CAROLE HARRIS: THIS SIDE OF THE RIVER
CAROLE HARRIS: THIS SIDE OF THE RIVER
Spring 2026 Season
Front Gallery
Image credit: Carole Harris, View From the Kitchen on Preston Street, 1999, 63.5 × 36 inches, patterned and solid cottons, machine pieced and machine quilted. Courtesy of the artist.
Carole Harris: This Side of the River is the first comprehensive museum exhibition dedicated to Detroit-based fiber artist Carole Harris. The exhibition honors her pioneering vision, one that has redefined the language of quilting and transformed it from a domestic craft into a mode of abstraction, cultural storytelling, and political reflection.
Harris’s work incorporates irregular shapes, layered textures, and diverse materials, situating her within the lineage of Black abstraction while challenging the historical divide between fine art and craft. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1977 at Gallery 7 (Detroit’s seminal Black artist-run space, founded in 1969 by artist Charles McGee), marking the birth of a career that has spanned nearly five decades and deeply influenced Detroit’s creative and cultural landscape. Combining her work as an interior designer with her artistic practice, Harris’s unique visual style merges influences from Gallery 7, African American quilting traditions, and constructivist aesthetics.
Image credit: Carole Harris, Playing on the Edge, 1991, 46.5 x 50 inches, patterned and solid cottons, machine pieced and machine quilted. Courtesy of the artist.
Her background as an interior designer informs her sensitivity to spatial rhythm, composition, and structure, translating the geometries of architecture and the pulse of urban life into textile form. Throughout her career, Harris has chronicled the evolving spirit of Detroit—its ambition, resilience, and reinvention. Her early works from the 1970s and 1980s capture the optimism of a city defined by industrial innovation and social progress. Composed of overlapping fabrics, sharp angles, and rhythmic patterns, these quilts evoke the ordered grids and vivid energy of modern urban landscapes.
As Detroit shifted through cycles of economic erosion and renewal in the 1990s and early 2000s, Harris’s art underwent a parallel transformation. Moving away from polished surfaces and formal precision, she embraced fragmentation, asymmetry, and open-ended forms. Her quilts began to unravel, revealing frayed edges, exposed seams, and traces of improvisation. This new visual language reflected the city’s changing landscape—its vacant factories, weathered textures, and the enduring vitality of its people. In This Side of the River, Harris performs a kind of material archaeology, turning economic downturn and imperfection into poetic expressions of survival and transformation.
Image credit: Carole Harris, Before or Since, 2023, 57 × 39 inches, patterned, solid, and repurposed cotton and blends, acrylic paint on muslin, cotton batting fusing, machine quilted with hand embroidery. Courtesy of the artist.
In recent years, Harris’s work has evolved toward a more improvisational style rooted in chance, rhythm, and repurposing. Drawing from traditions such as the Japanese boro technique of textile repair, she stitches together fragments of discarded fabric, giving them renewed life and form. Through dyeing, layering, and intentional aging, Harris creates tactile surfaces that hold both memory and motion. Her compositions resonate with the improvisational structures of jazz and the fluidity of lived experience—each piece becoming a meditation on time and resilience.
This Side of the River reflects on Detroit’s position along the U.S.–Canada border, symbolizing the flows of migration, labor, and cultural exchange that define the city. Across her body of work, Harris situates Detroit as a microcosm of transformation, where history, industry, and cultural exchange define the city. Across her body of work, Harris situates Detroit as a microcosm of transformation—where history, industry, and imagination continually intersect.
About the Artist
CAROLE HARRIS (b. 1943, Detroit, MI) received a BFA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Harris has exhibited across the United States, in Michigan, and internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); Museum of African American History (Detroit, MI); The River Gallery (Chattanooga, TN); National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH); and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Harris’ work has been published in numerous books, and her work has been reviewed by several newspapers and magazines. Carole Harris’ work was included in The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st Century America, which toured China in 2012, where she was a guest lecturer. In 2017 her work was included in Footworks at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne in France. Her work has received numerous awards and has been exhibited and published extensively, including a two-person exhibition Repetition, Rhythm, and Vocab with artist Allie McGhee at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in 2018, a solo exhibition at the NCRC Rotunda Gallery at the University of Michigan in 2017, and a solo exhibition at The Dennos Museum Center in 2019. Her work was included in the exhibition Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2019. In 2015 Carole Harris was awarded a Kresge Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.
Image credit: Carole Harris in her studio, 2024. Photo by Shekenia Mann. Courtesy of the artist.
Events
Event information about upcoming exhibitions will be published in fall 2023.
Press + Media
Exhibition title in Publication, Month Day, Year
