Kwesi O. Kwarteng: "Woven World"
In winsome pieces made from bright strips of fabric from around the globe, the fiber artist chases elusive cross-cultural harmony.
Our civic leaders like to say that forty different languages are widely spoken in Jersey City. Take a walk from the Heights to Greenville, and you’ll probably hear them all. Ethnic and cultural diversity is one of our town’s strengths. We’re right to be proud of it.
Getting people to travel from one section of the city to another is a different matter altogether. If you were here in the ‘00s, you may remember the lament of the late councilwoman Melissa Holloway: “the Downtown will not go Uptown.” We’ve come a long way since then, but it can still be a challenge to convince people to investigate parts of the city that they don’t know. Our fluency doesn’t mean much if we aren’t talking to each other.
Creators (and amateur anthropologists) who do get out and around in North Jersey never have any trouble finding and gathering cultural artifacts. Local artists often express their fascination with the complex ethnic composition of our communities by placing items associated with one ethnic tradition right next to items associated with other traditions. Unexpected proximity becomes a statement in itself. Some of our art shows can feel like a stroll through McGinley Square: polyglot, boisterous, steered by the dynamics of misapprehension and the energetic guesswork that happens when people from different backgrounds attempt — with some desperation — to understand each other and engage in acts of fruitful commerce. The feel of these exhibits can be frenetic, but the artists’ intentions are almost always harmonious.
Kwesi O. Kwarteng is overt about his aims. The fiber artist comes right out and tells us that the textiles that he’s working with are culturally significant. By that, he means they’re representative of styles and practices from their places of origin: West Africa, the Near and Far East, South America, our own post-industrial backyard. In “Woven World: A Tapestry of Social Interconnectedness,” now on view at the Art House Gallery (345 Marin Blvd.), he lines up pieces of fabric side by side, parallel as stripes on a flag, granting no particular prominence to any one, encouraging the eye to take in the totality without obstruction or interruption, as we do when we chance upon a rainbow. Even as the artist makes his stitches visible, Kwarteng and curator Shantel Asante-Kissi shoot for emotional seamlessness. These fabrics may have come to Jersey City from different corners of the earth; on Kwarteng’s portrait-sized canvas, we see unity.