Threads of Influence

An Exhibition by Stan Squirewell

On view March 20th – July 5th, 2026

Vernissage, An Exhibition Preview Series: Thursday, March 19th, 5-8pm

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In Threads of Influence, the Louisville based artist Stan Squirewell presents his ongoing work focusing on mixed media collage and the generational spirit that flows between our known and unknown ancestors. “In this exhibition,” he writes, “we honor the living spirit that flows through the African American experience—a collective energy of resilience, creativity, and transformation. Our community has always found ways to overcome adversity—from the struggles of our ancestors who laid the foundation, to the modern-day challenges we transform into art and empowerment. We stand on the shoulders of those who endured, and through our work, we reach toward a future full of beauty and truth.” Squirewell’s work emerges from the labor histories and the importance of family portraiture in African American communities, traditions that drive the continued cultural relevance of fashion and resourcefulness within the African American experience. His source imagery largely consists of found portraits that already contain a sense of honor, family portraits taken on an important occasion, but through Squirewell’s process of repurposing and reclamation he offers a renewal that firmly places his subjects in a more modern era, furthering their greatness, giving them a renewed sense of pride, dignity, and pleasure fit for today’s times. In writing about the importance of photographic images within the homes and histories of the Black experience, the writers bell hooks and Toni Morrison have both reflected on how pictures, family portraits, and snapshots, functioned in Southern tradition, and where, according to hooks, “they were and remain a mediation between the living and the dead.”

 

The title Threads of Influence carries multiple meanings, referring both to the vintage clothes worn by those in the original images and their new threads adorned by Squirewell. The title is also a reference to the other artists that are included in this exhibition who have influenced one another during Squirewell’s growth as an artist, collaborator, and mentor. 

 

Through a ritualized process, Squirewell’s work examines who curates and controls the narratives that become accepted as history. It asks questions about what perspective is used when history is written, whose stories are told, and whose are neglected. While some of the images in Squirewell’s work have come from his own family, many of the people in the original photos from various institutional archives are unknown to him.

 

Connecting the past with the present, Squirewell blends photography, painting, and textile to explore the presence of the African diaspora within his own identity. For him, ancestry is not history, rather it’s more of a metaphysical connection to people that relate to each other throughout time and space irrelevant to specific geography. In his practice, ancestry has a more spiritual component that aligns more closely with the ideas of Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that merges the areas of Black history and culture into imagined futures of new philosophical and technological realities that transcend the real world.

 

Through photography, mixed media works, installations, and the process of collage, Stan Squirewell’s practice challenges the established historical narratives of American art and history, tackling issues related to the African American experience, memory, and mythology. He is a graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he received his MFA. He has performed with Nick Cave at the National Portrait Gallery, and his works are held by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Robert Steele Collection, and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. Squirewell remixes materials from a personal collection of thousands of images from family albums, as well as private and public archives amassed over many years, all with the express aim to illustrate ambiguity and the absence of a single overarching identity.