Stephen Hamilton
August 6, 2025
Much of your work touches on the boundaries of time and space, particularly concerning the African Diaspora. That was certainly present in your Public Art Accelerator work, The Founders Project.
I think a lot about pre-colonial Africa and Black aesthetics, world-building, and world-making. Looking at the art and iconography of pre-colonial Africa, especially aspects of pre-colonial African thought and spirituality, allows you to look at how people structured their world and place within it. Through my research and investment in those aesthetics, I have found that elements of Black thought and aesthetics are relevant or identifiable for folks in the Diaspora.
Sometimes people look at my work and imagine I'm creating this utopic space. But in reality, I'm looking at Black world-building in this era of Black self-determination and thinking about the imagery and iconography recognizable to those of us in the Diaspora. Pre-colonial Africa is an expansive time period. I look at art and iconography from different eras in my work and think about how I'm strategically using that to create these imagined spaces and worlds. By investigating that, I can find recognizable and identifiable elements in my own experience as somebody of African descent. Illustrating these ideas from African thought, philosophy, and history is a powerful visual storytelling tool.
How did your participation in the Triennial’s Public Art Accelerator program in 2018 shape your approach to public art?
That was an amazing experience. It gave me the opportunity to think about my creative practice in general and, in particular, how to create something tailored to a specific community. While developing a public artwork, you must ask yourself, Who is this work for? How will this work live with people, especially the communities it represents?
I’m sure that relevance to the community has been a top priority as you’ve developed your Triennial project.
Community engagement has always been essential to my practice. My experience in the Public Art Accelerator allowed me to codify those tools. I’ve been thinking a lot about the educational components of my Triennial project and how people will engage with the work.
Your work invites viewers to imagine histories and futures coexisting and influencing one another by providing them with educational and creative opportunities.
How do we make sense of the world? How do we make sense of the big questions we have as people, like the nature of good and evil? African thought, philosophy, and history give us rich opportunities to engage with theories and ideas about these questions, but they often go under-explored. It's a shame because it's so beautiful, complex, and engaging. It’s also where many aesthetic ideas and elements of Black culture that inform our popular culture arise from. You can see how these different periods have produced material culture and ideas that impact Black experiences today.
Contemporary African culture is part of a grand trajectory of history. It’s the result of these complex, ever-changing, ever-evolving cultural experiences. As somebody dealing with that material culture, I witness a reticence connecting these grand aesthetic traditions to African American cultural production. I want my work to expose people to these traditions so they can see the connections between contemporary Black cultural production and these traditions rooted in history, not as some timeless thing that always was, but rather as something that has undergone a rich transformation over time.
A lot of your work is based in textile production. Do you view the separation of craft from fine art as a colonialist strategy to alienate people from their histories?
There is something very interesting about African textile production that disrupts our immediate understanding of craft and makes us then look at European histories of production in a new light. Depending on where you are, textile production in Africa is either a male or female-dominated art form. In certain places, there are both male and female weaving traditions. Even with that, gender can be nebulous. If we look at the history of textile production in Africa, women are the backbone of a vital weaving industry. Those items are often valued as ritually potent objects or luxury items.
Textile production, carpentry, and many other skills were an essential part of West Central African life. When you look at textile production and exchange in the United States, whether that was domestic production being done by enslaved people or commercial industries such as indigo or cotton production, you can see how much it was taking from a pool of expertise established in Africa long before. I see it as a reclamation when I use that knowledge to educate people about those histories in my work. I did a project with the Royall House and Slave Quarters in 2023 called Reclaiming Our Hands. In it, I was thinking about how textile history has been informed by the textile work done by enslaved people in the United States. Judith Wragg Chase wrote a book, Afro-American Art and Craft, that discusses the art and craft work done by enslaved people.
I learned weaving in Nigeria, and I need to pay homage to the lineage of weavers who taught me. I also learned about wood carving in Nigeria, specifically a type that is very much respected as an art in Yoruba culture. It's important for me to understand the traditions that I'm referencing.
I'm curious about how you understand the sacredness of an artwork. What does it mean to you personally? What about within a larger historical context?
It's essential to recognize that these works themselves are very much understood as religious objects in many parts of West and West Central Africa, not only in the sense that they are used by people who are priests or priestesses but oftentimes the materials themselves have very potent metaphysical properties, just as they have physical properties. For example, the physical properties of cotton include absorbency and softness. The fact that it attracts and holds water lends it the metaphysical property of something that can attract or absorb. Its ability to attract and absorb is also tied to other properties, such as absorbing blessings or the creative forces that allow you to conceive, things of that nature. People still make hand-spun cotton throughout West Africa specifically to create medicinal textiles. Raffia, however, is water-resistant, but once it becomes sufficiently wetted, it can take dye better than most other cellulose fibers. Its water resistance is helpful for textile production but also designates it as a ritual barrier for shrines and sacred spaces.
I often consider the ritual significance of my materials because they imbue my work with potent forces while paying homage to the history of textile production in West and West Central Africa.
Textile production is central to your Triennial project. Can you share a little about it?
I want to invite people into the process to see the labor that goes into textile production. I want people to see that this is an art form that requires a certain amount of labor and skill so that they understand how textiles were made—and still are made in certain parts of the world.
We think about cloth as just a mass-produced thing. We don't consider it an object imbued with a certain amount of value due to the labor that goes into producing it. Even with mass production, clothing is still made by people. A whole world of human labor and often suffering goes into the production of clothes. And that mass-produced clothing doesn't just go away. They go someplace else, often West Africa, to places like Ghana, where they become somebody else's problem. I want people to understand what textiles are and how they're made and allow them to witness that embodiment of labor.
How do you hope Triennial visitors experience your project?
I hope my Triennial project serves as a love letter to what Black hands make. I want to show people the rich history of these traditions.
As a local Boston artist, why do you think the Triennial is vital for the city? What do you see it offering to other local artists?
Boston is so slept on. There are amazing artists here. The city must invest in the artists and the communities here—and I'm not just talking about people born in Boston, but also people who are transplanted here. Artists here need to be able to create daring work that is not watered down. The Triennial can get people to understand that there are phenomenal artists here and put Boston on the map as an art city.