Diana Baird N'Diaye

About the Artist

Dr. Diana Baird N’Diaye is a multidisciplinary artist, folklife researcher, curator and transcontinental arts advocate who combines decades of experience both as a researcher and curator of African and African diaspora expressive culture. She considers her teaching as a vital aspect of her participatory art practice. N’Diaye’s art training began with sewing and needlework instruction from her Caribbean great aunts; In high school she became a student of African American couturiere Zelda Wynn Valdes, and worked as a mender in her mother’s dry cleaning store. Using her own transnational personal and family history as a starting point, she uses digital photography and stitching to create tableaus that interrogate the transatlantic identities/relationships and reconnections created in the aftermath of colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade, as sources of both trauma and joy, disfunction and healing. Diana N’Diaye’s quilts are represented in the Michigan State University Museum collection; her wearable artworks are in several private collections. She is the founder of the Smithsonian’s African American Craft Initiative, the Will to Adorn, a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, an award-winning writer, a board member of the Center for Craft, and a Gateway Studio artist. 

Artist's Statement

My art explorations are informed by my experiences of travel in spaces both in time and space. I journey through alternative timelines and geography that spans the world, and through landscapes of past, present, and imagined futures. Whether in the form of jewelry, quilts, collage, installation, or prose, I patch, darn, reassemble, embellish, and refashion new things out of experiences and memories. My work connects to concepts of healing and self-healing on the part of individuals, relationships, and society.   I find inspiration for my art practice in global traditions of everyday and ritual dress.