Ancestral Threads
Arianna Barley, Wabwila Mugala, Semoria Mosley
June 19, 2025
BLAC; 15 East Pennington; Tucson, AZ 85701
About the Artist
Arianna Barley ( Top Left) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher from Huntsville, Alabama. She earned her BA in Painting from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2018, and received her Masters of Fine Arts from Arizona State University in 2025. Her solo thesis show, Steeped, focused on her research and site engagements with Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama, and was hosted at Step Gallery in Phoenix Arizona, in April of 2025. Arianna received Arizona State University’s Nathan Cummings Graduate Travel Grant (2024) and was nominated and selected as an ASU Graduate College Enrichment Fellow (2022-2024). Recent group exhibitions include Becoming-with at Step Gallery (2023), body/architecture/landscape at Cosanti Originals (2023), and All the Moves at ASU’s Humanities Institute (2024).
Artist Statement
Rooted in the material culture and histories of the Black Southern United States, I create mixed-media textile works and installations that explore and question ways of knowing.
Through my practice, I utilize things passed down as tools for understanding and examining our relationship to ancestral and shared histories. Historically-imbued materials, oral histories, and archival photographs and documents are placed in conversation with fibers and textile processes as methods of examination and meaning-making with the past. Working simultaneously within and outside of institutional modes of historical engagement, my studio practice is guided by considerations of authorship and distinctions and interdependencies between “official” and speculative ways of knowing. The work begins with care and criticality, centers the archival encounter as grounds for understanding and imagining, and strives to remain accountable to our shared histories as well as our collective futures.
Wabwila Mugala
She/Her/Hers
Mugala ( Top Right) is a Zambian born interdisciplinary artist with a focus on print processes grounded in design and textiles. She received her BFA in New Media and Design at UNC Greensboro and MFA in Printmaking from Arizona State University (2025). Her practice engages with the call-and-response within the African diaspora through her own visual glossary functioning as pattern, design, and language. Recent shows and exhibitions include her solo exhibition In the Fold (2025) in Arizona and Of Natal Lands (2024) in South Carolina. She has been featured in Southwest Contemporary Magazine: Radical Futures (Volume 10) and AIGA Charlotte.
SEMORIA MOSLEY | artist statement
I am Semoria ( bottom left): an image maker who interrogates the relationship between habit and habitat through vehicles of shared memory. My curiosity leads me to traditional media techniques and contemporary image-making. Using practice-based research to explore the complexities of culture, identity, and environments within African diaspora communities, I focus on uncovering the daily nuance and mysticism of Black Americans in the Deep South.
A combination of video, performance, and photography is used to instigate familiarity through contextual difference. As a means of nontraditional collaboration, the work I share relies on empowering individual agency through experimental recollection and cultural code reconstruction. Inspired by what is ritual, routine, and diaristic, when viewed through a communal lens, where do the remnants of colonization reside within myself and everyone else?