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Dindga McCannon Has Been Stitching Black History into the American Art Canon for 60 Years

At Fridman Gallery, six decades of paintings, quilts, prints and assemblages reveal how the Harlem-born artist turned material experimentation into an expansive language of Black history, womanhood, music and memory.

A pioneer of textile assemblage, found-object quilting and wearable art, Dindga McCannon has always drawn on emotional intelligence and creative intuition to shape her vibrant artistic language. Her work is held in major museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Phillips Collection and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. As she weaves together different histories and the traces embodied in objects and materials, McCannon follows something of the spontaneous improvisation of a jazz riff, listening and responding with attentive, empathic understanding. The result is a layered form of storytelling built from repurposed fragments of fabric and found objects, assembled through stitching, beads, buttons, embroidery and paint.

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Born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx, McCannon came of age as an artist and young mother during the rise of the civil rights movement. She began her career studying with Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew and Al Loving at the Art Students League of New York. On her 18th birthday, she went to a concert in Tompkins Square Park, where she encountered the Sun Ra Arkestra, an alternative jazz ensemble whose Afrofuturist performance struck her as a kind of epiphany. When we met at her current show at Fridman Gallery, McCannon looked as though she had just stepped out of one of their performances—the Arkestra had played nearby only a few months earlier for the New Museum Summer Bash. Her vibrant outfit extended the work itself, revealing an all-encompassing creative universe shaped by the energy of her relentless, expansive imagination. On view through October 18, “Yesterday and Today” brings together, for the first time, her groundbreaking mixed-media quilts, paintings and prints from the 1970s to the present.

"Dindga McCannon - Yesterday and Today" Artist: Dindga McCannon Venue: Fridman Gallery Address: 169 Bowery, New York, NY Through: October 18, 2026

“Usually, I have some idea of what I want to do, what kind of story I want to tell, and then I start collecting things from my studio,” McCannon tells Observer, describing her studio as an immense archive of things accumulated over time. “I’ve been practicing for close to 60 years, and I pick things up as I go around the world. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to do with them, but if I see something interesting, I can’t leave it. So I collect it.” Her process is intuitive yet narrative-driven: materials are chosen for the story she wants to tell and the associations they carry.

She points to a sculpture, Carnival 2 (2022), which took shape after she encountered the Carnival tradition on a trip to Venice. McCannon linked that experience to attending carnival in Haiti in 1971 and to her longstanding fascination with costume, shine and collective celebration. The sculpture combines fragments from her own archive with pieces sourced from New York stores that have long served costume makers, creating a Harlequinesque compendium of the tradition across geographies. “I love costumes. I love the shine,” she says. “Carnival is a collective celebration. It’s celebrated in something like 50 countries—it’s not just one country, it’s worldwide.”

Through her freestyle approach, McCannon collapses hierarchies between materials and between art and craft, making quilting, sewing and needlework central........

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