Wabwila Mugala | Quilted Existence

2025-2026 Printmaking Artist-in-Residence

Drawing from printing practices, cosmologies, and design among the African diaspora, Quilted Existence explores indigo blue as a hue of resilience, creativity, and knowledge. In engaging with the exhibition, viewers will become part of an immersive conversation between textiles, indigo, and space.

Quilted Existence is an invitation to experience the layered histories of textile design, indigo, and cowrie shell beads. These materials, once viewed as symbols of protection or abundance, became vehicles of colonial and imperial violence, their abundant use as trade for human chattel coining the phrase “indigo for a hand”. Those black hands, stained blue with indigo, produced some of the wealthiest economies in the Caribbean and Americas; but much more than that, they carried knowledge, crafting beads, prayers, and songs as vessels to hold their stories. Cloth, too, was a vessel, draping homes and altars in ancestral memory as divine protection. Mugala’s work venerates that process, creating beauty to resist brutal violence, draped in indigo cloth, a midnight ocean, blue-black with grief and hope.

View the Quilted Existence Price List

Final Friday: May 29, 6-9 pm

INSIGHT Art Talk | Wednesday, June 3, at 7 pm