She Weaves White Gold


North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
August 2025 – Spring 2027


She Weaves White Gold is a new site-specific installation by Tanzanian-American artist Malaika Temba that honors the labor, legacy, and cultural knowledge of women through an immersive textile environment. Centered around the sisal plant, a natural fiber once dubbed “white gold” for its colonial-era economic value, the work traces the crop’s complex journey from its introduction to Tanzania by German colonizers to its embeddedness in contemporary Tanzanian life. Temba reimagines this material history as a narrative of feminine power and global exchange.

Working across jacquard weaving, silkscreen, dyeing, embroidery, and painting, Temba builds intricate, layered surfaces that reflect both the resilience of women’s labor and the soft power of textiles. Sisal is evoked both materially and metaphorically: its coarse fibers referenced in the unraveled fringe and stiffened surfaces of the tapestries, while cotton and other fibers gesture to global trade networks that continue to shape material culture. In her richly textured compositions, weaving becomes a foundation for storytelling, while painting and printing add moments of disruption, fluidity, and emphasis: an interplay of permanence and impermanence, structure and improvisation.

At the heart of the installation are Tanzanian marketplaces—vibrant spaces of commerce, negotiation, and collective care—one of the rare spaces where women hold visible authority. These scenes serve as visual shorthand for abundance, autonomy, and interdependence, their energy echoed in the rhythmic repetition of pattern, color, and form throughout the work. As in much of Temba’s practice, textile is reclaimed as a site of political, emotional, and historical weight as a medium capable of holding memory and honoring laborers.

Raised across Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S., Temba brings a transnational perspective to questions of identity, value, and global trade. She Weaves White Gold continues her commitment to centering the roles of African women in shaping material and cultural economies. Monumental in scale yet intimate in gesture, the installation foregrounds the often-invisible labor of harvesting, processing, carrying, and weaving, reframing it not as peripheral, but as central to global trade.


Installation view, She Weaves White Gold, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2025
Installation view, She Weaves White Gold, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2025
Installation view, She Weaves White Gold, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2025
Installation view, She Weaves White Gold, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2025
Installation view, She Weaves White Gold, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2025
Etched in Soil, 2025
Woven cotton rayon and acrylic paint
107 x 173 in (271.8 x 439.4 cm)
Etched in Soil, 2025 (detail)
Etched in Soil, 2025 (detail)
The Well Knows Her Name, 2025
Woven cotton rayon and acrylic paint
103 x 51 in (261.6 x 129.5 cm)
The Well Knows Her Name, 2025 (detail)
She Carries It Home, 2025
Woven cotton rayon and acrylic paint
100 x 45 in (254 x 114.3 cm)
Installation view, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 2025
Sisal Glyph (I), 2025
Photo Tex aqueous inkjet fabric
Variable dimensions
Edition of 10
Sisal Glyph (II), 2025
Photo Tex aqueous inkjet fabric
Variable dimensions
Edition of 10