The first solo show Carole Harris ever had was at Gallery 7, the Detroit space Charles McGee ran from 1969 to 1979 to give Black Detroit artists somewhere to exhibit. The year was 1977. Harris was a fiber artist with a Wayne State BFA from 1966 and a working career as an interior designer.
She had been making quilts on the side. McGee gave her the room. Forty-nine years later, MOCAD opens This Side of the River, a survey of Harris's quilts, on the museum's reopening day.
The show runs from April 25 through June 21. It is one of three exhibitions anchoring MOCAD's 20th-anniversary spring season, alongside the Olayami Dabls retrospective Detroit Cosmologies and Martha Mysko's Retail Therapy. Harris is the elder of the three.
Harris has spent a half-century pulling quilting away from the regular grid and into something looser, more improvisational, more layered. She works with vintage fabrics, hand-dyed cloth, found objects, and collage. She burns and dyes and paints surfaces before stitching them.
Her quilts get described as "otherworldly" a lot, partly because she lets the surface develop its own time signature, and partly because she draws on global textile traditions and uses them to look at Detroit. Critics have called her quilts vessels for political and cultural reflection. The Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery and the Museum of Arts and Design have shown her work.
So have venues in Europe, Japan, and South America. This Side of the River runs concurrent with Harris exhibitions at the Flint Institute of Arts, the Muskegon Museum of Art, and Materia Gallery, all in the same months. The Detroit show is the one most directly in conversation with where she started.
Gallery 7 is gone. The MBAD African Bead Museum, which Olayami Dabls runs and which is the subject of the Dabls retrospective in the next gallery, is the closest thing Detroit has to a working successor in the spirit of what McGee was doing.
Free admission with regular MOCAD entry.
55 East Canfield Street, Midtown.
