A Quilter Reclaims His Image
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Over seven years after his release from Angola State Prison in Louisiana, where he was wrongfully imprisoned for 41½ years, Gary Tyler will celebrate his first solo exhibition of quilts on July 8 at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, the same city where Rosa Parks and Tyler’s mother campaigned for his freedom in 1976. Tyler’s practice began after he started volunteering at Angola’s hospice program. In addition to gifting quilts to the families of late patients, volunteers would sell them at the prison’s rodeo for funding. When the group needed extra hands for an upcoming show, they recruited Tyler. “Doing my work made me realize that I have something to offer, that my greatest asset is myself,” Tyler says of revisiting quilting after his release. “I’m exhibiting to people what I’ve been through and who I am today.” The show’s title, “We Are the Willing,” is the motto of Angola’s drama club, which Tyler served as president of for 28 years. The 11 quilts on display feature symbols that relate to how Tyler sees his own evolution, like the butterfly, and self-portraits sourced from photos that were taken of Tyler while he was incarcerated. “It’s an opportunity for Gary to reproduce an image of himself at a particular moment in time, allowing him to develop agency over his story by reclaiming this mediated imagery,” the exhibition’s curator, Allison Glenn, says. Also on display is a vitrine of those sourced photographs alongside memorabilia that was circulated in the fight for Tyler’s freedom. “We Are the Willing” will be on view from July 8 through Sept. 6, lscgallery.com.