Kapwani Kiwanga: BLEED

Fifteen feet tall by sixty feet wide, BLEED is imposing. Indigo blue and charcoal black sections of quilted fabric form what may be interpreted as a seascape, while two ovals—one red, one white—nestle between the arcs. The piece references the “flying geese” formation, a motif believed to be used on Underground Railroad quilts to indicate a safe route north. As physically expansive as BLEED is, however, it is eq ually as immersive, thanks in part to the artist’s meticulous, research-based dye process. BLEED joins Christopher Myers’s Harlem Is a Myth and Camille Norment’s Untitled (heliotrope) (both 2025) as long-term commissions in our new building.

The deep blue of BLEED, which forms the top portion of the work, is dyed with indigo, a crop that was cultivated widely across American plantations. Its production drew greatly on enslaved people’s knowledge of the plant from West Africa, where the native indigo root was long used for dyeing and patterning textiles. Indigo dyeing depends on iterative cycles: cloth is repeatedly dipped into an indigo vat (a warm dye bath). As with rusting metal, each oxidation changes the color. In BLEED, Kiwanga references broader indigo traditions on the African continent. One such tradition is Yoruba Àdìrẹ, a type of textile art in southwestern Nigeria, where women traditionally prepare and dye cotton cloth, and use “resist techniques” to create patterns in blue and white. For Kiwanga, indigo references Black ancestral bonds to Africa and an inherited relationship to the land carried out by both the labor and chemistry required to make the color.

The bottom segment of the quilt is made of a rolling black speckled fabric created using black pigment oxidized with salt water collected from the Atlantic Ocean. Kiwanga’s dyeing process gestures to the many ways the ocean has altered Black life through slavery and migration and becomes a container for these histories. In this work, the oceanic waters transform the material through contact, creating an imprint of these ocean memories. The burgundy in the rightmost oval comes from pokeberry fruit. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, plant knowledge was shared between enslaved Africans and Indigenous people. The word “poke” traces to the Algonquian “pokan,” meaning “bloody,” a key influence on the mural’s title. Known for both its medicinal and toxic properties, Kiwanga’s use of the pokeberry is a reference to an 1816 trial in Virginia: an enslaved woman, Delphy, was accused of and sentenced to death for “feloniously preparing and administering poison” to Isabella Mitchell, her enslaver. The poison Delphy supposedly used was made of ground glass and pokeroot. In BLEED, pokeberries signal the defiance of enslaved peoples and the will toward their freedom.

DIY DYE
Want to make your own natural dyes at home? The following common household (or neighborhood) items produce the colors of the rainbow. Use a high ratio (try 2:1) of vegetable material to water for a deep color.

Beets for red
Avocado for pink (it’s true)
Paprika for orange
Turmeric for yellow
Spinach for green
Blueberries for blue (of course)
Black beans for purple (don’t let the name fool you) or sweet gum bark (you can find these trees all over New York)