In Between

Between logic and intuition lies a space of creation.

In Between brings you into that space through unexpected juxtapositions that invite creative reflection. Familiar objects are made curious, prompting questions about how creative thinking is sparked, how craft emerges as both an art-making and a healing practice, and how collaboration and improvisation become critical ways of knowing.

Throughout the space, objects like tricycles, sewing machines, and musical instruments are celebrated both for the craftsmanship of the people who made them and for their role as tools of play and craft. Removed from their usual associations, these objects prompt you to look again: to notice the space you’re standing in, to form your own meanings, and to find something new or unexpected in what you see.

With In Between, Ramekon O’Arwisters draws on his decades-long multidisciplinary practice in textile and craft to create a space that reflects his lived experience, ways of finding inspiration, and aim of finding calm, healing, and resilience both within and through the unknown. What emerges is a sense that creativity is rarely solitary, that we create together rooted in different versions of shared experience, and that this shared creative presence is itself a way of knowing.

Rooted in the exploration of traditional textile and craft practices, my work as a multimedia artist reflects my experiences as a Black and Queer man in the United States. Growing up amid de facto segregation in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s and ’70s, and later coming of age in San Francisco during the pivotal 1990s, I ground my sculptural and socially engaged work in the understanding that craft — especially textile and fabric — is an act of care, healing, and resilience. This belief traces back to my childhood and my grandmother, Celia Jones Taylor (1898–1982), who first taught me quilt-making as a safe space for creative expression.

— Ramekon O’Arwisters