Threaded Blue, Solo Show at Plato Gallery in New York City
May 20th – July 5th
Plato is proud to present Threaded Blue, a solo exhibition of New Jersey-based multidisciplinary artist
Diana Sinclair, opening Tuesday, May 20th with a public reception from 6-8pm.
In her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Diana Sinclair presents a meditation on water, memory and the
psychic and physical effects of the transatlantic passage. Working with cyanotypes on fabric, as well as
with sculpture, Sinclair is dedicated to experimenting with materials. She merges historical research and
personal experience, weaving together studio portraiture and archival fragments to reflect on the
longstanding—and often ruptured—relationship between Black communities and water.
For Sinclair, water is a charged site of disconnection, grief and potential repair. Having spent seven years
as a competitive swimmer while feeling unseen within that space, she returns to water as a site for
ancestral veneration and healing. Her works suggest that confronting the Black communities' relationship to
water is a spiritual endeavor. Sinclair questions what it means to be alienated from life’s most vital resource and
what it might take to return.
The majority of the works in Threaded Blue are cyanotypes on fabric stretched over canvas. Cyanotype
is a 19th-century camera-less photographic printing technique which uses light-sensitive chemicals on
materials such as paper and fabric and UV light to produce blue-tinted prints. Diana has been expanding
the medium’s possibilities: she designed a special, large-scale exposure chamber with regulated lights,
in which she exposes the light-sensitive fabric covered with semi-transparent prints of the deconstructed
polaroids of nude Black subjects, allowing time, water, light and chance to collaborate on the creation of
her textured, lyrical images. In another series, tea-toned cyanotypes on fabric are framed in brown wood,
referencing the containment and compression of enslaved bodies in the “womb-abyss of the slave
ship”– a term first coined by influential author Christina Sharpe in her book In the Wake: On Blackness
and Being.
Throughout the exhibition, Sinclair’s approach merges research and ritual. Her conversations with
scholars like Kevin Dawson and Jeff Wiltse—whose work traces aquatic traditions and the racialized
politics of water access—provided a foundational backbone for Sinclair’s practice. It was the artist’s
initial conversation with Wiltse that inspired her use of pool tiles—ubiquitous in the racially restricted
architecture of public swimming pools—in sculpture. Here, the blue tiles are incorporated into a
larger-than-life-size sculptural bust of a close friend, evoking both ancient Egyptian monuments and
Awol Erizku’s disco ball Nefertiti covered in mirror tiles.
Whether referencing segregated pools, the ocean floor or her own past, Sinclair’s work bears witness to
histories embedded in collective memory and bodily experience. The artist sees herself as an
antenna—attuned to the whispers of spirits, for which water is a conduit, seeking acknowledgment and
release. She also defines her role as an archivist: collecting primary documents, found photographs and
visual residues that connect the present to the past. Her works invite the viewers to contemplate
displacement, erasure and the potential for return.
Sinclair’s use of the color blue was initially predicated by the natural tones of the cyanotypes, yet over
time, its meaning expanded. The exhibition’s title, Threaded Blue, speaks to the visual and conceptual
currents running through the show—across oceans, generations and lived experience. Blue opens up
space in portraiture—moving beyond the racialized dichotomy of black and white, and offering a more
fluid, expansive way to see and be seen. The color becomes a woven channel—one that carries history
and tactile intimacy. At once environmental and emotional, it is a material throughline that links bodies,
spirits and stories across time and space.
Saltwater Underneath My Skin, 2024
Let Not Man Put Us Under, 2024
Black People Can't Swim, 2023
Innocence and Justice, 2025