This year’s Art in the Atrium project was selected to complement the exhibition Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Featuring a selection of textile works made by Nashville-based artists Ashley Larkin and Shabazz Larkin, the project shares personal stories related to their family—the joining of lives and communities through marriage and the transmission of values and traditions from parents to children—and offers a reflection on the vulnerable position of Black men in the United States.
Both artists are engaging with fiber arts after spending many years away from the medium. Ashley was trained and worked as a fashion designer before shifting her attention to therapy, meditation work, and motherhood. These artworks mark a welcome return to the studio and her first love of art making. Shabazz’s creative practice has centered on painting and sculpture, although he remembers watching and collaborating with his grandmother at her sewing machine as a child—an experience that underscores the intergenerational and familial nature of quilting and working with fabric also seen in Fabric of a Nation.
Artists’ Statements
Ashley Larkin
My textiles serve as maps to freedom and stories of liberation. Drawing from a family legacy of sewing passed down through generations, my creative practice is also deeply informed by my work as a therapist and meditation practitioner. Based in Nashville and originally from the mountains of Virginia, I first engaged textiles as a fashion designer in New York City.
After a decade-long hiatus from formal studio practice to study the art of psychotherapy and to embrace motherhood, today, my quilts serve as a journey back to my roots. My tapestries begin as intuitive expressions of my spiritual studies, transforming both personal and collective experiences into tactile narratives. Often portrait-like, my contemporary quilts use color, texture, and form to explore the themes I have spent years witnessing behind my desk as a therapist—mindfulness, impermanence, relationships, and personal agency.
My work seeks to be an empathetic witness to the human experience, inviting viewers on a layered journey of healing and remembrance.
Shabazz Larkin
My art practice is an extension of my meditation practice. I create as a means of liberation—first for myself, then for anyone who carries the burden of being human, being different, being neurodivergent, being a father, being a son. Each piece is an offering, a question, a portal. It is my deepest hope that when someone encounters my work, they don’t think—they feel. They feel themselves. They feel seen. They feel the possibility that they are not alone.
Though I’m best known for my use of acrylic on canvas, my current work lives in experiment and intuition. I build sculptures using nails, inspired by the Nkondi traditions of Central Africa, adorned with painted flowers—gardens of muscle memory and emotion. I collect objects from my backyard and the hardware store. I soak canvases in water to watch control dissolve. Chaos has become a collaborator. Lately, I’m working with raw materials, like wood, nails, water, and sound to create meditative environments that lead viewers into altered states of awareness and presence.
My themes circle around the volatility of the human heart and the profound truth of impermanence. Everything we cling to—names, roles, identities, even memory—will slip away. And in that slipping, there is something sacred. There is beauty in the groundlessness. My work is not here to preserve the illusion of solidity. It is here to show us how to let go.
I am Black, and I long for a day when this identity is irrelevant—but until then, I honor the ancestors that brought me here. My art includes them. It includes my children. It includes the unknown gods, the animals, the future ones. And yet, I create to dissolve even these identities, to remind myself and others that what we are is not fixed. I want you to experience my liberation— and know that yours is possible, too.
The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by
