“In Ways of Knowing, Stephanie Santana’s prints and constructed mixed-media textile works explore interior worlds, mythologies, navigational tools and resistance strategies of African diasporic origins. The works are part of a larger body called The Wayfinding Series, which Santana began in 2022 and describes as ‘honoring Black women as wayfinders, planners, strategists, timeline jumpers and archivists.’ With it, she endeavors to visualize and understand what her Black matriarchal ancestors experienced on an intuitive and emotional level, and examine how their concerns are relevant in the present day.

Santana’s process is one of discovery and deliberation. Over time, the artist has assembled a working archive comprising personal photographs of her own childhood and cherished women in her extended family, along with historical vernacular photographs of anonymous Black matriarchs. The same women appear multiple times within a single work and reappear across multiple pieces. The artist describes her decision-making process on materials and techniques to employ as a sequence of ‘responsive encounters’ with these photographs. The images are transferred and translated several times over; they are screenprinted and monoprinted onto fabric that is then reused numerous ways using traditional quilting techniques. To this, she adds hand-stitched embroidery, much like a series of visual annotations that directly engage with both the figures on the surface and the colorful abstract forms surrounding them.

The artist’s process is evident in Until You Rest, 2024, in which an early 20th century portrait photograph is collaged and screenprinted onto cotton textiles, cut into sections, rotated and then recombined as a pieced quilt. The matriarch’s piercing eyes, gentle mouth and the lace collar of her dress, reappear in sections multiple times over.

Santana preserves and distorts the imagery to create the impression of visual static emanating outwards from the bottom right edge. The work serves as a reminder that the search for ancestral knowledge is a search for self and at the same time, that the loss of self is an important part of rediscovery.

In Safe Passage, 2024, printed images are again organized and augmented with hand embroidery as colorful forms of elaboration and protection. At its center, a mother holds her young children close. Gold stitching covers the woman’s bodice and forms a mask on top of the young children’s faces. At the bottom left corner, the artist’s family poses for the camera in a photo from the 1950s. Yellow fabric obscures the signs hovering over the figures in the background, focusing the viewer’s attention on the smartly dressed, smiling figures. Santana also introduces a historical image of a 19th century American glass pitcher. She repeats it in varying states: as an exact reproduction, reduced to a silhouette, and reimagined by the artist as filled with painterly brushstrokes to symbolize the water that once filled the vessel. The work references a seminal photograph by Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986, which shows a Black woman from behind holding a both a silver pitcher and a plastic pitcher. Santana’s pitcher is also a waterbearer, bearing witness to history and full of memories. To the artist, its presence aptly serves, in the words of American author, theorist and social critic bell hooks, as a ‘reminder of the way history is held and shaped.’

Through the processes of printmaking, sewing and embroidery, the artist meditates on the lessons absorbed through this labor-intensive work: ‘how is information transmitted, and how does it change shape, shift and distort as it is passed?’”

—Lauren Rosenblum, Jensen Bryan Curator