Darrel Alexander Hines: COMMON THREADS

September 4 - October 10, 2026

Darryl Alexander Hines is compelled to tell stories. These narratives take the shape of large-scale pictorial compositions constructed from a range of materials. Images, patterns and textures are stitched, tufted, painted and collaged. 

This exhibition features work exploring the memory of growing up in a tightly knit African American community on the Cleveland’s East Side. Collaging contemporary materials with heirloom fabrics from his mother’s closet, the artist arrives to layered and tactile compositions. The evidence of the artist’s hand is present throughout the work: in the rawness of the edges, treatment of the surfaces and directness of the mark-making. Hines embraces a visual language that is both tender and rough, echoing a childhood in a rapidly shifting and culturally fraught landscape of 1960’s America.

 The pieces in the show reflecting onthe history of slavery run parallel with the autobiographical narratives. Working with a tufting gun, the artist hand-finishes the tapestries manipulating and layering their surfaces. Despite the labor-intensive process, the pieces are filled with a sense of immediacy and painterliness. Densely worked and colorful compositions imagine the psychological conditions of survival, voyages and separation. Here the casualness of the depicted gestures is juxtaposed against the gravity of the subject-matter, making the work at once jarring and haunting.