Destiny S. Palmer
Note: During undergrad my work explored formal visual language, aligning closely with hard edge, minimalist, and color field painting movements. But it was missing a connection to my identity. Upon entering graduate school, I figured this would be a great place to explore my interests into new concepts and history. Through grad school, assigning color to my response to American history was just the beginning. I lean heavily on photos, books, podcasts, maps, oral storytelling, etc.
Words by Michael Carroll:
There is an elegant, poetic thread that runs throughout Destiny Palmer’s paintings and fabric works. Fabric is implicitly tactile. We clothe ourselves in fabric and cover our furniture in it to further our comfort. Yet, fabric is cut, torn and pierced with a needle in order to stretch and contort the woven cloth into a wearable form or a cover for the armature of a chair. Palmer’s hand-sewn fabric assemblages are foiled by her vibrant paintings that encapsulate the intersectional, complex nature of life and its obstacles. By pairing her fabric works with these paintings, the latter are foiled by the subtlety of fabric. However, the delicacy of the sewn pieces is deceiving given the artist’s process of violently hand-sewing the materials together with a sharp needle and thread.
Behind the production of materials like fabric or furniture exists artistry, craft, labor, tradition and a social history that may or may not be readily apparent. For Palmer, her family’s unwilled past in South Carolina spurs her preoccupation with the invisible labor of slaves that has been omitted from history. Palmer’s interest in disregarded labor inspires her research-based process of dismantling the multi-faceted narratives of laborers, both historical and contemporary, and the systems that enabled their omission from public consciousness.
One way in which Palmer connects her artwork to the material’s background is her selection of primarily second-hand fabrics. By working with used fabrics, the artist recontextualizes the history woven into the cloth and constructs conceptual fibrous sculptures. Palmer associates cotton with slave labor, the people who historically would have picked the crop in the United States. She then extrapolates on this idea by using cotton materials as a signifier of the invisible labor behind the material. To do this, she pairs the cotton fabric with patriotic panels of red, white and blue starred fabrics to assail the United States’ exploitation of slave labor from its founding to its continued historical erasure.
Chapter 1.
Below you will find images that drive my work. I do not own the rights to these images, they are just used for reference and further research.
Reading List (Color)
Reading List History (Select Books)
Allen, James. Without Sanctuary. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.
“An Account of Two Voyages to New-England : Made during the Years 1638, 1663 : Josselyn, John, Fl. 1630-1675 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” Internet Archive, Boston : W. Veazie, 1865, https://archive.org/details/accountoftwovoya00joss/page/26/mode/2up?view=theater.
Anderson, William C., and Zoé Samudzi. As Black as Resistance. AK Press, 2018.
Baraka, Amiri. S O S. Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, 2015.
Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision. Stanford University Press, 2005.
Bois, W. E. B. Du. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Canedy, Dana, et al. Unseen. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017.
Cary, Lorene. The Price of a Child. National Geographic Books, 1996.
Cherlise, Renata. Black Archives. Ten Speed Press, 2023.
Clifton, Lucille. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. BOA Editions, Ltd., 2015.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015.
Driskell, David C., and Los Angeles County Museum Art. Two Centuries of Black American Art. 1976.
duBois, Page. Slaves and Other Objects. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Dungy, Camille T. Black Nature. University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Enwezor, Okwui. Grief and Grievance. Phaidon Press, 2020.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008.
---. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007.
Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image. 2005.
Fernández, Johanna. The Young Lords. UNC Press Books, 2019.
Foss, Richard. Rum. Reaktion Books, 2012.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Longman, 1980.
Gelburd, Gail, et al. Romare Bearden in Black-and-White. 1997.
Green, Victor H. The Negro Motorist Green Book. Colchis Books.
Hall, Rebecca. Wake. Simon and Schuster, 2021.
Hamad, Ruby. White Tears/Brown Scars. Catapult, 2020.
Hamilton, Virginia. The People Could Fly. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1993.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole and The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. One World, 2024.
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings. 1895.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother. Macmillan, 2008.
---. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Hewett, Jen. This Long Thread. Shambhala Publications, 2021.
HIDDEN HERITAGE. 1985.
hooks. Black Looks. Routledge, 2014.
---. Talking Back. Routledge, 2014.
Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind. Random House, 2025.
---. Teaching To Transgress. Routledge, 2014.
Hughes, Langston. The Ways of White Folks. Vintage, 2011.
Hull, Akasha Gloria, et al. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. 2015.
jake. “Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74) - HUB History: Boston History Podcast.” HUB History, http://facebook.com/hubhistory, 2 Apr. 2018, https://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/original-sin-the-roots-of-slavery-in-boston-ep74/.
Johnson, Mat. Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery (New Edition). Dark Horse Comics, 2018.
Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property. Yale University Press, 2019.
Lawson, Dhyandra. Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics. Delmonico Books, 2024.
Ligon, Glenn. Yourself in the World. 2011.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Penguin, 2020.
---. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Penguin UK, 2018.
---. Your Silence Will Not Protect You. 2017.
Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Ballantine Books, 2015.
Mercer, Kobena. Discrepant Abstraction. 2006.
Mitchell, Koritha. Living with Lynching. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
(MoAD), Museum of the African Diaspora, et al. Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold. Cameron, 2019.
Morris, Catherine, and Rujeko Hockley. We Wanted a Revolution. University of Texas Press, 2018.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage, 2007.
Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined. Duke University Press, 2018.
Newton, John. Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. DigiCat, 2022.
Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens. Strange Fruit. Indiana University Press, 1998.
Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Pickens, Therí Alyce. Black Madness. Duke University Press, 2019.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition. UNC Press Books, 2020.
Smithers, Gregory D. Slave Breeding. University Press of Florida, 2012.
Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. Haymarket Books, 2023.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits. Chronicle Books, 2018.
Thomas, Sheree R. Dark Matter. Grand Central Publishing, 2014.
“Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories, Available Online | Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2024.
Warren, Wendy. New England Bound. National Geographic Books, 2017.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901.
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors. The Floating Press, 2014.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record. DigiCat, 2022.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2023.
---. The Warmth of Other Suns. Vintage, 2011.
Willis, Deborah. Posing Beauty. W. W. Norton, 2009.
“Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, https://withoutsanctuary.org/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2024.
Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro. NYU Press, 2014.
Young, Kevin. Brown. Knopf, 2018.
Zamalin, Alex. Black Utopia. Columbia University Press, 2019.