In its creative dialogue with Diedrick Brackens, Retori has harnessed the artist’s knack for opposites, colors, yearning for renewal and ability to find balance through resilience in its Chapter 01 collection via contrasting textures and vividly hued accents and a recurring line evoking the silhouetted bodies.

The power of resilience informs the life and work of African American textile artist Diedrick Brackens, a poet weaving his roots and heritage into abstract and figurative tapestries. Crafting narratives through shapes and colors by pushing the limits of the loom, Brackens’ taps into a universal story of fulfillment and transformation.

 After abandoning biology studies he originally thought were his given path, Brackens switched gears and embarked on an artistic re-discovery of his roots, embedding the skillful traditional weaving techniques passed down by his grandmother into his art. South American quilting

West African strip-weaving and European tapestry-making have become the artist’s expressive vehicles. 

Defined by technical virtuosity and poetic sensibility, Brackens’ tapestries are ritualistic and repetitive compositions centered on intimacy, human connection, ancestral ties and resilience telegraphing pure and primitive human experiences drawn from folklore, biblical stories and African American literature.

Through silhouetted bodies and animals weaved against vividly colored striped or block-like backgrounds which evoke emotions, the artist celebrates the universal act of transformation seen through an autobiographical lens. He highlights the thin balance between opposites fueling a narrative of tensions between struggles and peace, the magical and the mundane, further enhanced by the harsh topics he depicts in contrast with the inherent softness and pliability of textiles.