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.

 

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.

 

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