Manuel Chavajay — "Threads to the South" at ISLAA

The work of artist Manuel Chavajay is being featured in “Threads to the South”, ISLAA’s most recent group exhibit.

Borrowing its title from the poem “I am climbing threads to the South” by Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, the exhibition showcases how artists have used fiber, thread, and textiles in disparate ways to chart connections to their roots.

Spanning ISLAA’s upstairs exhibition space and its two lower-level galleries, Threads to the South illustrates how fiber serves as a bridge between distinct times and places, embedded with histories and cultural traditions, including the complexities of national and individual identities in and from Latin America. The artists in the exhibition use thread to communicate physical or emotional displacement as they long, search, and strive for real and imagined territories to ground themselves firmly in Latin America. Together, these works underscore the processes of making, thinking, and feeling through fiber to question colonial conceptions of time and place, produce alternative art histories, and create new ideas of home.