station Bailey focuses on ancient African styles, reviving undocumented, non-commercial, engineered designs, artifacts and other cultural treasures from contemporary rural and urban homemakers. Influences on her work include economic culture and a wish to design experimental nature-based-futuristic, sustainable material culture in the aesthetic of funk for a skilled craft & masons labor force. She is concerned with social and economic development and the health and well-being for under-served rural communities that were socially erased during the
Atlantic Slave Trade. Her pieces are often connected to her ongoing project
Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk. "To be an artist and be able to create things – it's like fireworks every time you think about something," says Bailey. "I try to get energy and movement from something that is not moving at all." Her signature stitch is a flowy line, as if it is dripping. She calls it the "liquid stitch". (worn by
Samuel L. Jackson as DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy). In 2003, her designs were featured in an
Absolut Vodka advertisement entitled "Absolut Bailey." Bailey has been
artist-in-residence at the
Studio Museum in Harlem, the
Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in New York City. In an experimental collaboration sponsored by the
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the
MIT Media Lab, Bailey crocheted with
electroluminescent wire. Her work has been exhibited at the
Studio Museum of Harlem, the
Jersey City Museum, the
New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the
High Museum of Art in
Atlanta. As an addition to her ongoing project
Paradise Under Reconstruction, she created a hanging installation in 2006 called ''Mothership 1: Sistah Paradise's Great Walls of Fire Revival Tent''. This piece was created to cover the topic of absent historical documentation for
African enslavement in America. Sixty students, aged 14–17, designed three pieces for an imaginary couple moving into 21st-century Brooklyn using recycled materials. In 2016, Xenobia Bailey created a large-scale glass mosaic at the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the
New York City Subway's
34th Street – Hudson Yards station. She named the piece
Funktional Vibrations. Bailey crocheted the design for the mosaic; the
Miotto Mosaic Art Studio then digitized it and translated it into the final mosaic. That same year, she also participated in the SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Bailey was a 2018 artist-in-residence at the
McColl Center for Art + Innovation in
Charlotte, North Carolina. In 2020, Bailey unveiled a new public art mosaic entitled "Morning Stars" at
St. Petersburg's new Pier District. In 2020, Bailey designed the public art work, permanently installed in the Grand Reading Room, in the
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington DC. The library was originally designed by German American Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1972. In 2024, Xenobia Bailey presented her exhibition
Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk: The Second Coming at Venus Over Manhattan. This marked her first solo gallery show in New York City in over two decades, featuring approximately twenty recent and historical crochet works in an immersive installation. == Collections ==