Museum of the African Diaspora is pleased to present the second exhibition in the 2022-2023 Emerging Artists Program, Interlacing distributed intelligence/noir care, a solo exhibition of multidisciplinary textile artist Richard-Jonathan Nelson. The Black body and craft can be intermeshed to depict our western culture's speculative future no matter how foreign the idea of Black craft is outside of the American Low country. Through the hybridizing of traditional craft practices like embroidery, weaving, and quilting along with digital art, Interlacing distributed intelligence/noir care reimagines the Black body as a place for futuristic progress. Nelson’s work is balanced visually between the dichotomy of Blackness as an expansive unknowable monolithic void and a chromatically intense generator of culture. Thereby creating images of the Black Diaspora far removed from continued historic depiction as servile and without agency, but instead as visual and culturally complex individuals.

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The MoAD Emerging Artist Program invites local, emerging and mid-career visual artists and art collectives to submit proposals for solo exhibitions that reflect the cultural and artistic richness of the African Diaspora. Awardees have the opportunity for a solo exhibition in our galleries.

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MoAD Emerging Artists is generously funded by Karen Jenkins-Johnson & Kevin Johnson and Westridge Foundation.

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