Part of the Contemporary Craft exhibition “C3: Cloth, Culture, Community – Exploring 1,000 years of Black Pittsburgh through clothing.”
Contemporary Craft (TNS)
PITTSBURGH — Designer and writer Tereneh Idia remembers vividly standing in Drexel University’s Main Building and yelling, “I am Amina of Zazzau, Hausaland!”
She was dressed in wide trousers and a head wrap to resemble a 1500s West African warrior queen in what is now Nigeria.
Idia, who was then head of the Black Student Union at the Philadelphia university, wanted to “make Black History come alive” for students and faculty.
These days, she is doing the same thing in the Contemporary Craft exhibition “C3: Cloth, Culture, Community — Exploring 1,000 years of Black Pittsburgh through clothing.”
The free exhibition opened in December and continues through April 16 at Contemporary Craft’s BNY Mellon Satellite Gallery in the lobby of the Steel Plaza T-Station in Downtown. It is the result of a nine-month residency at Contemporary Craft funded by a $35,000 Creative Development Award from The Heinz Endowments.
In 14 outfits, Idia explores over 1,000 years of history, from 1500s Amina to 3000 Amina, who lives in a very different Pittsburgh than the one we know today. She honors Black rulers, slaves, soldiers, businessmen, coal miners, activists and artists — including her grandfather and father, sculptor Thaddeus Mosley — whose lives have shaped Western Pennsylvania, America and the world.
The exhibition begins with Amina, whom Idia first learned about from her image on a Nigerian postage stamp. The outfit features a breastplate of aluminum chain links, equestrian culottes made from fabric found at the Center for Creative Reuse in Point Breeze and a crown of recycled brass by Selima Dawson of Blakbird Jewelry.
Many outfits feature handmade items, sustainable fabrics and vintage clothing purchased on eBay. Several pieces bear the image of the designer’s C3 flag, which shows the East Coast of the United States and a portion of the coast of West Africa, with a dotted line to represent Africans’ Middle Passage to slavery.
The outfits are eye-catching and sometimes colorful; every detail has significance. But what really captures a visitor’s imagination is the stories behind the clothing.
Idia, a contributing writer for City Paper whose work has also appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, artfully weaves together history and personal reflections in a 32-page catalog that is required reading for anyone who wants to fully understand the exhibition.
In it, Idia shares the legend of the Flying Africans as told in the Julie Dash film “Daughters of the Dust”:
Eighteen Igbo people from Nigeria are brought by ship to Georgia, where they see a slave auction block and realize their fate. They join hands, turn and walk together back into the sea. Some say they drowned. Others believe they flew back to Africa.
Thorough research is the basis of other stories and clothing, including that of Francois, an African man who escaped enslavement by the French at Fort Duquesne, and alerted the English that the French were abandoning the fort. That valuable information prompted Virginia’s lieutenant governor to offer Francois his freedom.
Some stories are heart-breaking.”Sukey” Suck, an enslaved woman, indentured her daughter into slavery to John McKee, the founder of McKeesport, in the late 1700s. Idia admits she struggled to comprehend how a mother could do this, but eventually came to understand that a 12 1/2 -year indenture was the best Sukey could do for her daughter given her circumstances.
Even hopeful vignettes sometimes have a sad backstory. Figures of a mother and two daughters who came from the South in the 1920s for a better life in Pittsburgh wear jaunty hats and colorful clothing made from vintage fabrics. But there is no mannequin to represent their husband and father, who didn’t survive the journey to work in Western Pennsylvania’s steel mills and factories.
The mother’s brooch has the silhouette of her lost beloved’s face and they travel with a quilt instead of winter coats, items they didn’t need in their Southern hometown.
Next to the feminine figures is one of a coal miner whose work shirt bears the C3 flag. His Carhartt overalls are colorfully block-printed. This represents Idia’s grandfather, Thaddeus Mosley, Sr., a miner and union organizer who lived near what is now Grove City in the 1930s.
To intimidate him, company guards would shoot buckshot at his house while Mosley and his wife returned fire from the windows, Idia says. Her father and his siblings would hide under their beds. One aunt lived the rest of her life with buckshot in her leg.
Idia’s father, an artist renowned for his monumental wood sculptures, also inspired an outfit in the exhibition. Marked “World War II veteran,” the mannequin wears a dark wool suit similar to the Navy uniform Mosley wore while serving in the Solomon Islands in the 1940s. He didn’t keep it after the war.
“I threw my uniform in the San Francisco Bay but I kept my dog tags,” he is quoted as saying in the catalog.
Idia points out that service members had to turn in their dog tags to qualify for veteran benefits, which were less for African Americans than white veterans.
“The intergenerational and lasting impact of getting less than they deserved is not discussed enough,” she writes. “It led to lower wages, less wealth and an inability to secure housing or attend college…. So the cycle of having less than you deserve continued, and still does to this very day.”
