Blue Magic – Alexandria Eregbu

Blue Magic is a sonic and textile environment exploring the deep histories of the color blue. This live program is a unique chance to experience the material connections between textile, color and land while attuning to deep time and ancestral memory.

Join the American Folk Art Museum and guest artist Alexandria Eregbu for a newly commissioned sound work weaving her poetry, field recordings, sampled media, and folk music, with her textile works serving as a vibrant performance backdrop. Drawing from American quilting practice, oral storytelling, sound, and her own family history as a Nigerian-American, the artist will activate both sonically and visually the textiles included in the exhibition An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles.

Using her signature indigo-dyed textiles, Eregbu affirms the material and cultural significance of indigo (Indigofera tinctoria), a plant indigenous to West Africa, India, and Southeast Asia that became a crucial resource in American fashion, arts and design industries in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A hymn to indigo poetics, Blue Magic speculates and reimagines questions about the exhibited quilts, their materials, and their original makers, inviting shared remembrance of matrilineal wisdom and many historically marginalized voices. This immersive environment is an opportunity to honor Black contributions to textile history, particularly West Africa’s enduring ties to cultural practices such as tie-dyeing, sewing, embroidering, and quilting, traditions that continue to flourish across the United States today.