Lawrence Arts Center exhibit turns cloth into immersive memory space

A gallery you move through, not just look at

Wabwila Mugala’s new Lawrence Arts Center installation turns the gallery into something closer to an inhabited field of memory than a room of framed work. In *Quilted Existence*, visitors are meant to weave between hanging forms, shift their sightlines and experience cloth as a living surface, with indigo-dyed broadcloth, printmaking and resist-dye methods building a visual language around identity, resilience and the African diaspora.

That approach matters in Lawrence because it changes the basic relationship between visitor and artwork. Instead of standing back, the audience is asked to enter the piece, to feel how color, texture and suspended material reshape the room around them. Copper rods hanging from the ceiling help create that sense of enclosure and immersion, so the installation reads less like a display and more like a space to pass through, linger in and inhabit.

What the exhibit looks and feels like

The physical language of *Quilted Existence* is built from layers. Mugala uses indigo broadcloth, pattern, repetition and print processes to create a work that rewards slow movement and close attention. From one angle, the piece may feel graphic and orderly; from another, it may seem to break apart into fragments of textile, line and shadow.

That shift is central to the show’s effect. The Lawrence Arts Center says Mugala’s practice engages the call-and-response within the African diaspora through a visual glossary of pattern, design and language, and the exhibit draws from printing practices, cosmologies and design among the African diaspora. For visitors, that means the work is not only seen but navigated, with the body becoming part of the reading of the piece.

Why indigo carries so much weight here

Indigo is not simply a color choice in this installation. Across West Africa, artisans have used blue dye made from local plant sources for centuries, and museum sources link indigo to African textile traditions, women’s labor, wealth and political power. In that context, cloth becomes more than fabric. It becomes evidence of inherited skill, social meaning and cultural continuity.

The Arts Center’s framing also places indigo inside the larger story of the African diaspora, where textile traditions traveled, changed and were reclaimed across generations and continents. Scholars and museums describe indigo as part of a wider record of resilience and survival, including the knowledge carried by enslaved people and the later Black artistic return to the material. Mugala’s exhibit brings that history into a Lawrence gallery in a form visitors can physically encounter rather than only read about.

An artist shaped by movement, archives and place

Mugala is the Lawrence Arts Center’s 2025-2026 Printmaking Artist-in-Residence, and her path to textiles reflects a broad, interdisciplinary practice. Born in Zambia, she earned a BFA in New Media and Design from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and an MFA in Printmaking from Arizona State University in 2025. Before focusing more deeply on her own studio practice, she spent several years in corporate graphic design.

Her work evolved through collage and archival material, including Black magazines such as *Ebony* and *Jet*. Over time, layering patterns and enlarging images pushed her toward textiles, surfaces and repetition, a shift that shows up clearly in *Quilted Existence*. Mugala has also said that her color palette changed after she moved to Lawrence, moving away from earlier warm oranges and reds toward more neutral, calm tones in Kansas. That local adjustment gives the exhibit a second geography, one shaped by place as much as by origin.

Her recent solo exhibitions include *In the Fold* in Arizona in 2025 and *Of Natal Lands* in South Carolina in 2024. Those shows underline how her work moves across regions while holding onto a consistent interest in pattern, memory and the visual structure of Black cultural history.

How the residency connects to Lawrence now

The exhibit is part of a larger residency structure at the Lawrence Arts Center, not a one-off commission. The center says its residency program selects two artists each year and includes teaching, community outreach, interaction with other artists and studio care, culminating in an exhibition of new work. That model matters in a city like Lawrence because it ties the gallery to classrooms, conversations and ongoing arts programming, rather than treating the exhibition as a standalone event.

For local audiences, that means *Quilted Existence* arrives with civic as well as artistic significance. It connects a global Black cultural history to a neighborhood arts institution at 940 New Hampshire St., placing international ideas about cloth, language and diaspora in direct contact with the people who use the Lawrence Arts Center as a cultural meeting ground. In that sense, the show is not just about looking at art from afar. It is about how art can shape community memory in real time.

How to visit the exhibit

*Quilted Existence* runs from May 29 through June 20, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center Gallery, 940 New Hampshire St., Lawrence, Kansas. The opening is part of Lawrence Final Friday and runs from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, May 29, 2026, giving visitors a first chance to move through the installation as the month-end arts crowd fills downtown.

Mugala will also lead an Insight Art Talk at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, at the Lawrence Arts Center Gallery. Admission to both the exhibit and the talk is free. For anyone looking for a clear entry point into the show, the opening and the artist talk offer two different ways in: one through direct experience of the space, the other through Mugala’s own explanation of how print, textile and diaspora become one visual conversation.

By the time the show closes on June 20, the strongest impression may be how something as ordinary as cloth can hold geography, ancestry and adaptation at once. In Mugala’s hands, indigo is not decoration. It is memory made walkable.