Diedrick Brackens Interweaves Black History, Myth, and Self-Portraiture

“I cry so much sometimes, I feel like I’ma turn to drops.” That’s Chiron talking, the central character of Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film, Moonlight. The line came to me while I was looking at images of Diedrick Brackens’s new weavings, which, like the movie, offer an exploration of queer black experience that is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. These recent works were meant to be shown at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, in a solo exhibition called “bl