Future Past Tense

 

Future Past Tense

Artists: Esperanza Cortés, Cheryl Derricotte, Karen Hampton, Asa Jackson, Fay Ku

 

EXHIBITION DATES: Saturday, September 12 – October 30, 2026
RECEPTION: Please join us for a celebratory reception for the artists on Saturday, September 12th from 3–5:30 pm

Conversation: Saturday, September 12th at 2 pm
Esperanza Cortés, Cheryl Derricotte, Karen Hampton and Asa Jackson.
* limited seating

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Future Past Tense with Esperanza Cortés (New York), Cheryl Derricotte (San Francisco), Karen Hampton (New Mexico), Asa Jackson (North Carolina) and Fay Ku (New York).  The artists in this exhibition mirror historical and private chronicles to unmask past/future intersectionality. Their work posits that today is embedded in the immutable shadows of yesteryear.

 

Asa Jackson presents monumental tapestries with soft undulating rivulets of hand-dyed corded cotton sewn with contrasting thread. The tapestries are composed of horizontal and vertical fields of color, while the shaved nap reflects and absorbs light, casting various depths of pigment. Gridded topography references weaving, early African American quilts, landscapes, maps, or even the cloaks of royalty. Occasionally Jackson reveals the reverse side of the tapestry, repurposed denim cotton. Indigo-dyed cotton served as the uniform of those enslaved and, in present-day use, still serves as the uniform for those incarcerated. Textiles often belie their storied histories.

Asa Jackson lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the current President and CEO of McColl Center, North Carolina. He co-founded and served as Executive Director of the Contemporary Arts Network (CAN) Foundation, an arts nonprofit in Newport News, Virginia. Exhibitions include MoCA Arlington, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte. Jackson is included in public and private collections.

Cheryl Derricotte’s first sentence in her artist statement declares, “I do not often lead with beauty, but my work is well-crafted using beautiful materials.” Our perspective differs; not only are the glass books included in this exhibition stunning, they are thoughtful collaborators investigating race, environment, economics, politics, and community.

Derricotte’s glass, textile, and print work often honors forgotten Black female historical figures—women systemically erased from visibility. In 2022, she created a limited edition artist book to elevate the accomplishments of Mary Ellen Pleasant, formerly enslaved, who became one of the richest Black women in Gold-Rush-era San Francisco. Derricotte made an elegant set of glass table settings in the manner of Pleasant, who was known for her exquisite dinner parties in support of abolitionists and reformation to end slavery.

In 2026 Derricotte began making a series of glass books, with fictitious titles of her own design, such as Rooted in Place, Watercolor Techniques, and Nature Walks. The six books included in this exhibition reflect a range of topics, nothing of legend, until you understand the symbolic erasure of Black inclusion in any avocation, let alone profession.

Derricotte was the first recipient of the first BIPOC Residency at The Studio at the Corning Museum, Corning, NY. Other grants and residencies include the Windgate Craft Artist Fellowship/Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, and the Black [space] Residency, San Francisco. Collections include the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; Oakland Museum of California; San Francisco Archives/San Francisco Public Library; The Saint Louis (MO) Mercantile Library; and The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL

Karen Hampton’s tapestries included in this exhibition are apocryphal. Hampton spent years tracing her ancestry, knowing her surname was derived from the plantation where her African ancestors were enslaved. The Hampton plantation seized her forebears as ‘property of the estate,’ hundreds of Black men, women, and children enslaved for generations. She swore never to visit the South Carolina property, but indeed, this is precisely what she did.

Sharing with the plantation docents her research into her familial name and heritage, they kindly offered Karen access to areas of the estate closed off to visitors. Alone and overwhelmed by the immensity of the injustice and trauma experienced by those enslaved on the Hampton property, she began to hear cries filtering through the creaking floorboards and walls. Those cries penetrated every fiber of her being. She departed thinking that her ancestors recognized her, their future heir, yet they mournfully lamented what could not be changed. She descended the stairs, aware of the presence of spirits, and mentioned her experience to the docents. They too heard the cries and were unable to locate the source. Karen knew 400 years of history could never be silenced. The dyed indigo tapestries in this exhibition, Ghost 1 and Ghost 2, present maps of the Hampton Plantation, a site of generational genocide restored as a state park—a place where souls can never find peace.

Karen Hampton is held in the collections of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii; Chapman University, Orange, CA; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Denver Museum of Fine Art, CO; University of Chicago, IL; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Exhibitions include Art and Practice and California African American Museum, Los Angeles; University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, MA; Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles and Jane Lombard, New York.

We’re pleased to include the clay and beaded sculpture of Esperanza Cortés, with selections from her Las Mineras and Cante Jando series. Cortés is a Colombian born multidisciplinary artist based in New York City.

Cortés’ passion for the mosaic of the Americas, its folk-art traditions, rituals, music, dance are at the core of her practice. Her artwork amplifies transcultural experience. Poetically and intricately crafted, Cortés encourages us to consider the social and historical narratives when describing Colonialism, along with the politics of erasure and exclusion. As a former Afro-Latin dancer, her work seeks to underscore and use sacred space, the patterns of dance, music and fragments of global and personal histories as points to rebuild an inclusive cultural narrative.

Esperanza Cortés has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including Smack Mellon Gallery; Bronx Museum of Art; Queens Museum; El Museo del Barrio; MoMA PS1; Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC; Albright-Knox Gallery; Ogden Contemporary Arts; Turchin Center for The Visual Arts; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Art Museum. Awards include: New York State Council on the Arts Project Grant, John Simon Guggenheim, Hispanic Society Museum and Library Artist Research Fellowship; BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant; Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; Puffin Foundation Grant, New York State Biennial; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; New York Foundation for the Arts and the Sustained Achievement in the Visual Arts Award.

The drawings of Fay Ku emerge from the stories, myths, and fables told by her parents. Emigrating from Taiwan, her parents lived and worked in Oklahoma and Texas, eventually making their way to Maryland. While her parents were settling in the states, Fay remained with her grandparents in Taiwan until the age of three, a community where she was nurtured and loved. When her parents eventually settled, Fay embarked upon the journey to join them, leaving her short life of familiarity and safety behind.

For many years after emigrating, Fay was apart from the communities where she resided. She only spoke Mandarin, a language with one tense, the present tense. She learned English when she went to elementary school, a vocabulary that continuously dislocates time. She unwittingly began the journey of cultural accommodation, holding the cultural values, memories, and symbols of her parents and grandparents, while assimilating the dominant American culture.

Fay’s father, an avid student of history, filled their gaping community and familial void with memories, fables, and myths. He related stories of China’s cultural revolution, describing comradery, loss, and violence, but also childhood fables, tales of misadventures, and consequences. The fertility of Fay Ku’s drawings takes form from these shared narratives, fueling her imagination with powerful women whose struggles and defiance kept the travails of vulnerability at bay. Her protagonists conquered air and sea, human and animal kingdoms, dislocation, and isolation. Fay Ku draws folk heroes of her own making.

Fay Ku is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant.  Her work is in the collection of Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Asian American Art Centre, New York; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas, NV; The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT, and The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. She attended Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, for her B.A. and holds both an M.F.A. in Studio Art and an M.S. in Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute in the Fine Arts and Foundation departments and for the Pratt in Venice summer abroad program.