For a few years in New York City in the early 1980s, Candace Hill-Montgomery was everywhere. Bridging the gap between the Downtown scene and Harlem, she was known for her large-scale interventions in the urban landscape and mixed-media sculptures. Her work had political bite and displayed a taste for the absurd. Hill-Montgomery’s contribution to the legendary Times Square Show (1980) was a memorial for the slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and paid oblique tribute to Assata Shakur, who had recently escaped from prison. The following year, General Coldspot Memorials to Indifference for the Year of Our Lord 1981 saw her install a long row of refrigerator doors on the shore of Battery Park in lower Manhattan, a protest against hunger in America. They looked like tombstones or crooked teeth, a border fence facing the Statue of Liberty.

Lorna Simpson has recently described the importance of encountering Hill-Montgomery’s work – and that of her contemporaries David Hammons and Charles Abramson – as a young artist: ‘They would just make what they wanted to make without thinking about where it was going to go or be seen. They would make it in their studios, on the street, as an installation; they just made the work.’ But of course, without gallery representation or institutional support, it gets harder to keep it up as the years go by. By the mid-1990s, Hill-Montgomery appeared to have gone quiet.

Yet her first solo exhibition in Europe, A Bare Woman Mutters Nothing . . . , held this month at London’s Hollybush Gardens, shows that the work continued regardless. This career-survey offers a selection of Hill-Montgomery’s paintings from the 1970s, photographs from the 1990s and the sculptural weaves she has been making since the 2010s. It follows her inclusion in Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis and Survival at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, last year, and a solo show at New York’s Blank Forms in 2024. She is also included in this year’s Greater New York at MoMA PS1, alongside a range of up-and-coming artists.

The earliest work on display, Our Historic Children Sag Harbor Hills, is an oil painting from 1971. It depicts the historically African-American beachfront on Long Island, near to where Hill-Montgomery’s family eventually settled, and where the artist lives today. A young girl sits staring out to sea, while an older figure – perhaps her sister or mother – crouches behind her smiling. They’re in profile, looking left out of the frame. Their feet are firmly planted in the sand, and the sea looks calm. The work was first shown in a solidarity exhibition for Angela Davis. Hill-Montgomery’s aesthetics were shaped by militant Black Power, but I’m reminded too of the literary scholar Kevin Quashie’s work on quietness as a mode of Black expression: the painting insists on the child’s inwardness, defending her space to think.

When this work was produced, Hill-Montgomery was raising two children on her own and working as one of the first African-American runway models in the United States. This context is important, too. The clothes in Our Historic Children almost steal the show: the seated child is in a striped aquamarine top with a hood pulled up against her afro; the older figure wears a bright yellow coat which flows beyond the frame. It casts an improbable shadow that looks a bit like the lid of a grand piano. This shape in turn is mirrored by the hillside behind, which jostles against delicate clouds. The yellow seems to float, pure pigment detached from its referent. Elsewhere, in Mountain Wasteland Face Haiku (2016–17), a news agency photograph of Hill-Montgomery modelling for Bill Blass is bordered by woven threads. She appears to be wearing a dress made entirely of white feathers.

Such acquaintance with fabric has less glamorous roots. A quilt hangs nearby, embroidered with illustrations for verses from the Book of Proverbs, including an inscrutable one of the artist’s own coining, somewhere between consolation and admonishment: ‘If you lie down on the earth you wake up on the earth.’ Hill-Montgomery learned quilting from her grandmother in Alabama, with whom she used to spend summers until the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Some of her works hang from objects brought back by her father from her grandmother’s farm in Alabama. Her interest in craft is neither decorative nor homely. It forms part of what Amy Tobin has called her ‘gamut of tactics’, probing and critical, always conscious of history and the violence of American society.

Several of the works at Hollybush Gardens incorporate fragments of writing. In Some Are Liars (2024), the title phrase adorns a print on cotton, mounted on a large piece of pine wood board. The wood has been cut with a jigsaw into crenelations on either side, chunky notches or rungs, strung with thread. The cotton has been dyed in alternating hues of orange and red, and a small patch of blue keeps everything in motion. At the top of the board there’s a metal fixture with the word ‘LIBER’ scratched in – so close to ‘Liar’ – the Latin for both ‘freedom’ and ‘book’. It’s like some great puzzling piece of graffiti. The object is complex in structure; every fresh glance reveals something new.

‘All my work is about language’, Hill-Montgomery has said. ‘Even if it’s not talking about language within the piece, it’s about language and how we look at things through history.’ She has published poetry throughout her career. Fire Escape Scrolls (1982) is a series of short poems, rendered in calligraphy, recording the detritus of her neighbourhood. ‘Free / Huey / Poster / Fruit / Cake / Tin / Roof / Shingle’, reads a typical entry. This year’s Abstractive, co-authored with the Berlin-based poet David Grundy, meanwhile, brims with puns and vernacular energy. Where the earlier poems unfold as a series of discrete objects arranged in tableau, here whatever enters the language gets snarled up and transformed: ‘what eye thought was a flute / flue into a truck’.

This gnarly, slapstick syntax resounds in Hill-Montgomery’s weaves. Made on a handloom, they are usually square, or square-ish, no bigger than a sheet of newspaper. As Fred Moten has noted about Hill-Montgomery’s practice, ‘one of the cool things about weaving is that the edges of the work are indeterminate, or at least not simply evident’. The weaves are usually suspended from hangers, so there’s a definite vertical orientation. But the sense of indeterminacy is accentuated by various gaps, bunches, interruptions and appendages. Sometimes threads drip like fresh watery paint; sometimes they come bundled with rusting bits of metal. They are not planned in advance, but emerge through a process of improvisation. Or as Hill-Montgomery puts it, ‘The threads start to talk to you, start to show you where to go’.

The first weave in the gallery, Pope L’s T Raining Day (2025), is a tribute to the late performance artist and joins other memorial weaves for Brice Marden and George Floyd. The base threads are dark brown, but there are patches of maroon, pink, blue, yellow, white. Faces play hide-and-seek along the upper quadrant, with threads the colour of a dollar bill coming to the surface. A little tuft of orange sticks out, raising the spectre of Trump. Other monsters seem to lurk below. There’s a small string of black pigeon-shaped beads, a zipper, neon plastic ties and some bundled toy train tracks – the last perhaps a nod to the underground railroad. The overall effect is one of teasing allegory and playfulness, underpinned by vigilance.

Several weaves at Hollybush incorporate a metal cache-sexe, a West African modesty garment designed to cover women’s and girls’ genitals. In Another Running Go-Round: Spent Echo Hanging (2026), the waistband of the garment is attached to the left-hand side, almost piercing a cast acrylic cup of fraying yellow paint. The weave itself is composed of various shades of yellow, with blue, turquoise and brown in the centre. A brass United States Army button, retrieved from Hill-Montgomery’s father’s WWII uniform, is placed in the middle. In the lower right-hand corner there’s a painted shell and silver bead, hanging above the main part of the cache-sexe, fanned-out like a scallop. The piece is finished with a fresh lemon – strange fruit ­– suspended by several inches of thread.

In a public conversation with Tobin for the exhibition’s opening, Hill-Montgomery linked her use of the cache-sexe to the Epstein scandal, which was unfolding on the news while she worked. It is, she said, a device designed to cover up, but also to protect. We might recall the show’s ambivalent, riddling title. Is the woman who wears a cache-sexe ‘bare’? Is it a sign of subversion or submission to ‘mutter nothing’? Contradiction, paradox and ambiguity – so prominent in Hill-Montgomery’s titles – seem to form a strategy.

The photographic works – printed and mounted on Dibond – originate in the early 1990s, when Hill-Montgomery was teaching at a night school. They are double exposures of New York fruit stands, paired with examples of the artist’s own work. The old filmstock is gorgeous, warm ghosts of pineapples and oranges bleed sensuously into drawings and paintings. The pictures stand in a gesture of solidarity with the mostly migrant workforce who man the street stalls. Hill-Montgomery has said of this series: ‘We, as artists, cannot separate ourselves from the workers.’ The double exposure technique may recall DuBois’s theorization of double-consciousness – the structuring psychic predicament of being both Black and American, which is felt as ‘two unreconciled strivings’, ‘two warring ideals’. Riffing on DuBois, the great abstract painter Jack Whitten once remarked: ‘We are multi-dimensional people. We have always embraced reality with multiple meanings.’ The syntax of Hill-Montgomery’s practice works in this same mode, shifting and recombining – the lemon in Another Running Go-Round echoes the ghostly fruit and brings to mind the yellow robe in Our Historic Children.

One of my favourite works in the show is a found object displayed on a plinth: a papier-mâché statue of a black panther, cloaked in a distinctive Hill-Montgomery weave. In her conversation with Tobin, Hill-Montgomery spoke with particular admiration for the Black Panther Party’s Survival Programmes, the project of feeding and clothing the community. The juxtaposition of the statue with the weave is funny and loving – the artist takes care of the ageing icon of Black liberation, keeps it safe and warm.

‘As wild a motherfucking joint as America is’, wrote Amiri Baraka in 1978, ‘someone better get this shit down, otherwise no one will believe it.’ Disgusted by what he saw as the decadence of abstract expressionism, Baraka called for a renewed commitment to socialist realism. Hill-Montgomery’s work is never wholly abstract and never solely figurative. But she has been pursuing this same task – to ‘get this shit down’ – ever since her first residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979.

Read on: John-Baptiste Oduor, ‘Segregation’s Sequiturs’, NLR 136.