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 us in the galleries with 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, Alexandria 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.

This one-day-only live program is conceived and performed by Alexandria Eregbu. Organized by Mathilde Walker-Billaud, AFAM Curator of Programs and Engagement

Schedule

Alexandria Eregbu’s sonic and textile environment will be accessible to all gallery visitors throughout the day, from 11:30am to 7:00p.m..

The artist will activate the installation at the following times:

12:00 pm–1:00 pm — Invocation & Opening Ceremony

Artist Alexandria Eregbu brings the galleries to life with a powerful blend of spoken word and ambient sound, drawing inspiration from the quilts’ vibrant blues, rich cotton textures, and intricately dyed patterns.

4:00 pm–5:15 pm — Artist Talk with Dr Chelsea Frazier

In conversation with Dr Chelsea Frazier, Eregbu guides us through the conception of Blue Magic, discussing how her textile and sound installation responds to the exhibition An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles with an eco-critical and Black feminist lens on the Museum's textile collection.

6:00 pm–7:00 pm — Evening Ritual & Closing Performance

Using the quilts on view and their material ecologies as a tactile feedback loop, the artist performs an original composition of field recordings, sampled media, and folk music, pulling visitors into a space resonant with pulses and memories.

About the artist:

Alexandria Eregbu is an independent curator and cultural practitioner working at the intersections of art and music.

As a visual artist her artwork engages a combination of archival images, symbols, proverbs, and folklore to invoke ancestral memory in African-American existence. She creates textiles, paintings, sculpture, and performances to bridge nature, design, healing, and ecology. She uses materials like beads, indigo, cowrie shells, wood, and feathers and processes like embroidery, appliqué, natural dyeing, drawing, and quilting to make meaning with the unseen.

As DJ FINDING IJEOMA, Alexandria blends distinct methods of sampling, mixing, and archival audio to amplify femme voices, invoke Black memory, and honor the tradition of storytelling within global dance music culture. Rooted in Chicago’s sonic legacy, her practice embodies a deep reverence for rhythm, ritual, and collective gathering.

About the speaker:

Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier is a scholar working at the intersection of Black feminist literature and theory and the environmental humanities. Her scholarship, teaching, and public speaking span the fields of Black feminist literature and theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, African art and literature, political theory, science and technology studies, and Afrofuturism.

She is currently at work on her first book manuscript—an ecocritical study of contemporary Black women artists, writers, and activists. In her analyses, she probes the ways that dominant theoretical and disciplinary frameworks in environmental studies obscure the legibility of what she calls a Black feminist ecoethic as it manifests in Black women’s environmental writing, visual art, and activism across the African diaspora.

Dr. Frazier’s research has been generously supported by the Northwestern University Presidential Society of Fellows, the Science in Human Culture program at Northwestern, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the Alumni Association of Barnard College, the Purdue University Lynn Fellowship, and the Mellon Mays Fellowship program. Her published work appears in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies and in the edited volume Ecologies, Agents, Terrains from Yale University Press.

Images

Left: Alexandria Eregbu, Cosmic Seed, 2018, indigo and acrylic on linen, feathers, cowrie shells. Courtesy of the artist.

Middle: Alexandria Eregbu, Finding Ijeoma, 2024, performance. Photography by Lyric Newbern. Courtesy of the artist.

Right: 28. Flying Geese Quilt, United States, c. 1870. Cotton, 82 x 68 in. American Folk Art Museum Collection

Registration

Free, and open to all.

Advance registration for the performances and talk is appreciated. Please consider making a donation when you register to support ongoing programming.

Please note: Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis (even for those who have registered) and will be limited to the legal capacity of our venue.

This program takes place in the Museum’s Atrium on the first floor. All bags are subject to security bag check upon arrival to the Museum. Please plan to arrive at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start time. All backpacks must be left in complimentary lockers, located within the Shop.

For specific accommodation questions or needs, please contact us at least 10 days prior to the program at cHVibGljcHJvZ3JhbXMgfCBmb2xrYXJ0bXVzZXVtICEgb3Jn.

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