Candace Hill-Montgomery

‘In her itinerant ranging across media, form, and discipline, and her mobility in multiple contexts – Black Arts groups, feminist groups, and the alternative art scene – Hill-Montgomery synthesized what were, for others, parallel, competing, and sometimes antithetical agendas. As Fred Moten has theorized, following Laura Harris, we can think of Hill-Montgomery’s practice as part of the ‘aesthetic sociality’ and ‘experimental defiance’ of the struggle for Black liberation.’

–– Amy Tobin 

The black panther – featured in Give Attention to Transportation a Thought (1980–2024) – makes direct reference to the Black Panther Party, the militant wing of the struggle for civil rights in the United States. While Hill-Montgomery was not a member of the Party, she became increasingly aware of the erasure and distortion of their legacy and the broader civil rights movement among younger generations through subsequent decades.

This was part of the motivation for 92 Morningside – Remembering Fred Hampton, an installation for the infamous Times Square Show in New York (1980). The outsize scale and crowded composition of the drawing affirms its status as a distinct iteration, a graphic rendering in memoriam of the murder of the Black Panther Party Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton in his bedroom by law enforcement officers. 

Hill-Montgomery writes: ‘That was the start of a few drawings that I did based on those incidents and remembering, because it’s not something we are taught about. It’s remembering in the present moment rather than remembering from when things happened… I think all work is political, not just my work. My work is about language. Even if it’s not talking about language within the piece, it’s about language and how we look at things through history. And that’s political. Nobody tries to put anything down unless they’re afraid to look at it squarely. And that is political.’

Hill-Montgomery’s weaves, begun in 2013 and made on homemade looms, combine both techniques and materials. These intricately layered works, made from materials including Navajo sheep wool, linen, silk, kid mohair, punis,  rawhide and horsehair, allude to the artist’s own personal narrative as well as broader socio-political and feminist concerns, popular culture, desire and devotion. Amy Tobin writes: ‘Hill Montgomery’s textile practice bridges traditional craft with canvas and tapestry pictorialism. Her weaves behave like history paintings of landscapes, while their extreme facture – a result of the loose knot of a hand loom weave – emphasises her rich combination of materials… These materials create texture and form, offering three dimensionality; but they also enhance and complicate meaning.’

‘I looked a lot at African weavers, and I still weave with an African tradition. Less and Let’s Think Stripes Countess Careless is like an African weave because they make slit weaves where they create each weave in sections and then sew the sections together to make a whole. I do that occasionally to show the difference between colour and black and white, or the painterly quality versus the drawing. I usually have one little section that shows that.

The threads start to talk to you, start to show you where to go. I don’t have a drawing mapped out. That’s why the bottom of the weave is usually just colour until something starts to say: ‘Well do that’ or ‘Go in this direction’. I never take anything out either. I have certain rules for myself. I don’t rip things out and start over if it’s not looking right, because I find that if something is going to give you an idea, something that you’re working on, you have to let the process happen. If you start ripping things out, then you’re never going to know what is going to happen here. To me, that’s the joy of a weave.’

‘The title of the weave is a poem. The weave itself has the word ‘if’ woven into the background with zucchini and celery on the outside of a door. The F is fashioned into a person’s arms, opening the doorway, and the weave is broken into two halves. I live in the country, surrounded by farms, and a lot of my work has to do with farmland. My grandmother was a farmer and we visited every summer until Emmett Till was murdered, and my dad wouldn’t let us go down there anymore, as it was too dangerous, but I have a lot of Alabama left in me. My dad’s dad was African, so it’s a hard life to get over. It was really segregated in the south, and with that came too much to even talk about as children. I could tell all the stories of segregation in this country and there are people alive who lived through this. There’s no getting rid of these things – you can’t get rid of something when people are still alive to tell the story.

‘George Floyd Parkway began as a landscape before the events of May and June 2020 made demands on the form’s meaning. The title questions how the dead are commemorated in the United States, reimagining the William Floyd Parkway in Long Island – named after a founding father and slaveowner and running the whole North-South length of the peninsula – as a different kind of civic memorial.’