CC Mercer Watson

CC MERCER WATSON is a world-renowned multidisciplinary textile artist, poet, and cultural steward whose hand-stitched masterpieces and writing serve as living archives of the Southern, Indigenous, Black American experience. A gem from The Natural State, she’s an alchemizer of cloth, culture, and storytelling. Her work is deeply rooted in her heritage as the daughter of the late Attorney Christopher C. Mercer, Jr., a titan of the Civil Rights Movement, and the first of many movements in The South. Her maiden name, Mercer, means “a merchant in textiles” and she is a textile maven, stitching by hand thousands of hours a year. Watson believes that Arkansas is a cultural Mecca of The South, universally unifying our history and healing. Continuing her family’s legacy of justice, CC uses her mediums as a tool for liberation, weaving together ancestral oral traditions with a bold vision. Her signature style reimagines the Black body as a resilient, enduring cosmic force. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

Southern Black womanhood is the lens that I conjure and create from. I’m an alchemizer of cloth, culture, and storytelling, exercising art as an archive of my existence and as an homage to my kin. I honor the dead through my living. I am a link in the long spiritual memory of my ancestors. I am a dream preferred. What lore I contain as a curator, quilter, and poet… My hands, my dreams, my blood, my curiosity, and my soul are all conduits in between what is and what can be. My quilting, my writing, and my making deepens my investigation of the infinite universal power that I possess as a woman. I prefer to work by hand, making quilts that take up space, be it the magnanimous subject or the magnificent size. My purpose as a creative is saucy, sensory, slow, and intentional. My textiles, my poems, my voice, my recipes, and my time are the mediums I utilize to communicate cultural messages that signal survival, liberation, wonder, and healing for any who bear witness. I make beautiful things because I am a beautiful thing. Every iota of my being honors current and evolving Indigenous Black culture in the American South and our influence on the world through fibers, foods, and frequencies. 
Cosmic. Cultural. Magical. Wonderful.