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Artist: Javier Gonzalez
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 33 in x 26.5 in
Price: $3000
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work engages with home as both a physical space and a repository of community stories, identity and inherited knowledge. Through my self-developed piping technique, I transform paint into sculptural tapestries that draw on craft traditions passed down through my family, creating objects that carry personal and cultural histories.
My ongoing research into my Afro-Colombian heritage and the African American cultural landscape in Detroit has shaped my understanding of belonging as something that is both inherited and continually constructed. The legacy of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free African town in the Americas, and the craftsmanship of my grandmothers remind me that home can be an act of survival, resistance, and self-determination.
Through pattern, material, and repetition, I explore how histories and behaviors are carried across generations—and how healing can allow us to reshape what we inherit. In this sense, my work asks not only where we come from, but what kind of home and community we can collectively design toward. I see making as a form of ownership: reclaiming cultural & ancestral knowledge that transforms inherited narratives into new possibilities for belonging, dignity, and freedom.
Artist: Javier Gonzalez
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 33 in x 26.5 in
Price: $3000
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work engages with home as both a physical space and a repository of community stories, identity and inherited knowledge. Through my self-developed piping technique, I transform paint into sculptural tapestries that draw on craft traditions passed down through my family, creating objects that carry personal and cultural histories.
My ongoing research into my Afro-Colombian heritage and the African American cultural landscape in Detroit has shaped my understanding of belonging as something that is both inherited and continually constructed. The legacy of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free African town in the Americas, and the craftsmanship of my grandmothers remind me that home can be an act of survival, resistance, and self-determination.
Through pattern, material, and repetition, I explore how histories and behaviors are carried across generations—and how healing can allow us to reshape what we inherit. In this sense, my work asks not only where we come from, but what kind of home and community we can collectively design toward. I see making as a form of ownership: reclaiming cultural & ancestral knowledge that transforms inherited narratives into new possibilities for belonging, dignity, and freedom.