Each year, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center names its featured artist of the year and collaborates with them on projects to celebrate and showcase their work.
2025 marked a first for the museum, an exhibit of textile art, courtesy of Little Rock multimedia artist CC Mercer Watson.
The exhibit, titled “It was Written in the Stars,” is a distillation of the cosmic timeline, the identities we create, and those that are foisted upon us. Even the exhibit’s opening night was pinned to a celebration of the Mercer Watson family.
"Today would have been my father, the late, great attorney, CC Mercer Jr.'s 101st birthday,” Mercer Watson announced at the exhibit opening.
Time and space are at the heart of the exhibit. Mercer Watson says it represents 530 hours of hand-stitched quilting, folding in the history, culture, geography, and future of the Black diaspora.
"This is time, this is space, right? Then the ocean all around us, this is our journey of how we got here. A lot of people got here a lot of different ways… but, you know.”
Against the backdrop of that seemingly endless ocean, massive quilts span the length of the exhibit overhead, depicting deities from cultures in Ghana and other West African countries.
"So this Sun room corresponds with the Sun, that I have imagined my father and my siblings in the sky. That corresponds with the sunset of the mermaids here," said Mercer Watson. "Then we have the North Star. So these sirens of the southwest, we have the great mother, Yemaja, Mami Wata, this great mother of the ocean. As we crossed over, the diaspora: the Black people who were dispersed from Africa in the slave trade, that she's holding on to the day and night. You see in the distance, the North Star, because that was our way to freedom.”
It’s an ambitious exhibit that invites contemplation of how cultures thrive both in celebration and in spite of their environment, exploring the intersection of personal triumph and divine providence.
"I'm just excited that I get to honor my legacy in this way, and I hope it inspires people to hold fast to the stories of their ancestors and to think about what seeds they will plant for who’s next.”
CC Mercer Watson’s "It was Written in the Stars" is ongoing at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center through August 16, 2025.
The exhibit is free and open to the public.
