Angel Tempa is a New York-based artist whose painted, woven and embroidered tapestries examine how work, care, migration and value shape everyday life. Her work often begins with markets, streets, advertisements, and everyday gestures seen throughout East Africa, especially in Tanzania, where goods, language, signs, and human exchange reveal larger systems at work. Through textiles, she reclaims craft as a serious critical language, bringing attention to women’s work, material politics, and the unequal relations created by global exchange.
INTERVIEWS
This year, Temba revealed Our jobsher biggest project to date, as part of it Fade at the Studio Museum in Harlem, marking her New York institutional debut. The exhibition remains open until September 6, 2026, bringing together seventeen artists whose practices reexamine history, place, spirituality, material transformation and non-linear ideas of time. In Temba’s work, this research turns to work that remains visible in everyday life, but often goes unrecognized.
Ahead of her upcoming solo show in Los Angeles this fall, Temba speaks with DSCENE magazine editor Ana Markovic on textiles as image and structure, the influence of East African markets, the history of sisal, the role of language, scale, and the women whose work continues to sustain communities, economies, and cultural memory.
For readers discovering your art for the first time, how would you introduce yourself?
I make large-scale woven, painted and embroidered woven works about work, commerce, migration, advertising, care and global systems through scenes of everyday life. Much of my imagery comes from markets, streets, commuting and ordinary exchanges that I have observed in various places, especially in Tanzania.
I am fascinated by the contradiction of fabrics. Cloth is familiar because it lives so close to the body, yet it is also one of the world’s oldest industries. It is associated with mining, industrialization, technological innovation and vast economies. My work is ultimately about the human hand and all the systems that pretend not to be based on it.
Culture is not static. It is constantly being translated, and I am less interested in documenting a place than in showing how places and systems overlap and reshape each other.
What made textiles the right medium for you?
The textiles themselves already ask the questions that interest me. I originally trained as a painter, so I still think in terms of color, atmosphere and composition, but fabric moves into almost every part of human life. It conveys commerce, fashion, work, technology, ritual and care all at once.
I also like that even in the most industrialized textile production, human hands still play a role. The hardware itself defies the fantasy that machines operate on their own.
How has living in different countries shaped the way you think about material, movement and belonging?
Moving between countries made me notice how things travel. A hand-painted Coca-Cola ad in rural Tanzania, American clothing appears in East African markets, plastic chairs, packaging, woven baskets and language. World systems become hyper-visible through ordinary objects.
It also made me skeptical of fixed ideas about identity or belonging. Culture is not static. It is constantly being translated, and I am less interested in documenting a place than in showing how places and systems overlap and reshape each other.
Fabric is one of the few materials where intimacy and industry occupy the same object.
What changed when you started working with the Jacquard loom?
The Jacquard loom has completely changed the way I think about images. Instead of putting paint on a surface, you build it structurally, thread by thread.
What keeps me interested is that the loom has limits. It can’t capture the warmth of skin or the looseness of a gesture the way paint can. Instead of fighting these limitations, I’ve learned to work with them. Constraint can be incredibly generative.
Textiles may feel familiar, but they also carry stories of labor, industry and trade. How do you work with both sides of this material?
It’s the same story for me. A shirt, blanket or tapestry can be comforting while at the same time carrying the history of agriculture, factories, shipping routes and human labour. Fabric is one of the few materials where intimacy and industry occupy the same object.
My own process reflects this. I am constantly moving between computers, industrial looms, painting, embroidery and hand finishing. The work reflects the systems it talks about.
Kazi Zetu is full of people and forms of work that are visible every day but easy to overlook.
Everyday life often appears in your fabrics. What makes an ordinary gesture stick with you?
Usually, it’s a gesture that says more than the person intended. Someone balancing a heavy bag on his shoulder. A woman rearranging tomatoes in a market. Someone is sleeping on a bus.
These moments are not spectacular, but they are incredibly revealing. They quietly describe an entire way of life.
Your recent works move between familiar scenes and larger systems of labor, trade and migration. How do you keep the intimate and the universal in relation?
I like to start with a single person or a vignette because ultimately the larger system is always revealed from there. Markets include so many elements of global systems. Goods arrive, prices are negotiated, advertising competes for attention, people move things, repair things, eat, rest and work. I don’t need to invent metaphors for globalization. happening right there in front of me.
Markets are places where women negotiate, organize, transport, sell and sustain entire communities, yet these forms of expertise are rarely given the same prominence as other types of work.
Sisal has shaped your recent work in a significant way. What drew you to the material and what does it represent in your practice?
I’m drawn to materials that refuse to stay in one category. Sisal is a plant, but it is also an industry. It is agricultural, architectural, domestic and industrial all at once. The more I learned about his story in Tanzania, the more it felt like material that already contained the questions I was asking about work and global trade.
Swahili, English, puns and everyday phrases sometimes make their way into your fabrics. How do you know when a word belongs in the picture?
I’m interested in language that people stop noticing. Signs, painted storefronts, trucks, advertisements, small talk. These words become part of the landscape.
Sometimes language directs how we assign value before we even realize it. A single embroidered phrase can change the way someone reads an image without becoming the subject itself. I like words that reward a double look or a second glance.
My work is ultimately about the human hand and all the systems that pretend not to be based on it.
“Fade” deals with things that appear, disappear, return or change over time. How did you approach this idea?
Kazi Zetu is full of people and forms of work that are visible every day but easy to overlook. The title of the exhibition made me think of what is fading from public consciousness rather than what is literally disappearing.
There is also a natural fade to the work. Painted markings, weathered surfaces, weathered paint and a slowly unfurling fringe at the bottom suggest that the materials are constantly changing. Nothing in the work is fixed, just as the systems it depicts are never static.
This is your biggest work to date. What changed technically when you started working on this scale?
Everything was done naturally on this scale. Mixing paint meant mixing buckets instead of mugs. Unrolling the fringe became something I returned to for months rather than days. I also had to think about my body differently. Stretching, wearing a wrist brace, rearranging my studio to fit the panels in it and pacing the work so it doesn’t hurt.
Sometimes language directs how we assign value before we even realize it. A single embroidered phrase can change the way someone reads an image without becoming the subject itself.
You’ve said that you always ask what materials he remembers and who remembers through them. Who did you want him to remember through this new track?
Women at the center of Tanzania’s markets. Markets are places where women negotiate, organize, transport, sell and sustain entire communities, yet these forms of expertise are rarely given the same prominence as other types of work. I wanted them to understand the scale they always deserved.
With a work of this size, what did you want viewers from a distance to notice first, and what details did you want them to discover up close?
From a distance I wanted the work to read like a landscape or a billboard. As you get closer, it starts to behave more like a market. You don’t absorb a market all at once. Your eye wanders. You notice a person, then a sign, then an interaction happening somewhere else. I wanted the viewing to be like walking on stage.
Only after that do the smaller discoveries emerge: embroidered tongue, weave structures, and the unfurled fringe that reminds you this isn’t just a picture, it’s a fabric.
What would you like to explore next in your work?
I have always been interested in what textiles can do that other media cannot. Right now, that means more embroidery, more texture and relief, more sculptural elements, and installations that people move through rather than just look at. I am interested in construction work where the fiber becomes more dimensional.
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