 Skowhegan School of Art alum. They live and work in New York City. D'Angelo Lovell Williams has had four solo exhibitions with Higher Pictures in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. The 2020 exhibition, Papa Don’t Preach, was presented in collaboration with Janice Guy at her gallery in Harlem.

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dying of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens utilizes both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview.

Ashley Stull Meyers (she/her/hers) is a writer and curator of contemporary art. In 2017 she was named Director and Curator of The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University. The following year, she was made co-curator of the 2019 Portland Biennial. Currently, she serves as the Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Chief Curator of Art, Science and Technology at PRAx (Oregon State University). Her practice is often concerned with Black interiority and imagining extra-ordinary futures.