Diedrick Brackens, gather tender night, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Exhibition installation at YBCA
By John Felix Arnold
As I take my first steps into gather tender night, Diedrick Brackens’ solo exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts curated by Eugenie Joo, something remarkable happens. I am engulfed by an alluring indescribable power emitted from the mixture of colorful fibrous textures and free standing wooden structures. I find a resonance, not just of the human spirit, but the energy we are created of. In the midst of Brackens’ work I feel the complex ingredients of existence collaborating to remind me that we are woven together in a wondrous cosmology. gather tender night allows me to feel uncontained, floating and sinking, submerging and climbing through an unfolding material narrative that weaves worldly tactility into a threshold for the mythological and fantastical.
I have to agree with Bay Area artist and arts writer Sarah Hotchkiss, that the immensity of this particularly massive gallery within YBCA can make curating exhibitions challenging, having the propensity to swallow art alive. Its high ceilings feel like they could allow for simulations of human flight. This show not only isn’t swallowed by the space, it works it, fills it, asks questions of it, invites it to play. Brackens and Joo quietly fill our hearts with transcendent visions that bring the space to heel. The curatorial choices and layout carry my eyes and feet through the space, allowing for minimal architectural lines to calmly direct the expanses of tapestries, creating pathways and spacious openings through which to wander. The work and its presentation allows for immensity to feel accessible without reducing impact. Together they create a beautiful paradox, an expansive intimacy.
Exhibition installation views at YBCA
The exhibition comprises work made from 2020 to 2026. It envelopes us with stories that confront rifts in the collective psyche while simultaneously offering powerful visions of healing, movement, Blackness, Queerness, love, and connection. Brackens’ aesthetic universe presents questions and balm that he has found within himself and the natural world, something our society so imperatively needs to accept. In soft, dark, demigod (2021), a Black silhouetted figure engages in a satisfying forward arching stretch, touching their hands to the ground as an offering amongst a vibrant pink and red zone of delicately woven roses, draped freely from a wooden tent-like structure. This depiction of sensual embodiment ripples through my cells, reminding me to feel myself alive in my own body. I imagine Brackens at the loom, his arms and legs and head and torso all moving in great gestures, casting spells as he weaves us like a conductor through the gallery and into his layered storytelling.
Diedrick Brackens, soft, dark, demigod, 2021, woven cotton, acrylic yarn, and embroidered applique patches, 82 x 79 in., Collection of Gina and Stuart Peterson
With 15 large scale textiles lining the walls, hanging from the ceiling, and draped from free standing structures, Brackens turns the gallery into a portal of sumptuous color fields, animist invocations, material memory, and layered narrative symbolism. Remembrance and becoming meet exploration and immersion through images of flora, fauna, water, and shore in works like undergrowth understory (2025), wider than feeling (2025), commitments (2025), and help is available (2025). Pairs of Black silhouetted figures connect with their environments, share green energy orbs, bend, kiss, climb, rest, evade, and embrace in a garden protects the dreamer (2026), the crawling stars (2021), and ceremonies (2024). Reimagined folkloric and mythologic devices play with mysticism on the viewer’s consciousness and relationship with the work. The act of seeking becomes transmitted through the exhibitions’ soft woven textures.
Diedrick Brackens, a garden protects the dreamer, 2026 (detail), woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 104 x 98 in.
Caption - Diedrick Brackens, ceremonies, 2024, woven cotton yarn, 84 x 79 in., Collection of Noel E.D. Kirnon & undergrowth, understory, 2025, woven cotton and acrylic yarn 86 x 79 in., Collection of Elise and Andrew Brownstein
Blood Compass (2023), Brackens’ largest work to date, cascades down into the space at 245 inches tall, completely wrapping me in lavenders, muted violets, browns, calming yellows, ochres, and Black. The darkness is a place of exploration where the tides, the shore, the wafting humid dark air, geese in flight, and two Black silhouetted figures wading languidly in transition between the ocean and the land, connect through the fibers. One of them seems to look up at the geese, pointing to their symbolism as “a hopeful metaphor for the history and future of Black migrations across the United States”, as stated in the exhibition’s press release. A light house stands as the only human-built structure in the landscape. The figures come ashore and wade back into the waters of creation, perhaps eluding the surveillance of the light house that posits itself a sentinel in the natural confluence. For me, Brackens invites us into this space as witnesses to the beauty and eros of this journey that exists in the shadows. I am transported back to the American South. I can taste the salty air at night, feel it cling to my skin, hear the slow movement of the tide. I imagine Brackens taking a trip from his home of Mexia, TX to the Gulf Coast, wading into the dark waves at night with his companion, into nature’s rhythmic respite away from a world constantly surveilling them. As I walk around the back side of the work the whole piece becomes a bright yellow day, save for the light house and geese. The figures become hidden, escaping the gaze as they continue their journey together in secret through the darkness, bending time and space.
Diedrick Brackens, blood compass, 2023 (front and back), woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 245 x 202 1/2 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
To create his luminous tapestries, Brackens works a loom with hand-dyed cotton fiber and acrylic yarn. His process channels material, narrative, craft, and art historical influences from around the globe. Something specific that pulls me even further into his practice is the depth of his ongoing dialogue with the work of legendary Harlem Renaissance artist and educator Aaron Douglas. Brackens has created a formative conversation with this iconic figure, taking Douglas’ powerful, stern, unwavering murals depicting the march toward liberation and inviting them to experience a new found vulnerability in material, process, subject matter, and gesture. One where rest, healing, Queerness, and connection continue Douglas’ spirit towards love and Black liberation in an agile and sensuous progression, amidst a nation where many still do not accept their history and the suffering they continue to create.
(L) Diedrick Brackens, we dreamed our burden was dreams, 2026, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 100 x 100 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery (R) Diedrick Brackens, through the unburnt and blameless, 2020, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 98 x 96 in., Collection of Christopher M. Brant
The gallery’s large windows set the exhibition against the backdrop of San Francisco’s downtown skyscraper corridor. A bright red piece that sits at the furthest point back, parallel to the windows, through theunburnt and blameless (2020), sees two Black figures dancing or stepping with large gestural movements through fiery blue portals. I imagine these figures stepping even further through the portal of the windows, traveling through dimensions. The exhibition cannot be separated from the context of the cityscape, a place that Brackens knows well as a C.C.A. alumnus and professor. He explains, “I came to San Francisco nearly 15 years ago to refine my nascent art practice. I am excited to share this work at YBCA, and re-introduce my work to a community and city that I cherish.” This sentiment is felt as the spectacular journey unfolds through Brackens’ process of material myth-making.
The physical framing of a room or home stands in the gallery, drawing me toward and into it. Built with construction lumber it supports the crawling stars signal (2021) and if you have ghosts (2024). It also houses a new sculptural work, clearing (2026), comprising a bed covered in a woven blanket with a reed basket on top from which spills a pile of Dial soap bars. A place of restand revival in conversation with the tapestries that line the gallery walls and the framing. A small window frame next to the bed looks out further to the windows of the gallery. Flowers, shells, sand dollars, crystals, all are placed here like ritual moments that bring the world of the tapestries into a tangible memory of place. The wooden framing becomes a dwelling and a narrative map, an art historical mechanism, a container of material memory. It reminds us that the human world exists as part of nature, echoing a trope that carries through all of the works. It evokes a meditation on the idea of place across perception and time. The framing becomes a means to frame meaning, as it presents allusions to the world that exists beyond the gallery, a reality that is interwoven through Brackens’ life experiences. The scene asks viewers to reflect on what this all means to them.
The work titled, to soothe a myth (2023), brings us an example of Brackens’ interventions into art history and canonical mythologies. In the tapestry, a Black silhouetted figure comes into connection with a Unicorn, a symbol often used throughout history as a metaphor for the natural world, the wild, the presence of magic. The figure reaches out to touch, to soothe the mythological creature in a gentle moment as it rears up on its hind legs. Here, I read Brackens as intervening in the narrative of oppressive violence that runs throughout The Hunt for the Unicorn series, an iconic set of tapestries made in Europe during the late medieval period. However the mythical beast and the figure have come into contact with one another, whatever journeys they have experienced or aided one another in, there is a sense of liberation from the bondage each has endured throughout history. A sense of aliveness expands in the vertical scale of the piece as the two create a transcendent connection, interrupting art history as a mechanism to reach beyond time and soothe its ruptures.
Diedrick Brackens, to soothe a myth, 2022, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 140 x 99 in., Miller Meigs Collection
gather tender night centers me into a space that meets our current moment with a deafening quiet confidence, penetrating the hard facade of violence, power, and denial we see thrust at us daily. Brackens has given us radical acceptance and transformation in a way that challenges the viewer to consider what we are each holding back, what we barricade inside, either denying the world its truth or denying our own. What keeps us from caring for others and ourselves, from honesty, restfulness, joy, empowerment, from grief, from love, from our history, from plurality with the natural world and one another? Brackens’ brings us to a place where the past that is not past, as explained by Christina Sharpe, pulls us into every tapestry and fiber. He tunnels inward, toward the future, so that we can be immersed in his cosmic entanglement of creation, Queer joy, Black resonance, and new myth-making. His fears, strengths, and pleasures allow us to think how we might find more vulnerability and bravery to meet the world each day. Diedrick, thank you for enacting your ritual that brings each tapestry into the world, moving with all of your limbs, body, thoughts, and heart at the loom in a dance of creation. You become a guide who asks us to look at our own reflections through your honest visions, a guide and healer of the human spirit.
Diedrick Brackens, you'll never get to heaven if you break my heart, 2026, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 100 x 100 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
gather tender night is on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through August 23rd, 2026, Y.B.C.A., 701 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103, Open Weds-Sunday 11am-5pm
For more information, please view their website https://ybca.org
Photography - Charlie Villyard
Photos courtesy of YBCA
