The Brooklyn Rail

At the Shepherd, a restored Romanesque-style church, Detroit gallery Library Street Collective presents Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles, a hefty group show of thirty-six artists, curated by Allison Glenn, Artistic Director of the Shepherd. Featuring a multiplicity of shimmering works engaging fiber and fiber-adjacent practices, the exhibition includes gallery-represented favorites, historic Detroit makers, as well as emerging artists and Indigenous and international practitioners. The quilt is broad, but the exhibition extends generative threads for others to unspool still.

Glenn narrates a genealogy beginning in the nineteenth century with the invention of the Jacquard loom, which revolutionized the fabric industry, but the apex of Glenn’s curatorial framework is techno, a genre crafted in Detroit. Attributed to the Belleville Three, which included musicians Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, techno’s amalgamated four-on-four beat exploded on Detroit’s airwaves with tracks by labels Submerge, Minus Records, and Metroplex. Techno’s quintessential roots were radical—Detroit-based label Underground Resistance eschewed commercial production and released tracks to empower Black listeners with emancipatory Afrofuturist counternarratives in an economically struggling 1980s Detroit.

What Warp and Weft attempts to provide, mostly obliquely, is an alternate definition of technology, which functions as a counterpoint to the tangled mess of Euro-American technological progress, spurred on by a ceaseless teleology of enlightened modernity. Of course, the trajectory depends on coloniality. One recalls Walter D. Mignolo’s crisp words in The Darker Side of Western Modernity, “Coloniality (as I and others have argued in the past decade) is constitutive of modernity. There is no modernity without coloniality.” Instead, a better definition of technology may be the humble application of human knowledge, drawn from ancestors, the body, craft, and spirituality. Far more capacious, this alternate definition foregrounds Black and Indigenous epistemologies that precede and persist in spite of Western conquest.

In the Shepherd’s anteroom, works in improbable shades of sunset are gathered around Diné fiber artist Eric-Paul Riege’s sculpture yoo’4yay (2025). A totemic earring created for the Diné deity Ye’iitsoh, Riege’s sculpture is suspended from the gallery’s central oculus, a message from the artist’s grandmother: all objects, including jewelry, accumulate memories. Drawing the eye upwards, a marshmallow-adorned orb crowned with synthetic hair invites touch. The sculpture is anthropomorphic—an august marker of place. The surrounding constellation of works represent old guard Detroit artists like Carole Harris and Allie McGhee. Fissured like rust, Harris’s quilt Traces Remain (2024) exposes jubilant saturated patterns. Winding lines hint at off-kilter topographies, palimpsestic dermal readings. The tapestry converses with the taut leather surface of nearby Esteban Ramón Pérez’s Hey Angel, Fly Over and Bless Me (2024), another covert body. Upon close inspection, Pérez has etched a “scar,” a shooting star.

Techno, and its radical roots, pulse on low volume. Diné weaver Melissa Cody’s Dopamine Dream (2024) somewhat resembles a 1980s video game-cum-motherboard in its geometric pixelated pattern. Adopting the vernacular of Germantown Revival weaving, a style named after the Pennsylvania town where government wool was distributed on the Long Walk, Cody’s symbolism collapses timelines. In the transept, Tiff Massey’s printed mirrors White Out, you in red, black, and green (2024) nudge at a self-reckoning with gingham’s material history. Originating in Southeast Asia, gingham was produced and imported through global trade routes, eventually clothing enslaved peoples on American plantations. In the same room, subtle visual distortions reference the glitch from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto provoking “error” as a productive site. Woven on a TC2 digital loom, Joey Quiñones’s distorted eighteenth-century casta painting De India y De Negra; Lobo (2025) engages not only the glitch, but perhaps the temporal warp.

In the Shepherd’s nave, four metallic avatars by Nep Sidhu with Nicholas Galanin and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes stand as transported onlookers on the church’s “dance floor.” A confusing hodgepodge of synthesized cross-cultural references on historical technologists enrobe these figures, like a spirit-mediating shaman of Tlingit culture and the metalsmiths of the Chera dynasty. SHE in Shadow Form (2015–16) passes as blasé haute-couture, whereas SHE in Gold Form (2024), accoutered in a skirt of wiry black hair, feels somewhat more alive. Towards the apse, works glow in their holy surrounds. Angélica Serech’s Sembrando palabras en mi segunda piel (2023) appears perpetually belonging to the altar. Hand-dyed with knotted fabrics concurrently crossing over—a warp and weft—Serech’s installation, albeit not techno, presents an elegant musical score.