Internationally renowned fiber and crochet artist Xenobia Bailey was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. Her parents owned a janitorial business in which she worked every day before going to school. Growing up near Seattle’s Chinatown, her multicultural education began early. Xenobia was able to attend a Buddhist nursery school established by Ruby Chow so that local women with children could go to work. Ms. Chow, an important Seattle restaurateur, became a political force as well as one of Xenobia’s early role models for understanding feminine power. Xenobia also had storybook childhood experiences in which she remembers picking berries, sleeping on the back porch, and artistic activities such as constructing a tree house and creating a go-cart from her doll buggy.
In an article on Xenobia, writer Mary Thomas states: "she is a compilation of the Pacific-facing West Coast, a local American Indian presence, a European national heritage, African-American roots, immersion in a diversity of philosophical processes and religions, and the open-mindedness to embrace them all." This open-mindedness has enabled Ms. Bailey to be inclusive in her educational development as well. She first formally studied costume design with a theater group in the Black Arts West cultural movement; ethnomusicology and costume design at the University of Washington; and later earned a degree in industrial design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
But, Xenobia also found that a formal academic education could have its limitations and biases, which must be overcome. As she states: "My education is also from the community. It’s not written down. You learn about it through word of mouth, through someone you meet in a coffee shop, by stopping someone in the street who has an interesting book. You have to do your research, to seek it out, to find it." Giving action to her ideas, Xenobia learned crocheting from Bernadette Sanona, an Italian-Swiss teacher she met while an artist-in-community with the Brooklyn public schools. She further developed her skills through study with Sister Joseph, a Catholic nun she tracked down in order to learn tatting, a type of knotted needlework that had a scared origin.
Xenobia’s interests also led to her ongoing study of African history culture and art, Native American spirituality, feminism, African American history and popular culture with a special interest in the funk as envisioned by George Clinton. Xenobia Bailey has been recognized as one of the visionaries of our times with numerous awards and grants from the Tiffany Foundation, Empire State Crafts Alliance, New York Foundation for the Arts, Creative Capital Grant and National Endowment for the Arts. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Art Park (Lewiston, NY), Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation (NYC), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC). She has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), Society for Contemporary Craft (Pittsburgh, PA), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) and the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design (NYC).
