Macon Magazine

32 maconmagazine.com | APRIL/MAY 2020 " WHAT DRIVES ME AT THIS MOMENT IS MY DESIRE to look back at my life experiences and share them with my community," said Wini McQueen. "ere are places that might have been friendlier, or far more art-oriented, but there was something about coming to Macon that made me feel like I had a home. I had a place here. People needed me, they encouraged me, they supported me. I couldn't walk away from it." McQueen, a contemporary textile artist, is a beloved fixture of Macon's art scene. She's a gifted storyteller, a self-taught craftswoman, a lifelong learner and a creative innovator well-known for the way she redefines the traditional art of quiltmaking via modern textiles and techniques. Her work has gained national recognition and traveled to museums as far away as Japan. She won multiple grants and fellowships that enabled her to travel and teach in Africa. She curated two large- scale exhibits – one in Macon, one in Africa – documenting crafts in African-American communities. Her list of exhibitions, publications, educational experiences and awards is remarkable by any standards, except maybe her own. "It's too long," McQueen laughed. "I tried to make myself a one- page resume, but it was hard. All that stuff, it just kept going and going and going, and I thought, enough! Who wants to know about another exhibit or another classroom? I watched the sun set behind Mount Korogo in rural northern Cote d'Ivoire while the women prepared their bobbins for spinning work the next day – that's my real resume. at's the meat of it." Now, at age 77, McQueen is fully immersed in creating and preparing material for a major three-gallery exhibition that will open this summer at the Museum of Arts & Sciences. Titled "e Covering," this exhibit sees McQueen deconstructing and honoring the literal source material of her life's work – cotton. From a young age, she devoted herself to mindfully exploring the textiles of the African diaspora. "Never in my life have I seen a subject as compelling as cotton," she said. McQueen has been growing cotton in her front yard, dutifully observing it firsthand, though she admitted she's not the green thumb type. For her, it's research. "ere's a story there," she said, "and I want to mine it for metaphor." A cotton boll, its dense, clumpy fibers painted in vibrant shades, sat on a nearby table at her studio. She picked it up with graceful fingers, held it out until light illuminated the bright, fuzzy filaments. "I'm calling this a corsage," she said. "I'm driven by the idea of pulling apart the things that come out of a cotton seed, turning them inside out and upside down." McQueen's exhibition will feature examples of her work from previous artistic periods alongside new paintings, handmade and hand- dyed clothing and a room-sized large-scale conceptual installation. is endeavor is larger in scope, scale and theme than anything she's done before. She's eager to open it up to the Middle Georgia community that nurtured her. "I want my work to speak of the beauty and horror of learning who I am, where I came from and what I've seen," she said. Susan Welsh, executive director of the Museum of Arts & Sciences, said, "Many of her older quilts fall close to folk art, but Wini's newest body of work feels distinctly different – a densely layered, conceptual narration of her experience as an African- American woman in the South." An artist's roots McQueen was born in New Jersey during World War II and moved to Durham, North Carolina, the city she considers her hometown, as a small child. She didn't grow up around cotton – Durham is tobacco country – but there was a cotton mill nearby where her grandfather worked as a boiler stoker, and he'd bring little swatches of cloth home from work. Soon enough, McQueen made her first quilt.

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