Call & Response
Stephanie Santana
GALLERY II
Stephanie Santana, Undivided Attention, 2025, digital collage, dimensions variable.
May 31–June 29, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, May 31, from 6–8pm
A.I.R Gallery is pleased to announce Call & Response, a solo exhibition of new works by 2024–2025 A.I.R. Fellow Stephanie Santana. Through textiles and installation, Santana investigates events that repeat and resonate throughout American history, knowledge gaps created by censorship and lack of documentation, and the role of Black women as record-keepers and stewards of vital information.
Using the Black vernacular tradition of call-and-response as a framework, Santana considers how resurfaced histories call us into a place of reflection and invite us to contemplate our role in shaping futures. The work of Miriam Matthews, a librarian, historian, and anti-censorship advocate during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s–1950s, serves as an ancestral point of departure for exploring the ways that both the presence and absence of information affect our understanding of history. Quilted textiles screenprinted with photographic images and documents culled from family and public archives are repeated, sequenced, and layered throughout the exhibition, forming a spatiotemporal dialogue and drawing throughlines between the ideological flashpoints of Matthews’s time and our own.
Adorning the textiles are a series of symbols, shapes, and images that have recurred throughout Santana’s recent work, rendered in grounding earth tones, richly colored hues and textures from the natural world. Pitchers, eyes, compasses, and intuitive linework combine and accumulate into a semiotic language, serving as guideposts and alluding to Black American histories of migration and fugitivity. Call & Response offers a countergaze to the many mechanisms that monitor and control our ways of knowing, and contemplates how obscured or censored information might be recovered.
Stephanie M. Santana (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) constructs mixed media textile works and print editions that explore interior worlds, mythologies, navigational tools, and resistance strategies of African diasporic origins. Rooted in the responsive encounter with archival material while engaging with the expansive traditions of quilting, printmaking, painting and collage, her practice centers an interest in unearthing useful information and alternative spaces of self-definition.
Recent exhibitions include solo presentations Ways of Knowing at The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (2024) and The Armory Show, New York, NY (2024). Santana’s work has been included in group exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN; Textile Arts Center, New York, NY; and John & Robyn Horn Gallery at Penland School of Craft, Penland, NC; among others. Her work is held in permanent collections that include Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Getty Research Institute.
Santana is the recipient of a Dieu Donné Workspace Residency (2025), A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship (2024), Ace Hotel Artist Residency with curatorial partner Powerhouse Arts (2024), NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (2023), and a Kahn/Mason SIP Fellowship with EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2023). Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Pressing Matters.
Santana is a founding member of printmaking collective Black Women of Print. She lives and works in New York.
View Stephanie Santana’s page here.
View the Press Release here.