Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the artist’s monumental installation, Birth of a Nation (2014), which represents the abstracted figure of a black woman nursing a white infant against the backdrop of the first official flag of the United States. Suspended above a mound of earth, the quilt is surrounded by Towns’ ongoing Story Quilts series (2016–), a cycle of seven works in luminous fabrics and glass beads that narrate the life of Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion.