Gary Tyler
Illuminations from a Captured Soul
& Robert Moreland
November 1 – December 20, 2025
October 24, 2025 –Official Welcome is excited to announce our first solo exhibition with Gary Tyler (b. 1958, St. Rose, LA) opening on November 1, 2025.
The exhibition features several new quilts – ranging from the tenderly poetic, Fernanda’s Touch (2025) to the tragic-comedy of Convict Poker (2025), which depicts a popular event at the Angola Prison Rodeo – a group of inmates playing Texas Hold ‘Em at a red plastic table, while being charged by an angry bull. Tyler’s narrative quilts also celebrate his friends from the Angola Prison Drama Program, depicting them in character with the full pathos of their performance. This will be Tyler’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the city where he first encountered the Black Power movement in 1970, on a trip to visit his elder sister in Watts and the city in which he has made his home since 2015. It is my great honor to host this milestone exhibition of Tyler’s work.
In 1974, at the age of 16, Tyler became the youngest person ever sentenced to death in the United States, for a crime he did not commit. Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s hundreds of thousands of people, including Angela Davis, the Los Angeles leftist student paper Red Tide, Amnesty International, and many other communities and organizations, in the United States and internationally rallied behind Tyler, advocating for his innocence and release. The artist spent 42 years in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana before being released at the age of 57. His artistic practice emerged from his resilience in enduring unjust incarceration and his desire to have a positive impact on the community he was incarcerated with. Tyler is a 2019 and 2020 Art Matters Awardee, and his work is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and the Kadist Collection, San Francisco.
Gary Tyler is an artist, living and working in Los Angeles, California. For over four decades, Tyler has been working at the intersection of art and social justice. For three decades, Tyler was the President of the Angola Prison Drama Program, using the position to promote a culture of community, civic responsibility, and optimism. He taught himself how to quilt to fundraise for his fellow inmates receiving care from their peers through the Angola Prison Hospice.
Story quilts have a long history in African American art, with notable examples beginning in the work of Harriet Powers (1837 – 1910) and ranging to contemporary practitioners like Bisa Butler (b. 1973.) Quilting, as an artistic tradition, is both a practical skill used to create utilitarian objects of need within families and communities and an archival practice, preserving materials, expressing ideas and politics, and telling personal stories as well as documenting community history. In the field of contemporary art, African American narrative quilt making began to make space in the canon of art with the pioneering work of Faith Ringgold (1930 – 2024). Over the last several years, exhibitions of African American quilts, both narrative and abstract, have taken place in major galleries and museums. Tyler’s work aligns closely with these enduring traditions of communal craft and storytelling that define the history of story quilts.
Quilting entered Tyler’s life through the Angola Prison Hospice – at a time when the AIDs crisis was in full swing and many men in prison were HIV+ and being seen through the end of their lives with peer support from other inmates. Making and selling quilts allowed inmates to raise money for the hospice program. At the same time, outside of the prison, the AIDs Memorial Quilt was being produced by allies, friends, and families of folks dying from HIV/AIDs to memorialize their loved ones as well as record their outrage at the slow and callous response of the US government to support healthcare to prevent and treat HIV.
Quilts were chosen for the memorial for much the same reason that quilts are a tradition in African American communities – quilts are soft and warm, they evoke care, closeness, and family – it is a radical act to record a history of incarceration, of an epidemic that wiped out a generation, of slavery and the struggle for civil rights on a warm, cozy blanket. These quilts wrap us, literally, and figuratively, in collective memory. Tyler’s quilted work is hopeful, but does not gloss over his and other inmates’ experiences. These quilts exemplify narrative and documentary art practices’ best qualities – they are both incredibly specific, rooted in self-portraiture and the artist’s personal experience, so the viewer connects directly with real emotion and real events.
We have also recently co-published a limited edition print with Ollin Editions, available for pre-sale online here. Thanks to the generous support of the Center for Art and Advocacy and The Hearthland Foundation, 100% of the proceeds from the prints go to the artist.
Alongside Tyler’s solo exhibition, Official Welcome is proud to present two new paintings by Louisiana-born, Los Angeles-based artist Robert Moreland. Moreland’s 3-dimensional post-minimal paintings cross lines between painting and sculpture and sculpture and architecture. Uncanny and deftly crafted, each of Moreland’s paintings begins as a paper maquette. The artist experiments with shifts in color, shadow, and light rendered by adding folds and volume to the painted surface.
In addition to the many private collections that have acquired his works, Moreland’s paintings are in the Frederick R. Weisman Collection in Los Angeles and The Koo House Museum in Seoul. He has a large public sculpture installed at the Adamwon Sculpture Park in South Korea. His work has been exhibited at The Hole, NYC; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles; Library Street Collective, Detroit; Louisiana State Museum, Louisiana; G.Gallery, Seoul, Korea; and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans.
For press and sales inquiries: hi@officialwelcome.art
