When you enter the “Weaving an Address” exhibition at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, Massachusetts, your gaze is directed to the central wall of the Allie Kussin Gallery. It’s there that Perla Mabel’s “Morir Soñando” hangs like the nave rosette window in France’s Chartres Cathedral. Mabel created this multi-media piece during Covid to find herself, and to “speak her truth without fear.”
She told me that her art is her love language. A sunflower ornament, owned by her mother, tops her work like a perpetual sun. The black, purple and gold fabrics that she pieced together echo the materials in home altars that she grew up with. Mabel painted several self-portraits emerging and dreaming in this cave-like spiritual space.
Curator Marla McLeod invited Mabel to display her work in the exhibit with only a month to prepare; the other artists were given a year’s notice. Happily, the power and reverence in Mabel’s works elevated this one to the title wall of the gallery.
At the gallery entrance, a quilt dedicated to Brister Freeman by Groton artist Sharon Chandler Correnty is enclosed in a vitrine. It greets the visitor with charm and agile references to the central story of this exhibition, the story of freed slave and Concord resident, Brister Freeman. Freeman earned his exit from slavery by enlisting alongside 27 other Black men in the Patriot army. After the war, he returned to Concord, where he had grown up as a slave, to buy land. Due to property redlining of the time, he was only able to purchase a small, untillable plot in the woods near the cabin of Henry David Thoreau, who mentions Freeman in his book, “Walden.”