Yto Barrada

"Long engaged with the botanical--palm trees, Tangier's native irises, weeds, and the ragged edges of the urban landscape--Barrada has lately explored the foraging and extraction of natural pigments and the dyeing of fabric, an ancient tradition codified in the modern period by, among others, the English textile designer and socialist activist William Morris in The Art of Dyeing (1889). Among Barrada's upcoming projects is the creation of a dye garden in Tangier--in the same spirit as the garden laid out by the Dada artist Hannah Höch in Germany--as an extension of her multidisciplinary community building projects, which date back to her founding of the Cinémathèque de Tanger eleven years ago. The new textile works shown in this exhibition--designed and hand-dyed by Barrada-- reference Frank Stella's series of fluorescent paintings from 1964-65, inspired in part by the Moroccan cities he visited on his honeymoon. Stella is one of many international artists who sought aesthetic inspiration and self-discovery in North Africa. These artistic epiphanies, lived out in the colonial and postcolonial space, have often been invoked to explain changes in the artists' palettes. Paul Klee's experience in Tunisia, for example, sparked the revelation, expressed in his diary, that "color possesses me ... color and I are one. I am a painter." Robert Rauschenberg, too, traveled to Morocco in 1953, where he gathered materials from antiquarian bookstalls that he incorporated into a series of collages mounted on shirt cardboard; a selection of these works is on display in the vitrines. The colors in Barrada's textiles reappropriate the forms and hues of Stella's modernist abstractions and transpose them onto fabric using dyes made in her studio from plants, minerals, and insects. The results recall works by painters Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohammed Melehi, founders of the Casablanca School in the 1960s, who pioneered a North African modernist abstraction derived from the motifs and materials of popular, local art forms"--http://moussemagazine.it/yto-barrada-the-dye-garden-at-american-academy-in-rome-2018/