Mansur Nurullah, Untitled No. 23, 2023. Found textiles, found rope, speaker wire, polyester, thread, 9 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/4 in. 24.1 x 29.2 x 3.2 cm.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- In his first solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco-based Mansur Nurullah presents intricately stitched, wall-hanging sculptures that build on the legacies of African-American quilt makers to trace personal and community histories. Made from discarded clothing, upholstery, bits of fur, disassembled shoes and handbags and other detritus, he incorporates the pasts of those materials and the people who used them, to depict personal or social narratives in exuberant, three-dimensional artworks that exist beyond the boundaries of painting, sculpture or textile.
Living and working in San Francisco, Nurullah moves through the city on foot or bicycle and thinks of plotting one’s course in daily life as a metaphor for finding one’s place in the world. He sees each of his artworks as charting a journey – whether tracing the lives of students he councils, the social travails of marginalized communities or the flight of his great grandparents from Tulsa to a new life in Chicago. These billowing, three-dimensional quilts are the topographic maps of people’s emotional lives…