Trading Post: 41.77260° N, 72.66754° W, when a garden doesn’t return or can’t be found by Chotsani Elaine Dean

Opening reception: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibitions run September 24 - November 8, 2026

 

Trading Post...by Chotsani Elaine Dean is another entry into the complex, layered realities of Dean’s communal ancestry's history and visual archives, setting forth the foundations of creative purpose in her practice and research. Much of Dean’s work is rooted in quilts made during the period of early European colonization of North America through post-antebellum, stitched on and, eventually, off cotton plantations by enslaved and free African Americans well into the mid-20th century and continuing to a communal practice today. These quilts, their makers' lives, and the material that gives them life, cotton, serve as the historical sources and points of departure she uses to examine, explore, and comprehend this dreadful time in America's history while simultaneously searching and locating connected global and cultural economics, commodities, and realities people and place and the entanglements therein that have rippled into the present.