In this Bay Area artist's hands, weaving becomes a site of experimentation and refusal. San Francisco-based Diedrick Brackens asks what a weaver can weave today in his new exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Brackens constructs stories illustrated and embedded in the medium itself with hand-dyed cotton and acrylic yarn, creating a spatial, immersive experience. Each work reads like a still frame from a larger narrative: bodies lean, float, flex, embrace or dissolve into color fields.

The central installation, 'clearing', translates weaving into lived space where utilitarian origins and expressive possibilities merge. Threads hang loose, edges remain unfinished, and the textile process is made visible. This exhibition challenges traditions that privilege polish while foregrounding transmission: how knowledge is passed down, altered, and sustained.

Brackens pushes further into the body’s entanglement with the natural, spiritual, and animal worlds in his tapestry 'Blood Compass'. Four geese advance towards a distant lighthouse as two Black figures stand in water below, gazing upward. The work is a quiet, luminous meditation on histories of displacement, return, and survival.

Walking through Brackens' exhibition feels like stepping into a shared symbolic Black space, much like the recent celebrated juke joint sequence in 'Sinners', where nocturnal figures gather through music and dance across time. Here, it is not sound but warp and weft that holds and honors multiple histories, thread by gentle thread.