When I went to the show “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art” at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU I had a preconception. I thought I was going to see beautiful, contemporary renditions of traditional African patterns. Not that I was entirely wrong, but the show features work made by groundbreaking artists who use various textile traditions as inspiration and render their work in wildly inventive and diverse fashions.

My favorite piece was made by the Ghanaian artist Rikki Wemega-Kwawu. I first saw his piece “Kente for the Space Age” from a distance as I entered the gallery and I was instantly drawn to its intense colors. The hanging “textile” had a sheen to it that suggested it was made of plastic. It hung like a long and tall shower curtain dangling from a piece of wood. The flow of tinctures hinted at traditional patterns, but it also announced a strikingly contemporary sensibility, with hues of bright orange, red, purple, blue, and chartreuse that are more common to pop art than kente cloth. When I walked up close to the piece I realized the piece was made up of hundreds of phone cards, stitched together by plastic twine. The cards came from a variety of phone card companies that appeal to the African consumer with images of pretty young women (the phone card from the company Onetouch, which included a young woman smiling as she talks on her cell phone, her hair wrapped in a traditional scarf, is repeated in a variety of colors and becomes a motif in the piece). Other images include a handsome young man in a dashiki holding a drum, another of a sunset (from the company “African Dream”) and others that feature the map of the continent.

The use of these cards in Wemega-Kwawu’s piece both celebrate and make fun of the graphic art that is used to sell the cards. These phone cards seemed to be aimed at a young, hip consumer and merge familiar, cliched images of Africa with the future that the telecommunications industry invokes—foregrounding the promise of human connection via technology. Phone cards appeal to people who have crossed borders and are often living or visiting in places and countries that are new to them. Offering cheaper rates than the larger phone companies but restricting users to time limits, the cards are ways to stay in touch with loved ones back home or to get in touch with those who have left home. Phone cards make use of this cleft between people, and are marketed to address issues of distance and separation and to lessen feelings of longing via familiar voices. Wemega-Kwawu is known primarily as a painter but I loved this monumental and witty work made of recycled materials that others throw out as soon as they have no more minutes left. Like the best of pop art he magnifies the overlooked aesthetics embedded in commercial art but he also shows how industries–as well as artists–mutate and revive traditions to invigorate both process and product.