Zoë Pulley Tends to Memory

In Zoë Pulley’s multimedia practice, family archives are a primary source material allowing for intergenerational connection across maternal and paternal lineages. Pulley is interested in the ways memory is embedded within everyday things— an article of clothing, pieces of candy, or a weathered book—that over time accumulate to form stuff, which she defines as “the artifacts, memories, ephemera, and seemingly nonsensical things that gradually gather in junk drawers, attic chests, closets, and crawl spaces.”1 She finds methods of extrapolating meaning from stuff that has survived for long stretches of time, insisting upon its significance as a carrier of history. She asks, “What are the stories here that can be investigated, learned more about, memorialized, but also, what is the responsibility to continue that legacy of keeping and holding?”2

Pulley’s process thus includes gathering and assembling materials laden with history, one that continues to take shape in the work made during her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Stepping into Pulley’s studio is a transportive experience to a place where brightly colored and patterned things and stuff abound. Her studio is a collection of objects from both past and present, resistant to a fixed moment in time yet suggestive of a domestic interior. Samples of black-and-white checkered linoleum line one corner of the floor, with the checkered pattern extending to the nearby wall in two shades of blue. Chains and coils of wires coated in yellow plastic are suspended from the wall. Swatches of hot pink, orange, and maroon-colored seatbelt fabric lie amid a collection of various art material odds and ends on a worktable. A rack of clothes stands in another corner. Throughout—pasted onto walls or spread out on flat surfaces–are archival photographs, each one showing family members and, family friends, known and unknown, at all stages in life.

These photographs come from Pulley’s extensive familial archive, which also includes handwritten letters and postcards, among other objects. Seen assembled, this archive narrates critical segments of her family’s history, tracing pathways from the Southern United States—Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee—to destinations farther north—Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Prince George’s County in Maryland—as part of the Great Migration (1910–1970). It thus charts her family’s journeys throughout the twentieth century, which Pulley translates with meticulous care and intention. The artist has been mining through these materials for most of her life; she recalls doing so with her maternal grandmother, Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower—whom she calls GranSan—at her home in Philadelphia. GranSan has a story for all the items she has collected, such as who is pictured in a photograph, what plans were being made between letter exchanges, and where she or another family member had worn a particular outfit. This is the stuff of memory—materials that hold the passage of time.

Pulley is especially drawn to the kitchen as a site where memory is embedded, and it is this space that serves as the framework for reflections on a kitchenette, her multimedia installation at MoMA PS1 in September 2024, as part of the culminating exhibition of her time in the Studio Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program. At the time of my visit, she was working mostly with prototypes, a method inherited from graphic design. Two such prototypes were for her “found myself in my grandmother’s closet” series, in which she stiches together fragments of sourced garments to form new garments at an exaggerated scale.3 Like most of her work, the series was made in collaboration with family members, this time guided by a question asked to her father and his sisters: “What’s a memory you have with one clothing item from your childhood?” Pulley embroidered pull quotes of their answers into vinyl plastic that encase the garments, recalling both protective plastic that covers living room furniture as well as a making process she terms “surfacing,” which “synthesizes narrative through the use of surfaces such as textiles, paper, web [and] video to reveal the spectacularly ordinary parts of Black life.”4 Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory,” introduced in her 1987 novel Beloved, informs Pulley’s articulation of surfacing. Rememory serves as a guiding reference for these works and Pulley’s larger practice, and although the term has evaded a concrete definition since its inception (perhaps intentionally), she understands rememory as “the breach of memory by way of a thing.” These things, such as articles of clothing, might not always appear significant, but Pulley’s activation—by way of visualizing narrative as a physical material—aims to reveal the inherent importance they indeed carry.

Another prototype we discuss is for her work kitchenette building, an homage to Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1963 poem of the same name (Brooks’s poem is also the guiding text for the entire installation itself). Intended to resemble a refrigerator, kitchenette building is composed of a purple magnetic sheet onto which archival photographs of the artist’s family are attached by brightly colored magnet letters. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Pulley will arrange the letter magnets to spell out each of the thirteen lines of Brooks’s poem, circulating family photographs for each activation. In this way, Pulley situates her own family’s participation in the Great Migration within Brooks’s critical engagement with the “American dream” and the ways in which Black American families negotiated space and mobility in the early- to mid-twentieth century. The private dreams that Brooks allows herself to revel in in the lines of her poem, dreams that “send up through onion fumes” and are “white and violet,” like Pulley’s refrigerator door, last for only a moment before being erased by a less forgiving reality.5 Pulley rescues these dreams from being lost, capturing them in the surfaces, stuff, and everyday objects of domestic space.

Beginning with an early career in fashion design, Pulley has continuously incorporated histories instilled in materials, as well as her own memories of sifting through them, into her work. While living in New York after earning a BFA in fashion design at Virginia Commonwealth University, she founded Gran Sans, a handmade jewelry company not only named after her grandmother but one also inspired by memories of exploring GranSan’s jewelry collection. In other projects involving garments and objects, Pulley frequently incorporates written accounts of past events collected from familial and nonfamilial participants. In 2020, realizing a gravitation toward text and type, Pulley pursued an MFA in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. In a year marked by the global Covid-19 pandemic and a reckoning with ongoing anti-Black violence, Pulley’s design practice continued to explore the preciousness of Black archives. That same year, she published the first volume of her book Black Joy Archive, an assembly of submitted images and narratives of Black people experiencing joy amid—and in resistance of—efforts to prevent such moments from existing. In a quilt for– (2021), Pulley pays homage to familial quilting traditions by making a quilt of plastic “thank you” bags stitched together and embroidered with the names of women relatives. And her multimedia installation dear [ ] (2023) sees disparate letters from her familial archive displayed both physically and digitally (via a corresponding website) and narrated by family members, offering an audiovisual collage of collective memory.

In the making of all her works, Pulley honors her family’s stewarding of archival materials while establishing an individual archival practice as a method of preserving memory. She finds ways to uncover meaning in what is not immediately seen in both image and object, uncovering histories that are embedded in the seemingly mundane. Memories are revisited and formed anew in Pulley’s work, not only opening access to moments from her family’s histories, but also inviting her audience to take time and reflect on their own. In asking “What are the inherent stories that materials, objects, ephemera, [and] stuff hold, and how can we explore that and create and artifact?,” Pulley encourages a recognition of the inherent value of materials that have been collected and amassed by elders.6 It is this generation’s responsibility to tend to them with care and intention in the present, all so that future generations might learn to do the same.