Lillian Blades' first solo exhibition sparkles and shines at Sarasota Art Museum

The word “installation” does workhorse duty in the art world, but it doesn’t do justice to the shimmering curtains in “Through the Veil,” the first solo exhibition of Lillian Blades, currently running at the Sarasota Art Museum campus of Ringling College.

Some people use the word “collage” to describe the Bahamian native’s dazzling creations. Others prefer “assemblage.”

Blades, who holds an MFA from Georgia State University, is partial to “quilts” when talking about her mixed-media pieces, which are wired together and hung from PVC piping, an homage to her plumber father.

In a telephone interview from her Atlanta studio, Blades cites the iconic Gee’s Bend quilts, memorialized on a set of U.S. postage stamps in 2006, as one of her influences.

As fate would have it, some of the Gee’s Bend quilts, which have been assembled for more than a century by Black artisans in Alabama, are also on display right now at SAM, a contemporary art museum housed in the former Sarasota High School. They are part of an exhibition called “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press.”

Blades’ mesmerizing pieces are on SAM’s third floor, while the Gee’s Bend quilts are on the second floor, a happy coincidence for museum patrons.

Like the Gee’s Bend quilts, Blades’ patchwork creations are assembled in a collective fashion, often incorporate found materials and frequently have asymmetrical patterns, a style called “improvisational” in the quilting world.

But the Gee’s Bend quilts are just one of the many threads running through Blades’ pieces. Others are the African diaspora, a Bahamian festival called Junkanoo and the yearning for her mother, a seamstress who died giving birth to the artist. Blades was raised by her aunt, who treated her as a daughter. 

“I tend to gravitate to smaller objects that I find that have a connection to the Caribbean, Africa or the South,” Blades explains. 

Image courtesy of Cydney Maria Rhines

Asked to enumerate some of the things that have found their way into her giant quilt-like tapestries, Blades slowly rattles off “toys, small musical instruments, picture frames, knickknacks, sculptural figurines, jewelry, household utensils, small textiles.” There’s even a clock without hands.

She finds these objects, which represent the past and memories, including those denied or forgotten, in thrift stores and at garage sales. To symbolize the present, Blades often incorporates small mirrors into her assemblages. Of course, you can’t drill a hole (to run the wire through) in a mirror without breaking it, so Blades glues them onto other materials, such as acrylic and wood.

“I use mirrors to reflect what’s now. I’m playing with time,” she says.

Like many children, Blades was introduced to art through coloring books and a box of 64 Crayola crayons. But even as a kid, the future artist liked to work collectively. “I’d be coloring one page, and I’d ask somebody to color the one facing it,” she says.

Blades became a more skilled artist after she was given an oil painting kit in eighth grade. “I was either going to be a child psychologist or an artist. I wanted to create, but there weren’t many female artists in the Bahamas,” she recalls.

Image courtesy of Ryan Gamma

She originally studied painting at Savannah School of Art and Design, but then stepped beyond the two-dimensional world in the 1990s, when she attached a pair of worn African sandals to the surface of one of her paintings.

Over time, Blades’ paintings started getting smaller and smaller, and she started joining them together like a quilt. “By joining one piece to another, I was trying to piece fragments of things that had been severed,” she says. 

With her use of bright colors, Blades is sometimes compared to Jackson Pollack, the Abstract Expressionist who splattered and poured paint onto his canvases. But her work also recalls “combines,” or 3-D assemblages made popular by Robert Rauschenberg, whose centenary is currently being celebrated at The Ringling and other museums.

From crayons to Caribbean carnival costumes

Being a member of groups that created the colorful, elaborate costumes for Junkanoo was a dress rehearsal of sorts for Blades’ future artistic endeavors.

The raucous Bahamian carnival takes place on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas), New Year’s Day and July 10, the country’s Independence Day. The groups that prepare for Junkanoo are similar to the krewes that produce the many parades that take place in New Orleans in the days leading up to Mardi Gras.

The krewes’ Bahamian cousins gather in shacks where they assemble intricate colorful costumes in a spirited competition. Blades loved the experience so much, that today, she belongs to a Junkanoo group in Atlanta, where she lives.

It’s a cliche to say something has to be seen to be believed or that the pictures don’t do justice to a particular scene, but sometimes these axioms hold true. 

That’s certainly the case with “Through the Veil,” which occupies two galleries, one filled with pieces in dark and neutral tones, and the other occupied by brightly hued creations, including one that incorporates all the colors of the rainbow.

It’s appropriate that a visitor stepping out of the elevator into “Through the Veil” is greeted by a piece called “Gumbo,” because mixing flavors and different cultural traditions certainly defines the ethos of Blades’ work.

After contemplating “Gumbo,” one steps farther into the John & Charlotte Suhler Gallery, where a standout piece is “Obsidian,” an all-black structure made of wood, fabric and acrylic that has a variety of textures. 

“I see it as a protective veil, like a shield,” Blades says of the piece, whose title comes from the natural glass stone formed by the cooling of volcanic lava.

Informed that Obsidian also is the name of a controversial, high-rise tower that has been proposed in downtown Sarasota, Blades comments, “Mmm. That’s interesting.” 

Let’s face it, “Obsidian” isn’t a name you hear every day. Like sharing a museum with the Gee’s Bend quilts, this kind of synchronicity is not unfamiliar terrain for Blades.

Image courtesy of Ryan Gamma

Moving into the larger, brighter Tom & Sherry Koski Gallery, one finds the centerpiece of “Through the Veil” — “Sanctuary,” a circular piece dominated by Barbie Pink (Yes, that’s a real color: Pantone 219c.) and other orchid-inspired hues. 

The roof of the piece’s inner core was part of a 2024 exhibition at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. It has been expanded and now is surrounded by curtain-like assemblages.

Blades uses so many salvaged materials in her art; why not repurpose an installation? Why not, indeed? 

The end result is majestic, as skylights in the gallery alter the appearance of “Perennial” throughout the day. In fact, the exhibition could have easily been called “Just Add Light,” because that’s the missing ingredient.

During a tour of the exhibition, SAM curator Lacie Barbour indulged a visitor, joining them on a bench to contemplate “Sanctuary” as a cloud passed by. 

“Depending on the time of year, the pieces look very different because of the angle of the sun,” says Barbour, whose official title is associate curator of exhibitions. 

My visit came as the summer solstice was approaching, but I’ll be back again before the exhibition closes on Oct. 26 to see what it looks like around the autumn equinox.

Even the less colorful works in the Suhler Gallery have targeted lighting that amps up the scintillation factor.

Blades says she doesn’t have a favorite piece among the 13 works on display at SAM, but I confess that I do. It’s “Perennial,” a rainbow-hued collage that also made its debut at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens as part of its 2024 “Orchid Daze” exhibition.

Like some of the Gee’s Bend quilts, “Perennial” moves from a grid-like layout to a displaying its components on the bias (diagonally).

With its mounted components, including a clock with no hands and 200 empty wooden picture frames, “Perennial” is more grounded and less ethereal than most of the other assemblages. But its metallic frames surrounded by riotous rainbow stripes may invoke “Finian’s Rainbow,” “The Wizard of Oz” or Pride Week, depending on your point of reference.

The floral motifs in “Perennial” honor life’s progression through the seasons and the hope of renewal. They also pay tribute to the florists in the artist’s family, including her mother, aunt and grandmother, known as Grammy. It is fitting that “Perennial” was first displayed in a botanical garden.

Blades says the empty frames refer to missing memories, the ones she never got to experience with her mother. 

But those blank spaces also allow the viewer to mentally insert their own portraits of family and friends and frame those Instagram-worthy photos of vacations, birthdays and other milestones. They leave room to imagine the selfie yet to be taken, the memory yet to be made.