“Unearthing Unicorns,” the recent tapestry exhibition by artist Simone Elizabeth Saunders, reimagines the captivity narrative of the Unicorn Tapestries (1495–1505), in part. Held at The Met Cloisters in New York City, the medieval tapestries depict a unicorn captured by 12 hunters, who then hold the creature in curious observation. As the archetypal symbol of rarity, the unicorn is often positioned as a figure that subverts set standards of normalcy. A panel from the medieval tapestries depicts the unicorn lying inside of a fenced-in patch of a fecund meadow. On a trip to the Cloisters, Saunders was both mesmerized by the beautifully woven story of the unicorn and compelled by a desire to set the unicorn free.

While the original artist of the medieval tapestries remains unknown, its opaque origin story has given way to widely varied interpretations of the series. In “Unearthing Unicorns,” Saunders derives a more liberatory narrative from the source material. Release in Darkness (2022), Saunders’s first panel, introduces Verchü (the phonetic spelling for “virtue”) as the unicorn’s Black femme companion. Verchü wears a dashiki peppered with bright orange and yellow shapes, with her hair wrapped above her head. Pictured alongside the mythical unicorn (whose name is capitalized in the exhibition as Unicorn), she invokes an Aphrodite-like warrior deity. In direct contrast to the original series’ wide perspective, Saunders’s panel presents both figures in an intimate profile.

Often inspired by iconography, Saunders’s process involves sketching digitally rendered drawings by hand. She then projects the image onto muslin and begins manually tufting and punch needling acrylic and wool thread to carefully bring her drawings to life. Typically used in crochet work, acrylic thread elevates the tapestries into glossy, banner-like images. This prominent display complements Saunders’s alignment of Verchü with the Unicorn. If Western mythos understands figures of the unicorn, or of Black femininity, in terms of subjugation, Saunders’s tapestries insist upon their narrative liberation, as the two begin a journey toward freedom beneath a velvety tufted sky of starry indigo.

Break Away at Dawn (2023) demonstrates Saunders’s central liberation narrative. Verchü rides on the back of the Unicorn in a strapless pink gown, hair loose and no longer wrapped. The daytime sky is ablaze with refreshing yellows and oranges, while the meadow is overgrown with wildflowers. Dogs nip at their heels and follow, mouths open, adding drama to their exit. The Unicorn’s broken shackles fall from Verchü’s out-stretched hands. In the next panel, Affirmations of the Day (2023), Verchü and the Unicorn pause at a waterfall for a moment of rest. Verchü bathes the Unicorn, as birds and other wildlife emerge. The fauna motif is also echoed in Harmony Sings at Dusk (2023), where Verchü finds comfort and rest under the Unicorn’s bowed head, as the two are surrounded by animal and plant life. This composition is amplified by a purple horizon. Verchü’s hair is full and free when she leans into the Unicorn, who is now rendered in an amber colour and fortified by their new calming home.

“Unearthing Unicorns” also includes Saunders’s 2021 tapestry series, The Four Queens. Inspired by Precious Stones (1900), Alphonse Mucha’s lithograph series, Saunders continues her examination of iconic archetypal figures. The facial expressions across The Four Queens showcase Saunders’s refined attention to detail. Reminiscent of Emory Douglas’s radical Black Panther Party posters of the ’60s and ’70s, which used the aesthetics of propaganda in political celebration of Black people, each of Saunders’s tapestries have one of the following phrases stitched into the bottom portion: Black Power, Black Dreams, Black Magic, and Black Love. Here, Saunders also employs the tufting gun and punch needle to portray her subjects’ embodied gestures and emotive dispositions that recall bell hooks’s oppositional gaze. Across these tapestries, Saunders’s signature detail of lush colour gradients results in bold luminous portraits of Black women and femmes.

Working within the legacy of Black feminist revision, Saunders carefully rearranges the same art-historical tropes that elide Black women with captivity, through the emblematic proxy of the unicorn. Viewers of this work will be challenged to elevate their conceptualizations of hierarchical standards of identity, and certainly beauty, and instead consider the magical sensibility found in escape.