Tina Williams Brewer: A Right To Dream

Tina Williams Brewer is an internationally recognized Pittsburgh-based fiber artist, storyteller, and creator of richly layered story quilts exploring African American history, culture, spirituality, memory, and resilience. Her work transforms fabric into a kind of memory device—layering images, symbols, color, and pattern to tell stories that might otherwise be forgotten. For Brewer, storytelling is inseparable from history. Her practice grew from a desire to explore African and African American experiences through art, reaching backward toward ancestral knowledge while also looking toward healing, possibility, and the future. Brewer’s work reminds us of the necessity of retelling stories of our collective past. As our relationship to it continues to change throughout time, we find variations deepening the meanings. Like the Sankofa, a bird looking back, we cannot know where we are going without knowing where we have come from. This navigational centering of self, and of a community, goes to the core of knowing who we are as individuals and as a society. The familial and cultural stories ground us, and push us forward. Like unseen forces of trade winds or ocean currents, a sense of direction is always present in her art.