Irene Antonia Diane Reece’s installation is a space created to honor the Black and Brown women who worked in San Antonio’s labor force in the textile industry. Black and Brown women within the South have contributed in more ways than one to building America and have received little to no recognition, even though Black and Brown women are the backbone of many movements. Reece challenges the narrative of archival work by showcasing these stories and questioning who gets to decide which archives are worthy of preserving.
The work is a collaboration between community members and the artist to ensure the women’s stories are remembered and never forgotten. Interviews range from Reece’s family members to community leaders to union workers who all worked within San Antonio’s textile industry. Although the work visually highlights San Antonio’s textile industry, it fundamentally speaks to the broader importance of preserving family legacies, archives, and community heritage. Reece’s installation consists of fragments of memories from the women’s oral histories to build an environment where you are meant to feel as if you are home.
hand-me-downs began with Reece wanting to know more about her own grandmother’s upbringing, as she was tasked with caregiving for her in recent years. While doing this, she discovered her grandmother’s multiple jobs within the textile factories in San Antonio. This prompted Reece to look into the history of the textile industry within San Antonio, Texas, and the workers who worked there. What she uncovered was family life, social injustice, civil unrest, and community care. San Antonio has a long-standing history of boycotts and protests from its laborers; one of these Reece learned about from the union group Fuerza Unida—with whom she also later collaborated—which was pivotal in the fight for the human rights of workers and beyond.
As Reece’s research developed, there were missing stories and communities that needed to be addressed. One major gap was the lack of representation of Black women within the textile industry in San Antonio. San Antonio is home to St. Philip’s College, an HBCU, which created one of the first sewing and tailoring programs in Texas in the late 1800s. Black communities historically contributed to the textile industry, and yet Reece found it striking that there is little to no mention of Black workers in San Antonio. It is no accident that Reece places Black imagery throughout the installation. The use of archival work displayed over mesh fabric showing a fading image of students from St. Philip’s College is a reminder to the viewer that while this history is fading, Reece will continue to find and remember them.
The work is not to be viewed as a form of relic, such as in a history museum, but as if you are visiting the living. For the archives are living. They are displayed in this exhibition not to be viewed as the past telling its stories, but for us to embrace them in the present. This prompted Reece to create this work to send a message to her communities: that if we allow others to write and decide what our history is, then they will erase us.
– Irene Antonia Diane Reece, Artist
Photo by Irene Antonia Diane Reece
