Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night @ YBCA
Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area.
Organized by guest curator Eungie Joo, the exhibition features fifteen tapestries created since 2020, including three new works that consider tenderness, migration, and connections with the natural world.
Working on the loom with hand-dyed cotton fiber and acrylic yarn, Brackens transforms the ancient language of tapestry into a contemporary, deeply personal form of storytelling. His figures—often single or paired—move through water, flora, and fauna in scenes that feel at once intimate and mythic. For Brackens, the outdoors is not a backdrop but a vital site of freedom: a space where queer desire, sensuality, and self-recognition can unfold without constraint.
At the heart of the exhibition is a woven diptych, commitments (2025) and help is available (2025), which stages vulnerability through intoxicating and lethal botanicals. In commitments, angel’s trumpet surrounds two seated figures with arms raised in prayer or surrender, rendered in luminous gradients of pink, purple, and blue. Its companion piece, help is available, depicts a solitary figure entangled in jimsonweed, arms reaching outward in a moment suspended between peril and rescue. As Brackens notes, his figures resist fixed interpretation, instead acting as “vehicles to register certain effects or ideas.”
The exhibition also debuts three new works that reflect Brackens’ return to living in the Bay Area. These include a meditation on domestic refuge suggested through bay windows; a ritual scene rooted in Southern traditions, where a bottle tree wards off evil as two figures nearly touch; and a work centered on rest, care, and togetherness.
Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night will be accompanied by public programs and community gatherings throughout its run, including an opening night celebration on March 13, 2026, featuring music by DJs La Femme Papi and Juanita MORE!