Xenobia Bailey

Xenobia Bailey (born 1955) is an American fine artist, designer, Supernaturalist, cultural activist and fiber artist best known for her eclectic crochet African-inspired hats and her large-scale crochet pieces and mandalas.

Early life and education Born Sherilyn Bailey in Seattle in 1955, in the 1980s she changed her name to Xenobia for the warrior queen of ancient Palmyra and made her way to New York City. She began her professional life as a costume designer for the now defunct Black Arts/West and earned a BFA in Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1977. Affirmative action took her to the University of Washington Her pieces are often connected to her ongoing project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk.

"To be an artist and be able to create things – it's like fireworks every time you think about something," says Bailey. "I try to get energy and movement from something that is not moving at all." Her signature stitch is a flowy line, as if it is dripping. She calls it the "liquid stitch". (worn by Samuel L. Jackson as DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy).

In 2003, her designs were featured in an Absolut Vodka advertisement entitled "Absolut Bailey." Bailey has been artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in New York City. In an experimental collaboration sponsored by the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the MIT Media Lab, Bailey crocheted with electroluminescent wire. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Jersey City Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

As an addition to her ongoing project Paradise Under Reconstruction, she created a hanging installation in 2006 called Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent. This piece was created to cover the topic of absent historical documentation for African enslavement in America. Sixty students, aged 14–17, designed three pieces for an imaginary couple moving into 21st-century Brooklyn using recycled materials.

In 2016, Xenobia Bailey created a large-scale glass mosaic at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the New York City Subway's 34th Street – Hudson Yards station. She named the piece Funktional Vibrations. Bailey crocheted the design for the mosaic; the Miotto Mosaic Art Studio then digitized it and translated it into the final mosaic. That same year, she also participated in the SITE Santa Fe Biennial.

Bailey was a 2018 artist-in-residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 2020, Bailey unveiled a new public art mosaic entitled "Morning Stars" at St. Petersburg's new Pier District.

In 2020, Bailey designed the public art work, permanently installed in the Grand Reading Room, in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington DC. The library was originally designed by German American Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1972.

In 2024, Xenobia Bailey presented her exhibition Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk: The Second Coming at Venus Over Manhattan. This marked her first solo gallery show in New York City in over two decades, featuring approximately twenty recent and historical crochet works in an immersive installation.

Collections Her work is in the permanent collections at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Allentown Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Texas Fashion Collection, and in the Museum of Arts and Design.

Selected exhibitions Solo 2002: Xenobia Bailey: Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk—Phase IV (January 18 - February 17) 2008: Jersey City Museum, [RE]Possessed (June 16 - August 24, 2008) 2015: 34th St–Hudson Yards Station, Funktional Vibrations, Glass Mosaic, The Studio Museum in Harlem (Permanent Installation 2015) 2020: Morning Stars, St. Pete Pier, St. Petersburg, Florida (permanent installation).

Group 2015: Xenobia Bailey (1955, Seattle) is one of the artists in the exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present in ICA Boston, from October 1 till January 4, 2015. The exhibition also has a catalog in print form. 2017: Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field, Museum of Arts and Design, New York City (October 24 – December 17, 2017) 2019: Vibration & Frequency Experiment Funktional Material Culture Design Lab, Seattle at Wa Na Wari

Honors and awards In 2000, Xenobia Bailey won a Creative Capital grant for her project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk. In 2019, Bailey was one of the inaugural recipients of the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. In 2026, she was named a United States Artists (USA) Fellow.