Although Los Angeles artist Karen Hampton’s “The Journey North” is not about Hawaii or Hawaiians, her intricate textile pieces may resonate strongly with local and indigenous respect for ancestral narrative, genealogy and materials.

Hampton’s images are rich and coherent, combining dyeing, painting, digital image transfer, text, quilting and the textural quality of the fabric she is printing on. Her hand-stitching is seen on works throughout the show, sometimes as circles, other times as silhouettes, skeletal elements and topographical outlines. Hers is a truly hybrid practice that is deeply rooted in storytelling’s role in maintaining the integrity and importance of lineage.

For example, her portrait of Frederick Douglass is embellished with red stitching that follows the contours of his head, shoulders and parts of his clothing. This famed abolitionist, orator and writer gazes into his future with all of the Victorian intensity we find in portraits of Hawaiian royalty. The image is partially obscured by a repeating floral pattern, setting up the possibility to re-imagine deeply buried cultural intersections between Hawaiians and African-Americans, who as sailors, missionaries, entrepreneurs, soldiers and schoolteachers have been flowing through these islands since the early 19th century.

In the semi-abstract “Under a Shade Tree,” a black silhouetted woman appears to mourn before an almost-bare tree. Instead of leaves, Hampton outlines an area lightly filled with red strokes and blotches that intensify at the tree’s base. There, a shape the color of dried blood evokes a crumpled body, which calls attention to the lighter stitching at the woman’s feet that could be read as a pile of rope. Thus the word “shade” in the title is subtly shifted such that the specter of lynching haunts this work.

Today’s talk of travel bans, refugees and tourist boycotts joins the rhetoric of secession coming from places like California and Oregon. These impulses mingle with those of Hawaiian sovereignty and Black Lives Matter, for this climate of violence, long-standing injustice and challenges to freedoms is familiar to Native Hawaiians and African-Americans alike.

Hampton’s “Journey North” toward that freedom is mapped by stitched trails that outline, excise and emphasize, like a petroglyph or repeating silhouette of a fruiting ulu. Perhaps it is time to rekindle a centuries-old relationship.