Xenobia Bailey (born 1955) is an American fine artist, designer, Supernaturalist, cultural activist and fiber artist best known for her eclectic crochet African-inspired hats and her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas.
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 City. 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 in 1977. 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.
In the late 80s, she worked for the CETA program as an art instructor, which led her to meeting master needleworker Bernadette Sonona. It is here that Xenobia advanced her skills and learned how to create needleworks without the use of a pattern or template.
Work
Bailey focuses on ancient African styles, reviving undocumented, non-commercial, engineered designs, artifacts and other cultural treasures from contemporary rural and urban homemakers. Influences on her work include economic culture and a wish to design experimental nature-based-futuristic, sustainable material culture in the aesthetic of funk for a skilled craft & masons labor force. She is concerned with social and economic development and the health and well-being for under-served rural communities that were socially erased during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas consist of colorful concentric circles and repeating patterns. Bailey's art work ranges from costumes, hats, wall pieces and newer digital images are "the far cry from the traditional shawls and doilies associated with the medium". Her pieces are often connected to her ongoing project [[Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk.']]' Bailey's work strives to create a textile culture and aesthetic that African Americans were unable to develop because of slavery and reconstruction.
"To be an artist and be able to create things – it's like fireworks every time you think about something", says Bailey. "I try to get energy and movement from something that is not moving at all."
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 work draws upon the Kongo Cosmogram, or Yowa, a symbol important to Kongo metaphysics and spiritual ceremonies. Her signature stitch is a flowy line, as if it is dripping. She calls it the "liquid stitch". 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 Señor Love Daddy). She credits her shift from hats to walls to Chicago artist Nick Cave. Bailey's piece, "Sistah Paradise Great Wall of Fire Revival Tent (Mandela Cosmic tapestry of energy flow)" was exhibited at Stux Gallery, Fall 2000. The piece was hand crocheted with cotton acrylic yarns, with 10' high x 5' diameter. In 2000 Bailey received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Visual Arts.
In 2003, her designs were featured in 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. In an experimental collaboration sponsored by the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the MIT Media Lab, Bailey crocheted with electroluminescent wire. 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.