The Southern and the Sacred

For Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, textiles are portals to power. The self-taught artist weaves storytelling, mysticism, lost histories, ancestral tributes, and remembrances into exuberant textile works. Over Zoom on a sunny morning in early June, their dark curls pulled back in a ponytail and rocking long cobalt blue nails, the New Orleans-based artist rhapsodizes about textiles: “I just love textiles. We’re just surrounded by textiles in all of the most intimate ways, like blankets, and blankets that have been passed down, or quilts, and clothing. We’re always touched by cloth all the time.” Drawn to its tactility, Murray sources textiles from all over, whether found, thrifted, or purchased at fabric stores. They believe fabrics transform the feeling of a space in a way that other materials don’t. In five short years, Murray, who was recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 (for Art & Style 2024) has gained impressive momentum and visibility. An array of group shows with the Cierra Britton Gallery, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Strada, Locust Projects, Sibyl Gallery, and Secci Gallery, among others, have continued to catapult their art globally. Murray’s spirited and sewn artworks have also made it into the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Montclair Art Museum.

Murray, who is Black American, biracial, and queer, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in Asheville, North Carolina. They moved to Mississippi after graduating from Yale College, having completed a fine art study abroad program at Central Saint Martins in London. The artist now lives in Louisiana. The textures, sights, smells, and sounds of the South run through Murray’s veins and in their artistry. “It kind of took me to leave, going to Yale, to realize that—how Southern I was. There’s a certain slowness and this intimacy of how people relate to each other.” For Murray, it feels “really specific to the South,” and they think “that intimacy has shown up in [their] work in different ways.” On the artist’s website, an endearing page titled “My Ancestors” features archival photographs of both Black and white matriarchs, from each parent’s side. Murray’s reverence for textiles leads back to those women. Growing up, they saw their white paternal grandmother, who spent her final years in Jacksonville, sew often, and she once made Murray a little skirt for a costume party. This early bond between grandmother and grandchild planted the seed for sewing in Murray’s art practice.

Murray was raised and shaped by dynamic Black matriarchs whose ancestors migrated from the Carolinas and Georgia down to central Florida (Maitland and Winter Park). Their maternal grandmother, a law coach in Jacksonville, has supported attorneys and law firms for over 30 years, helping elevate their personal and professional well-being. Murray’s mother, an activist, founded a consulting firm advising grassroots groups and nonprofits on social justice and racial equity. Murray was raised in activism, which they describe as “Southern movement spaces” that organically led them to obtain a BA in African American studies from Yale in 2018. These two forces, activism and Black history and culture, beautifully collide in their art practice: “I feel like Black studies was such an important foundation and groundwork for my practice.” Black women authors and Black feminists have been foundational to the artist. They even had the opportunity to learn directly from renowned poet Elizabeth Alexander, who was Murray’s professor at Yale. Murray also finds Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry to be vital, to inspire titles for things “or just to find splices of language that feel like they give language to what I’m trying to do.” Additionally, Murray shares familial ties with none other than Zora Neale Hurston, who was raised in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black town in the US.

The title for their 2021 debut exhibition in their home state at the Miami-based N’Namdi Contemporary, They Looked at Us Like Violet, was derived from poet Dionne Brand’s “Verso 55” from The Blue Clerk, and Murray created large-scale textile collages for it. Digital images of Black women from past and present were printed on hand-dyed silk organza and other fabrics and painted with oil or acrylic on muslin. The works were bathed in shades of midnight blue, burgundy, teal green, and violet—the final color serving as an homage to their great-great-great grandmother Viola. One work, Revelations, shows two Black women figures in states of surrender and ecstasy, a digital print on denim, paired with tulle, vintage scarves, various textiles, and acrylic.

A second solo exhibition, Within Listening Distance of the Sea . . . (in the prose of poet Nikky Finney), followed that same year at Fridman Gallery in New York. Murray researched postcard images of Black women and girls from the colonial past (early 1900s), most likely photographed by white men, and replaced their pain and objectification, revering them in textile works that offer empathy and agency. Murray’s hands crafted the large-scale, sewn pieces all in the shades of the ocean, to feel emotionally intimate and meditative. The title work of the exhibit depicts a Black woman in repose; she is pensive and free. A digital print on satin, it featured a vintage Kantha quilt, a vintage slip dress, sequins, other textiles, and was hugged by stunning blues and purples. Themes of rest and liberation follow in the short film Deep Waters, also included in the exhibit, that Murray collaborated on with fellow Black Southerners Logan Lynette Burroughs, Heather Baebii Lee, and cast members from SpiritHouse (a Black women-led community org in Durham, North Carolina). The 11-minute black-and-white film features vignettes portraying Black people—everyday folks, artists, spiritual practitioners, cultural organizers—in joyful daily life in Durham and quotes from Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory.”

In their recent exhibition at Alma | Lewis in Pittsburgh, My Memory Is a Machine, Murray gravitates to found images of nostalgic everyday essentials, finding parallels to their life in the South. In this exhibit, they’re using contemporary imagery and re-interpreting the childhood memories (“kind of ’70s, a little bit”) of their mother, who’s a Black American Gen Xer. “It feels closer to home in a way,” Murray says. “There’s imagery of fans and cars—those are the central motifs—which relate back to the South and to different memories.” Kilolo Luckett, Alma | Lewis’s executive director and chief curator and a past collaborator of Murray’s, says Murray’s “kaleidoscopic, hand-dyed textiles layered with vintage photographs evoke dreamy memories, and their debut installation—created in a Southern vernacular aesthetic—brings together the intimate and the expansive.” One work, ‘Cross roads, features an image of the rap legend Layzie Bone and a former partner in a vintage coupe with desire and warmth in their stare, epitomizing Black love in the ’90s. In another, A Map to Nowhere, a young Black woman leans over a fan and holds a direct gaze with the viewer, fully empowered in her sexuality.

Murray’s memory is their way of accessing love and sentimentality—for their Black American Southern roots and family oral histories. “I feel like there’s a lot of cultural generational wealth that we don’t necessarily have,” the artist says when speaking about their Black maternal ancestors. “Cooking and these crafts or trades that have been lost over generations. We’re having to teach ourselves how to cook, because those things just haven’t been passed down because of trauma. I feel like the women on my mom’s side have instilled this: make something out of nothing—even if I don’t have the recipe or whatever it is, it’s in me somewhere.”