Fade
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
May 1 – September 6, 2026
Malaika Temba’s Kazi Zetu (Swahili: “Our Work”) is a monumental woven and embroidered tapestry: her largest work to date and her New York institutional debut, presented in Fade at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The work extends Temba’s sustained inquiry into labor, gendered economies, and the entanglement of local and global systems, bringing that inquiry to a scale commensurate with its ambition.
Temba works primarily through the Jacquard loom, a process that merges both digital and hand drafting with industrial weaving. The loom is precise, systematic, and inherently constraining: it is a challenge to capture what Temba describes as the aliveness of her subjects, the warmth of skin, the full tonal complexity she reaches for. Yet this constraint is generative. Trained first as a painter, Temba approaches weaving through color as structure rather than surface, building tone through the interplay of warp and weft, and through weave patterns that produce optical relationships instead of blended pigment. Moving fluidly between computer and loom, she works within and against the logic of the machine, locating in that tension a space of invention.
This movement between machine and hand is not incidental to Kazi Zetu; it is the work’s conceptual engine. Textile offers a material through which labor can be examined without abstraction. Cloth carries memory and place, but it is also one of the world’s oldest global industries, historically bound to extraction and production at scale. There is no industry, Temba insists, without the hand. Across her own cycle of production, from drawing and collage, to digital programming to industrial weaving, the work mirrors the systems it examines: structures that present themselves as autonomous while depending, at every stage, on humans they render invisible.
Kazi Zetu presents an immersive Tanzanian marketplace scene in which women are positioned at the center of exchange. Across Temba’s practice, markets function as both literal and symbolic sites: spaces where value is produced, negotiated, and circulated, and where women hold a position of visible authority. At this scale, these figures cannot be overlooked or relegated to the margins of visual or historical narrative. The work reframes them at a commanding dimension, insisting on their presence within broader global supply chains shaped by Western capitalist demand, and within art historical traditions that have long undervalued the textile medium itself.
Across the composition, fragments of advertising and economic language surface and recede. Partial billboards, painted spectral signage, embroidered phrases such as sawa sawa (Swahili for “okay” or “equal”), Subsidy, Global Wage Hierarchies, and Value Capture, function as a counter-language, naming the logics that structure the marketplace without declaring themselves. They remain at the edge of visibility and are present, but never dominant.
At the lower edge, the tapestry unravels into a dense fringe, a gesture that recurs across Temba’s work but here takes on heightened scale and weight. The work is not stretched like a painting; it hangs as cloth hangs, subject to gravity and time. This unravelling exposes the mechanics of the textile while evoking the accumulation and strain of labor itself. It is a reminder of what the material actually is.
Above the landscape scene, the sky references the patterned language of kanga textiles, situating the scene within a broader East African visual and communicative lineage. In this tradition, making and meaning are inseparable; cloth operates as both image and message, surface and speech.
Taken together, Kazi Zetu positions the market as a node within intersecting global networks where labor, material, and value circulate unevenly across histories of trade and extraction. Drawn from Temba’s own transnational formation, a Tanzanian and American artist raised across four continents, now debuting at New York’s foremost institution for Black art, the work offers a space in which women’s labor is not only seen, but centered and monumentalized, woven to the scale it has always deserved.
Fade (installation view), 2026. Courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Kris Graves
Fade (installation view), 2026. Courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Kris Graves
Kazi Zetu, 2026
Woven cotton rayon, acrylic paint, and embroidery
Approximately 164 x 140 in (416.6 x 355.6 cm)
Collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem
Fade (installation view), 2026. Courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Kris Graves
Woven cotton rayon, acrylic paint, and embroidery
Approximately 164 x 140 in (416.6 x 355.6 cm)
Collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem
Fade (installation view), 2026. Courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Kris Graves
Kazi Zetu, 2026 (detail)
Kazi Zetu, 2026 (detail)