“My ancestors are constantly whispering form and attitude in my ear. As I work in mystudio—tearing textile into small pieces, rubbing clay over the textile, pouring layers of liquid kaolin, and carving on the surface of the clay—I am constructing spaces that I hope viewers will engage with on a spiritual level, feeling the touch of the hands that made the works, both my own and those of my ancestors.” — Remy Jungerman

In recent years, Remy Jungerman has abandoned the more strict grid lines of his earlier works to explore a more layered, collage-like approach. Each strip of textile in the works in his new exhibition What the River Says builds upon the next, yielding a rhythmic pulse to this new body of work.

“Jungerman’s recent works represent not only a new direction in his practice, but also an imaginative reunion of visual forms that, like cousins or individual stars within a vast constellation, are both singular and cosmically twinned: uniquely interrelated across the creolized geographies of the African diaspora.” — Allison Young, Professor of Contemporary Art History, Louisiana State University

For the past three decades, Remy Jungerman’s practice has involved returning, again and again, to his roots in Suriname to create a visual language that connects the forms and patterns from his country of origin to those seen in other art forms throughout the African diaspora as well as in 20th Century Modernism.

In the summer of 2023, drawn by similarities he saw in the rich geometry displayed in the patchwork shoulder capes of the Surinamese Maroons to the quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, he traveled to the small town of Gee’s Bend (now called Boykin), that sits on a bend in the Alabama River. Like the Maroons, the inhabitants of Boykin are—to this day—nearly all descendants of enslaved people who worked on a plantation owned by Joseph Gee. Jungerman attended a quilting retreat hosted by two master Gee’s Bend quilters and this experience marked a distinct shift in his practice. He realized that he has been incorporating quilt-making tools and processes in his work for decades without quite realizing it.

In his new body of work on view in What the River Says, Jungerman “stitches together” small squares or strips of textile soaked in kaolin clay, applying them to wood panels in his wall pieces or in his free-standing cube works, and then scratching away at or literally “cutting out” fragments of the wood panels themselves to reveal the many layers beneath the surface. Powerfully weaving together threads of the African diaspora, in these new works Jungerman, imagines that visual memories from West Africa were carried by enslaved people across the ocean to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.