Using repurposed materials—primarily textiles and fibers—, the Houston-based artist Kaneem Smith seeks to remain in constant conversation with her ancestors. Smith explains that, as an African American, she identifies herself as a descendant of displaced peoples, and she seeks to investigate this history. Smith explains, “Since childhood I have long been captivated by the concept of acquiring raw organic, plant-based and synthetic fibers and then transforming that material for non-utilitarian use and occasional aesthetic significance.” Fibrous objects such as burlap sacks, homemade clothing, denim, and quilts quietly reveal the lives of African American people who worked on Southern antebellum plantations. Plantation life was centered on cotton—the money it brought and the labor it required—and many African American families can trace their history to a lineage of oppression in service of cotton.

Part of a series of works entitled Laborscape, Smith explores what land and the natural environment looked like through her African American ancestors’ eyes. Laborscape is constructed of hand-dyed cotton canvas, stretched over a wooden frame, much like a painting. The work resembles a traditional quilt with its scraps of fabric sewn together, however, its form more resembles a painting. These works are assembled land-portraits—a close, sustained look at the natural world as it reveals itself to the viewer. In her representation, the land becomes a fragmented piece-meal arrangement, rows and rows to be tended. Through the eyes of the ancestral Black imagination, the natural environment transforms from a landscape to a laborscape. Perhaps jagged mountains and sky, perhaps rocky riverbank and river, perhaps rows to be toiled, this assemblage contains many of Smith’s ancestors’ narratives. The choice of materials reflect this—some of the fabrics in this piece come from Smith’s father’s old work clothes. Her father, the Abstract Expressionist sculptor and painter George Smith, is a founding member of Houston’s Project Row Houses. As a descendant of community-focused creators, Smith fully understands the inspiration behind the making of a quilt. Smith declares, “A quilt is a representation of something being made out of nothing. And we cannot move forward without acknowledging the past, lest history be repeated.”