An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
June 2023

Excerpt (from the introduction):
”I know the exact moment when an artist’s work becomes part of my mental repository of practices that I will forever return to. When I’m looking at the work, my mind is rushed with a thousand thoughts, the most revealing ones being the essays I start writing or the projects I start curating in my head.

This is what happens when I see Shabez Jamal’s work. My most recent mental blooms were watered by the sculptures, Page Reconstructions and Untitled, from their solo show Close Your Eyes, And Remember at Sibyl Gallery in New Orleans. When I take up the artist’s invitation to close my eyes, projected on the backs of my eyelids I can clearly see Shabez’s sculptures and compositions sharing space with the drawings and prints of another artist in my mental repository of forever-references, Darrel Ellis. Together, their work would speak to one another in a language of kin, finding threads of lineage between and toward one another from the opposite ends of nearly four decades.

I would re-read archivist Steven G. Fullwood’s essay The Case of the Artist’s Archive from the book Darrel Ellis (published by Visual Aids), which speaks to subarchives, family photo albums, and how private family archives circulate and change when they enter the public realm. I would think of Shabez’s Page Reconstructions and concrete encasements when reading about how Ellis’ family archives made it so that “through his artistic explorations, [Ellis] and his father entered into a conversation beyond space and time.” I would think about Shabez, and also their second-self and keeper of the archives, Anita, when Fullwood writes, “consider for a moment another kind of archival experience: Darrel as archive, an embodiment of his ancestry and experience.”

I would begin conversations with Shabez about the future of their own public family archive, and how it and their work, as Fullwood writes, “warrant a place among a constellation of Black family archives in an institution where Blackness isn’t marginal, it’s the universe.”

These echoes, calls, and conversations only exist as future dreams, all sparked before, during, and after a conversation I had in early May with Shabez. We covered so much ground, including how they remain rooted in Missouri despite living in New Orleans, how ethics and integrity impact their use of archival materials, and the act of acknowledging their grandmother and extended family as co-authors of the work.”

Read the full interview here…

___
Photo Credits:
[1] Shabez Jamal, Self-portrait in studio, 2023. A portrait of the artist in a studio space, surrounded by their artworks. Some photographic images hang just behind them with a refrigerator door propped up against the wall close by. At their feet and to the left are several concrete works from In Remembrance of Us. Image courtesy of Shabez Jamal.

[2] Shabez Jamal, Untitled (Page Reconstruction no. 85), 2023. In Untitled (Page Reconstruction no. 85), one large photograph of a person seated on a stool, seen from profile view. The photograph takes up the majority of the frame of the image. Covering the face and feet of the person in the image are two other Polaroids, one turned facedown, the other showing a spotlight on a person’s face as they turn away from the camera. Photo courtesy of Shabez Jamal.

[3] Shabez Jamal, Album Reconstruction No. 1, 2022. Oak, Acrylic Sheets, Polaroid Images, Chromogenic Prints and Bronze photo corners, 14” × 16 1/2” × 8”. A collage of Polaroid photographs is presented between two wooden boards. The photographs show a close up of a figure’s eyes, their legs, a side profile, and more. Image courtesy of Shabez Jamal.

[4] In this scanned self-portrait there is a Polaroid of Shabez Jamal in their studio, wearing all black and seated on a stack of concrete bricks. There are concrete artworks at their feet and in the background is a dark blue wall and shelves. The Polaroid is scanned and placed within the center of the image, floating against a dark black, textured background. Photo by Shabez Jamal.

An interview for Indigo Arts Alliance’s The Record
March 2023 (interview conducted in 2022)

Excerpt (from the introduction):
”It was Ryan Adams who reminded me that it’s possible to get to know an artist’s work without ever stepping foot in their studio or standing in front of their work in an exhibition space. There’s a way to feel familiar with an artist’s practice without having their murals be the backdrop of daily commutes or perusing their work on digital screens. What I consider to be my introduction to Adams’ work didn’t actually involve his work at all. It happened this past January, by happenstance, in the kitchen of Surf Point Foundation during the first week of our residency, as we both brewed our coffee. Though the curious curator in me looked into the work of the other artists in my residency cohort before I arrived, those explorations didn’t tell me nearly as much as my conversation with Adams did that morning.

After sharing the journey we each took to get to Surf Point–me through a multi-day road trip from Chicago, Illinois and Adams through some creative family scheduling from Portland, Maine–the conversation turned to music. From there, we quickly discovered our mutual love and appreciation for hip hop, particularly lyricists Phonte and Big Pooh who are also known as the Durham-born duo Little Brother. I bring this up because, in most cases, to be a Little Brother fan signals a reverence for poetics, clever wordplay, humor, alluring rhythms, and unapologetic respect and devotion to Black life and culture. Similarly, to bear witness to Adams’ work, no matter the context, is to experience all of these same qualities echoing in a different yet deeply related form. When I look at Adams’ art now, it is always lyrically and sonically annotated. I let myself fall into the words and get caught up nodding to the beat.

Many months later and as he prepared for shows at Notch8 Gallery and Ishibashi Gallery (Concord, MA), Adams and I took some time to discuss the origin story of his style, making work on the streets versus the studio, and what it’s like to be a Black artist in an era of seismic social, political, and cultural sea changes.”

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Ryan Adams.

An essay for the complementary publication of the exhibition Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo at the DePaul Art Museum

Edited by Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes with Aliya Hussain and Audrey Petty
August 2022

Created as part of the exhibition Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo, this publication brings together activists, artists, poets, and torture survivors to investigate and resist the ecosystems of violence that connect Chicago to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The aim of the publication is to uncover moments of beauty, poetry, and shared humanity within and despite the traumas of state violence.

Excerpt from “A Prelude and Postscript to Finding Liberation in the Night’s Sky, or Before and After Remaking the Exceptional”:

”…every voice, memory, experience, gesture, image, and object in this project’s orbit is asking us to do the individual and collective work of articulating, questioning, and attempting to define the aesthetics and creative practices of liberation. To open ourselves up to the pathways and tools that lead to deeper embodiment.

Generally, when I explore this for myself, I almost always end up in the same place–looking to the sky above me and the ground beneath my feet, but also to Black abstraction. No matter what I do, I find my way back to Black abstraction and its direct relationship to the past, present, and future phenomenologies of Black people. I’ve found this to be a consistent and sturdy container for these questions and a playground for the kind of experimentation that gets us closer to answers. I find this, too, to be the stomping grounds of artists, organizers, writers, record-keepers, and freedom architects because it is a territory defined by no restraints but also anchored in the realities of body knowledge (pleasures and traumas), testimony, and experience.

What Black abstraction and its art forms can provide is a momentary respite from the mental and physical blocks created by the world’s most oppressive systems and structures, and a way to process their harms. It presents an environment where it’s possible to dream of, unravel, and construct things we haven’t seen or felt we haven’t had access to. It reconnects us to things that have been taken from us, such as prolonged mental and spiritual freedom, and sometimes even a slice of what physical freedom can be. It is both familiar and unfamiliar territory.

‘There is fertile soil on the edge of unknowing. Abundant are the fruits that sweeten the tongue.’ - Damon Locks

Black abstraction also makes room for multitudes. It can be a collective portrait and include all of our insights, tactics, struggles, and expressions. If we sit with it, spend time with it, Black abstraction can make a way for entropy, manifestation, and a connectedness to ourselves and the worlds around us. When I look at the work of freedom fighters who are battling on mental, spiritual, and physical fronts, it’s clear that they knew and know Black abstraction as a superpower. They’ve harnessed it, shared it, and encrypted their work with it, creating writings, artworks, and actions that are embedded with slow-releasing, slow-burning instruction manuals, weapons, historical contexts, and wellsprings.

Remaking the Exceptional isn’t a show of only Black abstractionists, but it is, at all levels, in conversation with the technologies of Black abstraction.”

Photo Credits:
[1] A tea time spread from a 2015 iteration of Tea Project, a performance by Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes. Photo by Beatriz Meseguer, courtesy of DePaul Art Museum website.

[2] Detail from the cover image of the publication.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
January 2023

Excerpts:
“Erol’s work is best experienced in silence, or in soft whispers, quiet reveals, and patient observations. It’s meant to be savored, relished, and, by doing that, discovered. It’s meant to be re-experienced and interpreted over time, with welcomed and expanded revisions. Should you take up his invitation to sit for a while, whether in his studio or in his canvases, I recommend you approach it gently, but also prepare to receive waves of information, cleverly buried imagery, glimpses of immediate and distant ancestries, and access to sweeping studies of internal worlds and materials.”

Erol Scott Harris: “When it comes to articulating who I am, where I am at as an artist, it always falls outside of just being an artist. I think it’s about how to be a human. I’m always asking that question first, and the artistry is something that I just happen to do. Art gives the closest thing that I can find to an answer when asking myself what it means [to be] human or when tapping into a deeper part of myself.“

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:
[1] A black-and-white portrait of Erol looking directly into the camera and sitting among dry flowers outdoors on an elevated train track. Buildings and a cloudy sky can be seen in the background. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

[2] A black-and-white portrait of Erol sitting among dry flowers outdoors on an elevated train track. Buildings, electricity towers, and a cloudy sky can be seen in the background. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

An closing essay for the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating A Living Legacy (CALL) Initiative

Fall 2022

[Free downloadable PDF]
[Printed Workbook]
[Audiobook]
[Audio of my essay]

Created under the vision and care of Shervone Neckles-Ortiz and Kay Takeda, Career Documentation for the Visual Artist is a free educational workbook focused on legacy planning for artists. It features a range of perspectives in the artist legacy and archiving field, and covers topics such as setting priorities and goals, creating a support system, budgeting for your inventory practice, mapping your archival legacy, creating an artwork inventory, managing digital image assets, creating a bibliography, drafting a preservation plan, capturing your career map and timeline, and more practical advice for documenting your career as an artist.

The guide is part of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) initiative, which has supported artists in their efforts to catalogue, manage, and preserve their life’s work for over 15 years.

Contributors include Virginia Allison-Reinhardt, Luke Blackadar, Rose Candela, Catherine Czacki, Jim Grace, Margaret Graham, Deidre Hamlar, Tempestt Hazel, Elaine Grogan Luttrull, LaStarsha McGarity, Sharon Mizota, Jennifer Patiño, Steven G. Fullwood, Antonia A. Perez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Jan Wurm.

from the essay “A Love Note from the Other Side”:

“First, allow me to introduce myself. I am one of the people waiting lovingly on the other side of this process of organizing your life’s work and creating your archive. I am someone who might be digging through your files and folders years from now in order to write essays, curate shows, and draw links between your work, your words, and those of other artists or related periods in history. I’ll be the person falling in love with your letters, sketchbooks, and the illegible notes written in the margins of your papers. I am the person who is going to want to do right by you and your work while quoting your words in the most authentic and aligned context. I will bring up your name in studio visits and during panel discussions while pulling up installation views of past exhibitions for interested audiences. I will seek out the parts of your story and your work that have yet to make it into books, shows, and essays. I am one of the potential future explorers of the material portrait you will create for yourself.

Maybe you’re like me in that when you read this Guide you feel a slight weight lift from your shoulders, removed simply by knowing that you have been handed a blueprint from which to build and that you are not alone in this process. But while one weight is lifted, others may still linger because archiving isn’t solely the process of organizing. As several of the contributors to this Guide have stated, it is also a highly personal and intimate practice of reflection. It is an act of love and an expression of self-worth, and often articulates community love and value. Therefore, it is also a space of vulnerability.”

Una entrevista para Sixty Inches From Center
Abril 2022

To read this in English, click here.

”Cuando entré en el taller de Cecilia Beaven del Hyde Park Art Center el otoño pasado, me impactó una sensación inmediata de déjà vu. Curiosa y con la esperanza de entender por qué, me moví lentamente por el espacio, mirando sus cómics, ilustraciones, tejidos y la animación en bucle en una pequeña pantalla en el centro de la habitación. Cuando mis ojos se posaron en sus pinturas y pequeñas esculturas de cerámica, recordé de inmediato: en las primeras semanas de 2020, vi el trabajo de Cecilia en la Galería Plomo en la Ciudad de México y, no solo había visto su trabajo, sino que había pasado horas sentada con él y adentrándome en los recipientes alegóricos que ella había creado. Me atrajo su habilidad de hacer un trabajo que ofrecía misterio, asombro, humor y vulnerabilidad a través de migas de pan que se han desprendido de relatos autobiográficos y ancestrales.

Como pueden imaginar, nuestra visita del taller abarcó mucho terreno. Hablamos de artistas de historietas internacionales, dibujos animados de Nickelodeon y nuestras experiencias como hermanas pequeñas de nuestras familias. Hablamos sobre cómo, a pesar de que su práctica se mueve a través de distintos medios con fluidez, eso no impide que se encuentre con curvas de aprendizaje ocasionales. Compartimos nuestros pensamientos sobre el peso y las limitaciones de las etiquetas, cómo las sacudimos o les damos forma. Fuimos aún más lejos, hablando sobre las formas en que las etiquetas cambian en diferentes geografías y contextos sociales, cómo la raza puede desorientar a quienes inmigran a los Estados Unidos. Después de volver a leer esta entrevista, recordé la fuerza que me atrajo su trabajo cuando lo vi por primera vez hace dos años. Luego, pensé en lo impresionada e inspirada que mi yo preadolescente, amante de dibujos animados de los sábados por la mañana estaría después de ver un trabajo como este y escuchar la historia de Cecilia.”

Para leer esto entrevista en español, haga clic aquí.

Autor de la foto:
[1] Cecilia Beaven sentada en una galería frente a tres de sus grandes pinturas amarillas y negras, incluídas en la muestra “Dream” en Hyde Park Art Center. Cecilia está sentada sobra una silla, mirando hacia un lado. Foto de Ryan Edmund Thiel.

[2] Cuatro de las pinturas de Cecilia, una al lado de la otra, colgadas en la pared de su taller. Cada pintura muestra una figura colorida que encaja perfectamente dentro del marco del lienzo. Debajo de la obra se pueden ver otros materiales de taller y dibujos de historietas sobre una mesa. Foto de Ryan Edmund Thiel.

[3] Colgando de dos clips de carpeta en una pared hay una página blanca que contiene más de dos docenas de dibujos lineales, retratos ilustrados de la artista en varias poses, flotando dentro del espacio de la página. Foto de Ryan Edmund Thiel.

[4] Varios mosaicos de cerámica marrón, azul, verde azulado, gris y rosa organizados juntos en una pared. Cada uno contiene una escena que se asemeja a los guiones gráficos cómicos de Cecilia. En medio de estos azulejos hay dos pequeñas obras escultóricas de cerámica en pequeños estantes de color azul brillante. Foto de Ryan Edmund Thiel.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
April 2022

“Ever since I spent a winter afternoon in Farah Salem’s studio, the two of us falling deep into conversation, the words of poet Nayyirah Waheed have been whispering in my mind: “Complexity is just simplicity which refuses to be anything else.”

Farah is the kind of transdisciplinary artist whose practice folds in and unfolds out of itself, endlessly and inevitably, as she uses her art and art therapy practices to honor, challenge, and reimagine rituals and psychologies across generations and geographies. If you don’t take the time to fall in, then you’re missing out on a chance to join her in a voyage between worlds. You’re missing an opportunity to expand your understanding of how art moves through our bodies and art’s ability to be a vehicle for ancestral knowledge and the human psyche.

What began as a practice rooted in design and photography has now become something intuitive and precisely untamed. Farah follows her instincts, which has led to her ability to take the tools she’s been given or acquired and use them to create expansive and provoking works through seemingly simple gestures. This can be seen in works like Erode Re-Compose, a series of Polaroid assemblages that, at a glance, look like colorful, collaged landscapes but are, in fact, photographic visualizations of the psychological impacts and distorting effects of trauma on memory. As someone who spends time thinking about memory (re)composition and its relationship to truth and speculative nonfiction, I find form for these ideas within Farah’s work.

The following is a glimpse into parts of hours we spent together discussing her artist origin story, the basis of her artistic ethos, and how the recurring theme of time as material has shown up in her work over the years.”

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:
[1] Artist Farah Salem stands in her former studio at Hyde Park Art Center with art works, fabrics, garments, and photographs hang on the wall near a shelf and table holding various materials and artworks in-progress. Farah is wearing white pants, a black top and vibrantly colorful scarf draped across her shoulders. She’s looking off to the side, smiling, with her hands gestured in front of her. Photo by EdVetté Wilson Jones.

[2] A portrait of Farah Salem sitting in her studio wearing white pants and a vibrant scarf draped over a black turtleneck top. Part of a wood panel with Polaroids from the ‘Erode Re-Compose’ hanging in the background, with other polaroids directly on the wall. Partial views of images from the series Temporary Deformations. Photo by EdVetté Wilson Jones.

[3] With dyed fingertips and a small grip-shaped sculpture being softly clutched, Farah’s hand stretches into the frame from the left. Just beyond her hand you can see more small bright copper-colored sculptures from the series sitting on a table. Photo by EdVetté Wilson Jones.

[4] Farah Salem can be seen from mid-face down, holding a headpiece instrument that’s covered in cowry shells. You can see her vibrant scarf draped over a black turtleneck top. Part of a wood panel with Polaroids from the ‘Erode Re-Compose’ hanging in the background. Photo by EdVetté Wilson Jones.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center (in collaboration with Art Design Chicago Now)
May 2022

”I should have known that my conversation with Ross Stanton Jordan would go unexpectedly. It’s on-brand with how he has shown up in my art world over the years that we’ve known one another. We’ve crossed paths randomly on the streets of Chicago or in Zoom rooms where he’s representing the Jane Addams Hull House Museum as the Interim Director and Curatorial Manager. I’ve run into him at places like the Chicago Cultural Center, at spaces where he happened to be holding events for projects he’s curated, and most recently as I was on my way out of Expo Chicago. What is predictable, though, is each time this happens I’m grateful for the encounter and reminded of the thoughtful and endearing energy that he pours into the cultural vessels of Chicago.

Recently, we changed things up by finding a scheduled time to sit down and chat. I thought that our time would be spent tracing the years of his Presidential Library Project up to our present-day context from 2015, which is the year it began. Or, I thought we would dive into an endless analysis of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s canonized image as interpreted through the brush of Amy Sherald, just like he did during his recent talk on The Obama Portraits, an event hosted at Hull House Museum and presented as part of Red Line Service’s Art Histories Series. Yes, we talked about those things, but, of course, the conversation still took a turn. Before we knew it we were summoning our memories of nearly a century’s worth of fictional and speculative Black president portrayals–everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. in his youngest years, to Richard Pryor (a fellow Peoria native) in his short-lived, self-titled 1977 sketch comedy show. We discussed Key and Peele, Eddie Murphy, Wanda Sykes, and Chris Rock. We talked about the searing words of James Baldwin and humor as a means of survival, often infused with sharp truths and trickster energy. We discussed Black comedians’ role in imagining the unimaginable during a time before November 4, 2008, a time when most Black people could only speak the idea of a Black president in front of an audience of millions if it was presented as comedy. A joke for ideas unattainable and considered absurd by those who historically and currently run those offices.

Then, we discussed the collective bewilderment of the Obama family occupying that position for eight years and the ways that artists have translated this very complicated anomaly. We talked about how, during and after Barack Obama’s presidency, artists have given form to what was formerly a tenacious and cautiously wishful and subtle joke. We discussed how artists are helping us articulate a period in history that many of us are likely still trying to fully understand the reality and impact of.”

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:
[1] Ross Stanton Jordan stands in a room of the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, surrounded by variations on the color brown through a wooden table and chairs next to him and wood paneling and wallpaper on the wall. Ross looks off to the left at something outside of the frame, one hand resting on the table. He’s wearing a denim jacket, dark brown pants, and a belt that matches the brown of the table. Photo by Joshua Clay Johnson.

[2] Ross Stanton Jordan sits in a chair, at a desk in a bright room facing away from the camera. He’s looking out of the middle of three windows that surround him. On the desk are two incoming/outgoing trays, a pencil holder, and a small yellow sign with illegible text. Photo by Joshua Clay Johnson.

[3] Ross Stanton Jordan sits, back turned to the camera, in a room of the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, again surrounded by variations on the color brown through a wooden table and chairs next to him and wood paneling and wall paper on the walls around him. His head is slightly framed by a projector screen in the distance. He’s wearing a denim jacket, dark brown pants. Photo by Joshua Clay Johnson.

[4] Installation view of the exhibition The Presidential Library Project: Black Presidential Imaginary which was on view at Hyde Park Art Center from March 26, 2017 to July 2, 2017. To the left of the image is a monitor with a still, close-up image of a person looking directly into the camera. Next to the monitor are several wall-mounted sculptural artworks with photographic images dispersed throughout. On the adjacent wall is a series of green images framed in bright orange with bright orange, illegible text in the middle. In the foreground there are two monolithic wooden assemblage sculptures. Photo courtesy of Hyde Park Art Center.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
May 2022

”When the ground is softening and shifting beneath you, where do you turn? Do you put pen to paper? Or turn to a short stack of worn out books and marked pages that provide guiding words? Do you immerse yourself in the humbling beauty of nature? Or do you turn inward and seek stillness? Do you grab a megaphone and take to the streets, whatever your literal or metaphorical streets might be? Or do you turn to the people you love and the best advice givers of your confidante circle?

Personally, over the past two years, I’ve spent time taking stock of the anchors and lighthouses that have been essential to keeping my undoing at bay. Although it’s always changing, my arsenal includes all of the above and more, with my ‘and more’ including people like “Bunny” McKensie Mack, the trilingual facilitator, educator, activist, researcher, and artist who founded the change management firm MMG. For those who know McKensie, you know exactly why.

I first met McKensie in 2018 when we at Sixty were organizing the Chicago Archives + Artists Festival. They were at the helm of Art + Feminism, an organization committed to closing information gaps related to gender, feminism, and the arts using Wikipedia. Although that weekend was a whirlwind for me, I made a point to sit in on their workshop titled Wait, What’s a Wikipedia?: An Edit-a-thon Training for Chicago Culture. It was everything I thought it would be…and more. I left with an even clearer understanding of how much both archiving and record-keeping are entangled in conversations about power dynamics, self-determination, community care, and a collaborative approach to history evolution and maintenance.

After that, I continued to find myself in McKensie’s presence, whether that was from a digital distance through social media or through unexpected run-ins at one of the less cringe-worthy diversity, equity, and inclusion day-of-learning events for the cultural nonprofit and philanthropy sectors. Or, while I was sitting through their talk for the Association of College and Research Libraries where, as part of the lecture, they included a slide that read in bright orange font, “Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian librarian from Harlem.”

Watching McKensie speak truth to power with such style, tenderness, grace, honesty, and humor — with absolutely no apologies — is a glorious experience. It’s everything. When I’ve crossed their path, I’ve been challenged and changed. I’ve been affirmed within sectors, a country, and a world that has often felt antagonistic towards me and the people I love.

My words are insufficient when trying to describe all that McKensie is and has been in the time I’ve known them. Channeling the lyrics of Chicago’s own Curtis Mayfield, “they’re close but not quite.” When I find it hard to fully describe and want to deepen my appreciation of someone who’s made such a profound and unexpected impact on my thinking, I am usually compelled to go straight to the source. Although no interview could truly hold all that they are, at the other side of the following conversation you will find yourself with the gift of being better acquainted with the makings of the one and only Bunny McKensie Mack.”

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:
[1] McKensie Mack sits on a small wooden bridge in the Garden of the Phoenix or the Osaka Garden in Jackson Park, Chicago. They are wearing a bright read snakeskin ensemble with white thick-soled shoes. They have their hands resting on one leg, looking directly into the camera. Photo by Ireashia M. Bennett.

[2] McKensie Mack is seen kneeled down in front of a mirror, looking at their reflection among some sidewalk and greenery in the Garden of the Phoenix or the Osaka Garden in Jackson Park, Chicago. You can see parts of the bright read snakeskin ensemble they’re wearing and interwoven vines behind them. They have their hands crossed in front of them. Photo by Ireashia M. Bennett.

[3] A portrait of McKensie Mack standing under a blue sky and trees in the Garden of the Phoenix or the Osaka Garden in Jackson Park, Chicago. They are sunbathed, looking into the camera. You can see the top of the red snakeskin outfit they’re wearing. Photo by Ireashia M. Bennett.

A book review for Sixty Inches From Center
January 2021

”Calling it a wall is somewhat of a misnomer. Although the most widely circulated visual documentation of the wall depicts it as a shapeshifting mural with many artists collaging it with words, paintings, and photographs over its years, the memories and oral histories that have been carried forward after the building was demolished let us know that it was much more than a canvas for a mural. It was a stage and a rallying point. It was a celebration and articulation of liberatory and radically imaginative agendas and expressions. It was, and is, a provocation and a source for memory and material. It is one of the many legacies that can be tapped into when artists, particularly Black artists, want to be reminded of the artistic strategies and methodologies that are available to (re)activate within a contemporary context, as our current times hold many of the same social and political grievances and also the markers of a cultural renaissance and golden era.”

Each contribution to the book is anchored by the concept of a fleeting monument, defined by Crawford as a new form of monument making that gives an expansive view for how we articulate “spaces, events, and scenarios that are underdiscussed or erased historically, that might warrant marking, but in a manner that is less than monumental, that is in some way anti-heroic, unstatic, and in no way timeless.” Crawford goes on to say, “in effect, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect offers a retort to the current monument fever, addressing the problem of monuments by amplifying an alternative history of praiseworthy sites and subjects.”

Using something that no longer exists in physical form as a jumping off point, Fleeting Monuments acts as a complementary text for and documented evidence of how artists and organizers are carrying the essence and energies of the Wall of Respect into today. The book provides examples of how artists are harnessing ephemeral and time-based tactics to disrupt the ways that failing systems and destructive histories have been celebrated on city streets, in public parks, and in the pages of our (text)books. It is a companion piece for the ongoing and recent efforts to revise and interrogate the integrity of United States history as told through the public statues, commemorative symbols, and memories that linger, lurch, or are absent throughout the country. And yet it is also a call to make more visible an approach to commemoration that honors life, joy, and our unbreakable bonds with one another.

Read the full article here….

[1] A view of the cover of the book Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect sitting on a black surface. The front cover has a sideways image of a public statue in the process of being taken down, with a partly cloudy blue sky in the background. The cover text reads “Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect” in orange lettering and “Romi Crawford, Editor” in black lettering. The book’s cover photo was provided courtesy of Valerie Cassel Oliver, 2020. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

[2] The book Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect is open to pages 14 and 15, showing a 1967 photo by Robert Sengstacke of The Wall of Respect in Chicago. You see a street-level view of a mural composed of over a dozen portraits of historic figures painted on the side of a two-story building. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

[3] The book Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect is open to pages 230 and 230, showing the cell phone photos that art historian Mechtild Widrich took of William Walker’s mural “Childhood is Without Prejudice (also called “Children of Goodwill”) located in Hyde Park Chicago. You see detailed street-level views of the mural, which includes larger-than-life portraits of children with their hands together holding a globe. The largest detailed image has a Rousseau quote painted white on a black background that reads “You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth itself to nobody.” Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
January 2022

I’m not even sure how to frame what you’re about to read. The following interview with Dorothy Burge is a shortened version of a marathon studio visit, a two and a half hour conversation that included multiple belly laughs, tearful retellings, sounds from cell phone videos, future works, and multiple deep-cut lessons in Chicago’s social, political, and economic histories.

It is a lesson on how art works, too. Our conversation is a testimony of the natural and unpredictable development of an artistic practice and how art—actually artists—can lead the way to legislative change, in this case through a groundbreaking reparations ordinance for survivors of police torture in Chicago.

Dorothy Burge has lived many lives. These lives are defined by her personal experiences and time spent studying, teaching, and applying elements of industrial design, urban planning, policy, storytelling, and quilting to the benefit of the people around her. The ways she puts her knowledge to work have resulted in clear come-ups for countless people, but they have, too, been useful in fortifying her sense of self. She won’t hesitate to let you know that her life-long relationship to design, such as her style and her upbringing in high-rise public housing, has been a sharp tool that has led her into a deeper understanding of value systems, autonomy, privilege, and biases within educational and professional settings.

Maybe the best thing for me to do is get out of the way so that you can get into it.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:
[1] A full-length portrait of artist Dorothy Burge standing in her studio at Hyde Park Art Center. She wears a top, head wrap and pants with black, yellow, and white patterns. In the foreground is a table with a sewing machine and sewing materials. Behind her is another bench with sewing and other materials. Along the wall are fabric portraits of iconic Black women including Lena Horne, Harriet Tubman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Coretta Scott King, Kathleen Cleaver, and others. Photo by Joshua Clay Johnson.

[2] A portrait of Dorothy Burge standing in her studio at Hyde Park Art Center holding a magenta-colored fabric pattern with yellow lettering that reads, “My Humanity is Bound To Yours.” Behind her is a bench with sewing and other materials. Along the wall are fabric portraits of iconic Black women. Photo by Joshua Clay Johnson.

[3] A portrait of artist Dorothy Burge sitting at a sewing machine in her studio at Hyde Park Art Center. In the foreground are various quilt pieces and sewing materials. Behind her are more sewing materials as well as artworks hanging on the walls. Photo by Joshua Clay Johnson.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
October 2021

When I sat down to talk with Zoe Hollomon and Erin Sharkey, a married couple in love and life, the sun was blazing and the weather was still hot in Chicago. The days were slowly starting to get shorter and at that point the calendar was one of the only real signs that fall was on its way. The other sign was the pure joy that radiated from the computer screen as Zoe and Erin told me about when they would finally get to spend weeks on end at Rootsprings in Annandale, Minnesota, a 36-acre retreat center that they co-run on the unceded territory of the Dakota people. Fall 2021 would be the first time they would experience harvest season on those grounds, since February 2021 was when they and the other two married, lesbian couples of Rootsprings Cooperative reclaimed the land in the name of community, healing, revolution, and artistry.

To understand how these three couples, made up of artists, environmental organizers, and activists, acquired this ecologically vast and fertile site, you must first know the history. Prior to the members of Rootsprings Cooperative receiving the site, this Dakota land was known by some as The Fields at Wellsprings Farm. Before that, and since 1988, the land was occupied by the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls who used it as a retreat space for the Franciscan community until it changed hands to private owners in 2014. In late 2015, a nonprofit organization called The Fields took over the management and operations of the retreat and the land, resulting in the renaming of it as The Fields at Wellsprings Farm.

The journey that led to the land being rechristened as The Fields at Rootsprings began with the social, political, and cultural jolts that shook us all in 2020, with one of the most galvanizing shifts happening with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, where Zoe and Erin are currently based. In an effort to acknowledge the outcries for justice that were sounding loudly not only throughout the country but just hours away from them, the owners of Wellsprings Farm decided to begin conversations around transfer of ownership to local Black, Latinx, and Indigenous organizers as an act of reparations.

The space is now known as The Fields at Rootsprings. It is a site of healing and rejuvenation that centers queer and melanated artists, organizers, and healers in need of replenishment in a setting that caters to their values and also their dreams—dreams for themselves, their communities, and the Earth. The model that the six of them are creating is anchored in cooperative principles, reverence for the land, and the ancestral origins of people like them. Through Rootsprings, they are addressing the lack of spaces where freedom fighters can, if only briefly, remove their armor and focus on healing and nourishment. They are quite literally world-building towards an existence where the caretakers of the people are cared for and a life of subsistence is a distant memory.

As we enter more deeply into the winter months and sit at the edge of a transition into a new year, I am grateful for the chance to revisit Zoe and Erin’s words. The following conversation is a generous look into the endless depths of their work as individuals, as life partners, and as members of a cooperative that is sowing love seeds everywhere they go.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:

[1] An illustrated portrait of Erin Sharkey and Zoe Hollomon standing in front of a body of water with a stretch of open land seen in the distance. To the left a bright red farmhouse and another building can be seen in the distance, surrounded by trees under a blue sky with light cloud coverage. Illustration by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.

[2] An illustrated and slightly re-imagined landscape portrait of The Fields At Rootsprings, showing several of the buildings, residential spaces, and structures of the site. Next to the bright red farmhouse and another building is the Octavia E. Butler Dome. In the foreground you can see an abstracted view of plants and farmland surrounded by trees under a blue sky. Illustration by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
October 2021

“All I ask for is peace…”

I almost didn’t hear the words because they were delivered like a deep sigh into the exhibition space. As the line was being digitally exhaled into the room, three generations of Hazels rounded the corner of the main gallery to see the other half of Making Our Space: Members of the Peoria Guild of Black Artists, an exhibition curated by Jessica Bingham at University Galleries at Illinois State University. The show brings together the work and words of Kevin J. Bradford, Krystopher Dudley Brown, Alexa Cary, Kameron Hoover, David L. Jennings, Chantell Marlow, Alexander Martin, Erick Minnis, Morgan Mullen, Hannah Offut, Brenda Pagan, Rose de Peoria, Kayla Thomas, and Quinton Thomas–all early and founding members of the group lovingly known as PGOBA.

In between time spent with each piece and while on converging and diverging paths with my mother and niece, I was trying to catch and kept missing the source of the sigh. Finally, the three of us came together at an installation and video that was set up as a kind of rest area and centerpiece where a seat, a small end table with books and dried flowers, and a live plant stretching out next to a golden bird statue all faced a monitor on a free-standing wall that was painted black.

We listened to each of the poems, the last in the group being the piece “Young” by Krystopher Dudley Brown–the source of the sigh–which came with a series of quietly spoken but potent lines that I had to close my eyes to hear. On the wall adjacent to the video was a shelf that held an altar of poetry on paper, dried flora, rocks, and vessels. Among the materials was “Open for a Reason,” a framed poem by David Jennings (a.k.a. Anonymous Rain). Planted within his poetry was a line that forced a pause from me:

“A finite bit of any gift received can be enough.”

These words got me thinking. Spending Juneteenth in this space with two people I love comprehensively and in the company of the subtle and resounding work of the Peoria Guild of Black Artists (PGOBA) was a gift. Watching my mother take on the role of interpreter for her favorite pieces and seeing my niece silently spinning a mental and visual response to the work she was experiencing was a gift. But, too, I was reminded of the gift I received about one month prior when I spent time with Alexander Martin (they/them), Erick Minnis (he/him), and Brenda Pagan (she/they) at the East Bluff Community Center in Peoria, Illinois. What was supposed to be one hour of questions turned into three, and in that time they each gave me new reasons to fall back in love with the city I was born and raised in. That was a gift.

It’s often the poets who literally and metaphorically bring me home. Making Our Space reminded me of this truth.

The following longread is part of Testimony, a series of essays, interviews, and first-person accounts of the interior lives and exterior experiences of Black trans, Black women and girls, Black femme, and Black non-binary artists and friends. It is an edited version of my interview with Alexander, Erick, and Brenda where we discuss life, death, rejecting the masterwork, and world-building–a conversation that I hope never ends.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:
[1] Brenda Pagan, Alexander Martin, and Erick Minnis stand side-by-side, arms draped over one another or interlocked, in front of double doors, looking directly into the camera with the sun shining around them. Photo by Erick Minnis.

[2] An installation view of an altar of framed and loose paper resting on a shelf with dried flowers and vessels placed throughout. Above the shelf is white vinyl lettering on a black wall that reads Poets of the Peoria Guild of Black Artists with the names Krystopher Dudley Brown, David L. Jennings, Hannah Offutt, Brenda Pagan, Rose de Peoria, and Kayla Thomas underneath. Photo by Jessica Bingham. Courtesy of University Galleries of Illinois State University.

[3] An installation view of bright room with a free-standing wall at the center. The wall has a shelf holding an altar below white lettering on a black wall, and a large monitor on the adjacent wall. Just in front of the wall is a wooden upholstered seat, end table, and plants. Photo by Jessica Bingham. Courtesy of University Galleries of Illinois State University.

[4] Ten members of the Peoria Guild of Black Artists stand together outside on the front stairs of the home of artist and founding member Brenda Pagan. Photo by Erick Minnis.

A publication co-edited by Skyla Hearn, Sarah Ross, and Tempestt Hazel with introduction by Mariame Kaba. Designed by Neta Bomani. Published by Sojourners for Justice Press.
March 2021

[Link to online publication]

Editors’ Note:

“This collection of essays, interviews, poetry, art and archives honors and reflects the immense influence Dr. Margaret T. G. Burroughs had on the political and cultural life of Chicago and the lives of people she met. Dr. Burroughs was cut like a diamond, each facet of her work shaped another. She was an educator, community organizer, activist, artist, poet, historian and she built some of the city’s great, lasting institutions. A special section of this booklet includes an Unfurling. This is a social practice introduced to this project by Skyla Hearn whereby people, as liberatory memory workers, pull materials from existing archives and share what those materials mean to them. In this iteration, we pulled from existing archives, gathered new materials and also created new works to be entered into the archive of Dr. Burroughs. In this way, this collection iterates the impact of Dr. Burroughs and her politics of culture, care, freedom and love for Black people.” —Skyla Hearn, Sarah Ross, and Tempestt Hazel

From my essay “Sincerely Yours: Letters To and From Dr. Margaret T. G. Burroughs”:

”This letter also exists alongside thousands of letters that Dr. Burroughs wrote to colleagues, peers, friends, students, pen pals, and challengers throughout her lifetime, all of which live quietly nestled in archives and collections that we know and and others that we know nothing about. Many of the writings clearly demonstrate the power of the messages she penned and illuminate the less visible work that happened in the spaces around and within her roles as a mother, wife, educator, painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, author, institution-builder, and abolitionist (as described by her former students). 

I’m not in a position to offer any conclusive thoughts around the ways in which correspondence has changed between then and now. I can’t speak to anything other than my own experience of how our communication behaviors have shifted with the eavesdropping or insertion of an onlooker through the CC or BCC of our emails. Or to draw connections between the residuals of handwritten and typewritten correspondence that show up in how we email, text, or DM. Or how letters operate at a different pace than email—how they are slower and, in many ways, the stakes are higher as a result. Or how you have to think more deeply about your words as you write them and can’t correct or change your mind as easily without that crossing-out being visible to the receiver—or your being forced to start all over again.

What I can speak to is how reading back through Dr. Burroughs’s letters reminds me that this form of communication warrants and makes way for an exceptional kind of intimacy, consideration, and care. It offers space for the hand and the heart to be discernible, whether the words on the page are sharp or soft. While we don’t hear about it nearly as much as her art, poetry, or institution-building, Dr. Burroughs’ letters are part of her care practice and speak to a tradition of letter-writing being used to advocate for or connect to people who are far from us in thought, physical distance, or due to the isolating tactics of carceral systems.”

A keynote address for the 2020 Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists and the Society of American Archivists.
December 2021 (published)

The follow text is an excerpt from the transcript for a keynote address that was delivered on August 6, 2020 for the 2020 ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2020: Creating Our Future Conference.

As an organization we know that working against decades of omissions and gaps, and attempting to secure access and placement of neglected cultural histories, artists, and storytellers within the coveted arenas of scholarship, academia, and research is key, but it’s a type of change and dismantling that can and will be met with resistance.

We will not rely on chance and hope that architects of history will include the omitted histories that we nurture. We will continue taking a complex approach to change the narrative on several fronts, and make sure the agents of change, a.k.a. the artists, writers, curators, and partners we work with, are equipped with the resources and access they need in order to contribute to and be leaders in that change.

Even with those challenges, I remain grateful because many of you within the archiving community have been early understanders and appreciators of our work.

As I continued to meditate on this theme, and what “Creating Our Future” looks like in practice, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that whether or not we knew it, Sixty was created out of that necessity.

In Chicago, nationally, and globally we are seeing more demands for more equitable, more just, and radically imagined futures. We at Sixty have always been working toward that.

The futures that are being demanded by protestors, grassroots organizers, the Movement for Black Lives, trans and queer activists, disabilitiy activists, and anyone at the margins hold at their core an ethos that is radically and unapologetically honest, restorative, nourishing, collectively created, and transformative. These futures welcome questions about value systems and the histories we’ve been told explicitly through history books and curricula or implicitly through violence, racist systems, and deep, relentless divestment.

Read the full keynote here….

[1] Still of Tempestt Hazel, sitting on the stairs of the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. From a video filmed by On the Real Film.

[2] Two prints and one large photograph hang on the walls in the sales gallery of the South Side Community Art Center in August 2020. Tempestt Hazel stands at the photograph, pointing out different artists included in the photo “A Great Day in Bronzeville.” Still courtesy of On the Real Film.

[3] Librarians Analú López, Leslie Patterson, and Victoria Sky in the special collections area of the Harold Washington Library, where the Chicago Artist Files are stored. The three of them sit at a table with archive materials covering the table. They are surrounded by bookshelves with books and boxes on the shelves. Photo courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

[4] Ten people sit next to one another around a red leather couch within the library room of the Read/Write Library. There are bookshelves surrounding them and they are all smiling while looking directly into the camera. From left to right, top to bottom, we have Tempestt Hazel, H. Melt, Mel Leverich, Aay Preston-Myint, Kate Hadley Toftness, Jennifer Patiño Cervantes, Sara Chapman, Christina Nafziger, Ivan LOZANO, and Catherine Grandgeorge. Photo courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

[5] Nine people standing, smiling and laughing together, in a room behind wooden chairs with coats hanging on the back of two of them. Taken during a Sixty Inches From Center editorial meeting at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, 2018. Photo courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

[6] Several people gathered on the steps outside of a large residential greystone near the South Loop of Chicago. Image courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

An essay for the Loss/Capture Project by Sixty Inches From Center
October 2020

“There used to be a house here...and [my] dad bought the house next door to put my grandparents in–my mom’s and my dad’s parents,” Mom explained while standing at the edge of two empty, grassy lots in the middle of a block on the south end of my hometown, Peoria, Illinois. “And [your uncle] Arthur used to live there,” she continued, pointing to another empty lot across the street. As she said this, I added three houses to my growing mental list of homes that were once owned and occupied by members of my family. So far, the list totaled six that spread across Peoria, Chicago, and also parts of Tennessee where my sister recently found out, through some rediscovered family records, that her maternal grandparents once owned a home and land. My mother had no idea that the three homes had been torn down and it’s not clear what happened to them in the decades between now and when her parents left the homes and after she and all of her siblings moved out.

While standing in the middle of the lots, I tried to soak up all of the people, personal landmarks, and the sparks from her million memories that made it to the front of her mind. I attempted to visualize, from her descriptions, what Smith Street looked like for Mom in the 50s and 60s: “There were hedges right there, we would play volleyball over them.” “[Dad kept] the dogs, the chickens, and the garden over here.” “The garage used to be here with the two refrigerator-freezers in them—one for the fish, and one for the other meat that dad hunted and processed.” “We had so much fun here…”

Watching my mother remake her home through fragmented recollections in a now vacant space felt like a familiar practice for those of us who, like my family, have stories with many fractures and points where the details begin to disappear. There are often abrupt stops and gaps in family and community lineages because those stories weren’t always documented or easily circulated. Those stories, objects, and records are also sometimes tangled in precariousness due to a combination of difficult circumstances. Elders who construct memory bridges and provide the details that fill the fissures of photographs and records sometimes pass away before that knowledge is captured. Or, family and community histories succumb to conflicting stories and mystery around what happened to the keepsakes that were in long-cleared closets, basements, or storage trunks, and were lost over time during family migratons and formal or ad hoc estate transitions.

Talking with my mother about her history was also a potent reminder of who and what the original repositories of Black legacies are: the people through which histories and traditions are housed and carried forward, and the private or community spaces where collections were intentionally or naturally accumulated.

These repositories, including the now institutionally-housed ones that still endure today, often feel like nothing short of miracles when remembering that they exist within a country that has consistently prevented and actively resisted the formation, maintenance, and accessibility of autonomous and thriving Black histories and spaces. Despite everything working to convince us otherwise, these collections still stand as evidence that an unquantifiable and, in some cases, unrecoverable Black cultural richness exists and that Black people have always been aware of the need to document and carry on our stories ourselves. And through tireless and relatively quiet maneuvers, these repositories and people have withstood within a country whose founders saw the erasure of Black and Indigenous culture, language, and history as something as critical to the making of the United States as creating an exclusive, distorted, and self-serving version of freedom and democracy.

What we are fortunate enough to know now, which counters any claim that we have no significant history, and what some from past generations didn’t have readily available, is the research and evidence that addresses gaps in Black history, and a deeper understanding around approaches to preservation that were inherent to our ancestors. As Dorothy Porter Wesley described back in 1957, the “anthropologists, linguists, and historians have gone far to correct this ignorant opinion [and] have proved that many African people of high culture have possessed an historical sense, and further, that their trained memories and prodigious fund of legend have served as the actual conservators of their history.”1 She goes on to reference Maurice Delafosse’s use of the term “living books” when talking about Africa’s earliest libraries that were, in fact, people: court historians, artists, storytellers, poets, musicians, and others who carried the responsibility of being “walking encyclopedias” and passing on tribal stories, proverbs, mythologies, genealogies, beliefs, and root traditions. It is a form of history-keeping that is still practiced today.

Alongside these history-making traditions, many of the collections used to anchor and establish the Black research institutions that are beloved today can be traced back to individuals who also knew the importance of collecting and preserving Black histories and memories and who took it upon themselves to make sure these collections were complex, nuanced, thorough, and placed in good hands. Dorothy Porter Wesley was one of those individuals. A foremother of decolonizing libraries and their classification systems as well as a defining force in the valuation of library materials authored by Black people, Porter was one of the main librarians and curators responsible for developing the collections that would help to establish the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in 1973. Starting with the private collections and libraries of Jesse E. Moorland and Arthur B. Spingarn, the center’s holdings were established on abolitionist texts, narratives of enslaved peoples, and the global Black experience and diaspora.

Read the full essay here….

Photo Credits:
[1] Collage by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.

[2] A crowd of people walking up the stairs and into the front door of the Michigan Avenue location of the DuSable Museum of African American History, circa 1969. Black Chicago Directory, 1969. Carol Adams Collection. Photographer: Unknown.

[3] Women's reading group at Hall Branch, 1940. In this photograph, Vivian Harsh, the first African American branch head of the Chicago Public Library, is at the back on the left, children's literature writer, librarian, and advocate, Charlemae Hill Rollins, is at the back on the right They are standing behind a table where 26 other people are sitting, books and papers in front of them, most looking at the camera. Hall Branch Archives. Photographer: Unknown.

[4] Photograph of Dorothy Porter Wesley instructing Howard University manuscript staff: Thomas Battle, Evelyn Brooks-Barnett and Denise Glelin, July 1974. Beinecke Library, Box 101, Folder: 1974 D.P. M. F. Photographer: Unknown.

Compiled for the Loss/Capture Project by Sixty Inches From Center
October 2020

Published as a companion piece to the essay Don’t It Always Seem To Go: On the Loss and Capture of Black (re)Collections, this is a list of cultural collections, papers, and artworks that speak to the history and heritage of Black Chicago. It is organized in chronological order according to the date when the materials were donated, purchased, or acquired by the institution, or when the collection, artwork, or building was established, created, or built. Organizing them chronologically reveals things like periods when Chicago institutions were increasing and decreasing their acquisitions of Black archival materials and when significant moments of Black cultural production was happening. It also highlights moments of loss of Black Chicago culture, collections, and artworks throughout history as a way to show the vulnerability of our stories and the quiet and booming erasures and dislocations that take place over time.

View the complete timeline…



Image: A photo of a couple dozen framed historic portraits hanging salon-style on a wall behind a display case of materials at the Bronzeville Visitor Information Center at 411 E 35th Street. Photo courtesy of Tempestt Hazel, 2011.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
October 2020

I don’t have the words to introduce this conversation in the way that it requires and deserves. When we spoke back in August, artist Tricia Hersey was generous and relentless in her call to us, making it absolutely clear that at the heart of liberation is rest. With that in mind, how do I frame or contextualize the totality and service of her work? Given the expansiveness of her practice, which includes and extends far beyond and deep into the beloved Nap Ministry, how do I communicate how her work has offered a salve, an abrupt reawakening, and a thread that, if pulled, may lead to our individual and collective unbinding? Sparks fly, visions manifest organically, and energies shift on a molecular level in the space between her praxis as a transdisciplinary artist, activist, theologian, community healer, and creator of The Nap Ministry. How do you synthesize something like that when it contains enough seed and substance from which to generate the future we are bold enough to imagine?

I want to do right by our exchange. I want to talk about my own experience with rest, or the lack of it, due to the systems and circumstances I inherited. Then, I want to pull back and ask that we all take a moment to imagine new ways of living, a different and more nourishing daily life, that doesn’t have us bound to a clock, a grind, or an archaic definition of work, life, and living. I want to talk about the conversations I’ve had about what it feels like to crumble under the weight of what we’ve been taught or the institutions we’ve been forced into and resisted, but also how we still somehow remain intact simply because we know there’s another way that holds high the more embodied, potent, and ancestral progenitors of ‘self-care’ and ‘wellness.’ We’ve seen them in waves and glimpses. We can taste the sustenance they have for us.

I want to talk about how it hit my bone marrow when Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote on Instagram days after Tricia and I spoke:

“Stress will make [B]lack bodies cyborgs and that’s exactly what slavery fashioned us into. Doesn’t seem right to have odds my people didn’t have just [to] be what my people fought becoming.

…don’t trade your parts for cash. They never give you enough trade-in value.”

I want to quote Alice Walker who said, “You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.” I want to feel that, incarnate that idea, and believe it fully through the lenses of all of who I am—and make that belief strong enough to not be shaken daily, hourly.

Everything that Tricia has done, from her origin story to the latest mantra she whispered into the Twitterverse or Instaverse, conveys everything I want to say. So, I’m going to forgo poetics because we all need to get this word.

Instead, and in honor of Tricia, I’m going to take this time to dream. Of new ways to live. More liberated and self-defined ways of making, contributing, and resting. I’m going to dream of how to learn, make, and model the pathways to this kind of living for everyone I know and love, and all of you.

So, as part of the Testimony series, I offer you this conversation between me and the artist, the truth-sayer, the Nap Bishop, a lighthouse in this storm—Tricia Hersey.

This interview was published as part of the Testimony series.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:
[1] Zoom portrait of Tricia Hersey from a computer screen. Photo shows Tricia seated, looking directly in the camera, wearing a gray off-the-shoulder sweater and a blue, yellow, and green head wrap. Within the screen, she is seated in front of a bookshelf and some plants. Outside of the computer screen, you can see a plant and view from a window in the background. Photo by Ireashia Bennett.

[2] A person dressed in all white is laying on a bed with a canopy, opened to reveal them sleeping. The bed is placed outdoors and surrounded by plants and buildings in the distance to the left. Photo from “A Resting Place” a Sound and Site Installation for Flux Projects, Atlanta, September 2019. Photo by Tabia Lisenbee-Parker.

[3] Three people sit in the middle of a grassy area, seated and reclined, leaning against one another, eyes closed. Photo from an ongoing photography project curated by Tricia Hersey. Photo by Charlie Watts.

[4] Zoom portrait of Tricia Hersey from a computer screen. Photo shows Tricia seated far from the screen, looking directly in the camera, wearing a gray off-the-shoulder sweater and a blue, yellow, and green head wrap. Within the screen and in the room next to her is a bookshelf, an artwork on the all above her, and some plants. Outside of the computer screen, you can see a plant and view outside a window in the background. Photo by Ireashia Bennett.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
July 2020

“…historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse, even when we were its topic.” —Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory

In one of my all-time favorite talks by Toni Morrison she speaks about what she calls the “interior life” of Black folks, also known as the distinctly Black experiences, thoughts, and emotions that oftentimes go unseen by the rest of the world and are usually excluded from historical narratives. She goes into depth about how this is usually an intentional omission, particularly from the narratives of those enslaved during the 18th and 19th centuries, because those stories were usually constructed or edited by white people, or intended to be read by white audiences. The concern was that if those readers really knew what Black people thought or went through, they might not be able to handle it. As a result, the interior thoughts and more monstrous accounts of that period were glossed over or given a “veil,” a covering that Ms. Morrison worked to remove through her novels. She explains that, “the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told, is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us.”

Today, as we settle into a swelling movement that is annotated by relentless public access to people’s internal thoughts and a growing level of fragility in response to grisly elements of Black Life revealed, there are still experiences and personal accounts from those at the center of the fight for Black liberation that struggle to be seen.

Brayla Stone, Dominique Fells, Riah Milton, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Oluwatoyin Salau, and the list goes on.

Testimony is an earnest attempt to address this by offering and archiving a series of essays, interviews, and first-person accounts of the interior lives and exterior experiences of Black trans, Black women, Black femme, and Black non-binary artists.

A few weeks ago I spoke with Ireashia M. Bennett, a Black queer new media artist from Suitland, Maryland who now calls Chicago home. Their work takes the form of photography, multimedia essays, short documentaries, and experimental films that poetically harness and affirm Black queer disabled perspectives and realities. In our time together, we discussed the importance of a clear and unapologetic artistic intention in this moment, the need for more tenderness, and how there’s a Nina Simone song for all occasions.

This interview was published as part of the Testimony series.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:
[1] Film still from Free Rein (in development), an experiential transmedia film project that explores the complexity of Black queer relationships, love, pleasure, and healing. The film still features an overlay of two moving image portraits of Ireashia M. Bennett and Kirstin Brockenborough. Courtesy of the artist.

[2] Film still from Ireashia M. Bennett’s ‘Sweetness,’ a vignette film that highlights the simple acts of love which often go overlooked. The still features a medium shot of Ireashia sitting in a chair wearing a jean romper as their grandmother moisturizes their scalp. Their gaze is looking beyond the camera.

[3] Ireashia M. Bennett, ‘Unruly Bodies, Divergent Minds (in-progress). From a portrait and interview series that explores pleasure, fat liberation, and sensual healing through the perspectives and experiences of disabled queer folks. The artist sits on a bed covered in a white and grey striped blanket. They are completely nude, with eyes closed, and calm. Courtesy of the artist.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
January 2020

Like many people who move to Chicago, Urooj Shakeel made the decision to relocate from a suburb of Detroit after realizing that if she wanted to try her hand at a career in the arts, now was the time. She doubled down and left long careers in healthcare and marketing to study arts administration and policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Prior to her move, she took a moment to reflect on her love of Detroit and the ways in which it seeded her love for art. Urooj wrote on her website, “I could go on forever talking about Detroit and all the artworks I’ve come across, interacted with and studied. How each one of them inspired me in my own art projects and where my ideas originated from. I can never be thankful enough for my colossal beginnings in Detroit. Everything I’ve learned from this city will inspire me in everything I plan to do in Chicago.”

Her words foreshadow how she would shape her practice after landing in Chicago just over two years ago. While holding fellowships and positions at cultural institutions and foundations, Urooj graduated from SAIC in the summer of 2019. She wrapped up her studies with two ambitious projects that pushed her into new territory creatively and curatorially. One is an exploration of family legacies through language and a project that paid homage to the poetry of her nana, or grandfather. The other, Truck Art Meets Little Free Library, is a project that reimagines iconic emblems that are prevalent across Pakistan and other South Asian cultures, then places them in one of Chicago’s quintessential communities to provoke connection.

As Urooj enters the next chapter of her life and practice, she took some time to talk about collaborating with family, the art inherent to Pakistani and Islamic cultures, and the creative and spiritual growth that’s possible when you give yourself permission to take a chance.

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:

[1 + 2] Portraits of Urooj Shakeel by Mark Blanchard.

[3] Urooj Shakeel's Truck Art Meets Little Free Library, installation view along Devon Avenue in Chicago. The image shows a small, yellow truck sculpture with bright multicolored images painted on each side, held up by a bright blue stake in the ground. Photo by Mark Blanchard.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
September 2019

Several years back when I was torn between interests in archives and contemporary art conservation, I came across the concept of fugitive media, or materials that were not built to stand the test of time and are prone to decomposition or fading. The use of fugitive media when creating something can inevitably render that object ephemeral, causing it to transform or disappear over time.

A close cousin of that concept is the idea of making something ephemeral-by-design, which adds a layer of intentionality to an object or artwork’s creation through the materials used. As the term suggests, when artists create something that’s ephemeral-by-design, it’s a strategic decision to make the work fleeting, potentially adding a layer of meaning or metaphor to any interpretation. Our read of an artwork can shift substantially through this aim alone.

Oscillating between all of these possibilities sits the musings of Sampada Aranke. Sampada is a scholar of performance studies, writer, curator, and professor who is currently leading courses like Afropessimist Aesthetics and Mean Moms and Other Feminist Strategies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Across her practice, Sampada asks questions of ephemerality and intention when it comes to objects of protest or materials and movements of the body, which includes everything from print media created for and by the Black Panther Party to the materials that make up and are emitted from the bodies of women and Black people.

In her upcoming book, tentatively titled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics, Sampada is using the stories of Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, and George Jackson to better understand images of death during the height of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s alongside the protest signs, posters, and materials that circulated around those monumentally tragic moments in history.

In “Feel Me?” at Iceberg Projects, her most recent curatorial project, Sampada brought together the work of West Coast artists Sadie Barnette, Xandra Ibarra, Dylan Mira, Kristan Kennedy, and Tina Takemoto. The show offers a feminist lens through which to consider how traces of body and bodily materials that are so inherently personal and, in some cases, quiet in nature can manifest in social settings and provoke new, booming awarenesses.

While sitting in the gallery of Iceberg Projects and with Xandra Ibarra’s Menstrual Rorschach Interpretation whispering quietly in the background, Sampada and I spoke about her current work, reading the colonized body and Western Enlightenment through a feminist lens, and what it means to be in and not of the institutions of academia.

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits:

[1 +2] Portraits of Sampada Aranke, photographed by Kristie Kahns.
[3+4] Installation view of “Feel Me” at Iceberg Projects. Photos courtesy of the gallery.

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
June 2019

“…completely new yet familiar territory.” These words echoed after I revisited the accompanying publication for Relations, a performance that brought together pioneering artists Bebe Miller, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Ralph Lemon on the MCA Stage in November 2018. In her introduction for the publication, curator Tara Aisha Willis offers a series of questions and propositions that draw from the historically-anchored yet generative tone set by Miller, Houston-Jones, and Lemon, while also honoring the shapeshifting and indefinable nature of Black dance and movement practices. 

When considered in full, Willis, too, is the “new yet familiar” manifested in many ways. As a returning Chicago native whose dance career has developed largely outside of the city, there’s a fresh familiarity to her perspective. The new is also visible through her role as a curator of performance and when considering the artists and projects she is bringing to the MCA Stage. Then, an additional familiarity is present within her work due to an awareness of historical context, a body of knowledge that is harnessed, in part, through her work as a PhD candidate in the Performance Studies program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. While paying close attention to the foundations that many before her helped build, she is pushing these experimental legacies forward and charting new territory by demonstrating what it looks like to simultaneously embody and move fluidly between her roles as an artist, scholar, writer, administrator, and curator of dance. 

During our conversation, Willis discusses significant moments on the path that led her back to Chicago in order to take a position as Associate Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the deep and sometimes untethered relationship with dance, performance, and movement that carried her along the way.

Read the full interview here…

Photo Credits, top to bottom:
[1-2] Portraits of Tara Aisha Willis at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago by Kristie Kahns.

[3-4] Performance view, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ralph Lemon, and Bebe Miller: Relations, MCA Chicago November 2-3, 2018 Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

[5] Performance view, Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls: What Remains, MCA Chicago; December 5-9, 2018; Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

An essay for Common Field’s 2019 Field Perspectives published on Sixty Inches From Center
January 2019

Excerpt:
When I entered this work over a decade ago, I did so with the recognition that curators, administrators, arts writers, and the organizations and institutions they work for wouldn’t have a purpose if not for the artists whose work they build their careers and missions around. It’s such a simple point and seems like common sense (as do many of the cases I’m making), but it all bears repeating.

Rather than preach to the choir of artists who navigate this unsustainable lifestyle on a regular basis, I’d much rather speak to those who design opportunities and urge them to create more equitable scenarios across all of their offerings to artists.

As an independent curator, freelance writer, co-founder of a small nonprofit, and a cultural worker who has concurrently held full-time, part-time and contract positions at city arts agencies, galleries at major universities, arts alliances, a foundation, and other kinds of arts organizations, I’ve experienced, facilitated, and been the creator of a range of artist opportunities. I’ve been screwed over, learned from my own mistakes, and sacrificed my own compensation for the sake of the artists I’ve worked with. Then, while channeling my experiences as a freelance and contract worker, I’ve sat at the brainstorming tables in large, well-resourced institutions and fought for larger stipends, separate material budgets, and additional funds that consider the hidden costs that reduce the payments artists are initially given. From these experiences, I’ve come up with a handful of things that institutional opportunity-makers should add to their list of considerations when working with artists.

Read the full essay here…

[1] Image of two bills of 500 pesos, one above the other and on a black surface with some hidden text between the bills. The top bill shows a portrait of artist Diego Rivera and the one below it shows a portrait of artist Frida Kahlo. Photo taken January 2016 by Tempestt Hazel.

[2] Common Field’s Field Perspectives image.

An essay for the Art AIDS America Chicago catalog by Alphawood Foundation.

Excerpt:
Although we don’t always think of it this way, history is a mighty and ferocious tool. When done well, it has the ability to conjure up forces and galvanize coalitions of people who perhaps rarely or never had the privilege of fully knowing their lineage or their cultural, social, or geographic inheritance. An understanding and exertion of history can open our world in ways that were previously unimaginable and trigger a chain reaction that makes visible a hidden piece of human ancestry that we can no longer imagine living without access to. On the contrary, when it falls into neglectful, self-serving hands, the exploitation of history has the ability to cause the unraveling and erasure of entire cultures and truths.

But sometimes erasure is seemingly unintentional and history becomes a victim of circumstance. When history isn’t met with the resources and tools that allow for proper preservation--whether it be physical structures or the human history books who hold and transfer these knowledges--it runs the risk of being lost. Even in all of its ferociousness, history is one of the most vulnerable and susceptible tools we have. Elders pass away everyday. Entire archival and family collections end up destroyed because of deterioration over time or are discarded. The keepers and caretakers of history make editorial and aesthetic decisions that prioritize some histories over others, writing out stories that will continue to remain buried just below the surface. Then, the vulnerabilities of history are further intensified when you overlay them with the realities of the most abandoned, fettered, and violently targeted populations of our planet. It makes clear the urgency of care that needs to be given and the fact that the weight of what’s at stake is real.

When western art conventions are employed as the primary tool for storytelling, entire populations of people are left out automatically. Art is a parameter that is inherently broken because it comes with its own history of discrimination and calculated amnesia that mimics other historical narratives but comes with problems distinctly its own.

Order the catalogue here….

An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
September 2018

Excerpt:
Andres L. Hernandez and Amanda Williams are architects and longtime friends. They met over twenty years ago at the beginning of their careers while studying architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Since then, they have continued to stick by one another—turning to the other when they need a like-mind to think through new ideas, sharing information, and occasionally lamenting the dismal numbers of those like them in their field and its knock-on effects. And, every so often, there are magic moments when they’re able to collaborate.

In 2017 it was announced that they would both be joining the exhibition design team at the Obama Presidential Center, a crew led by Ralph Appelbaum Associates that includes Civic Projects LLC, Normal, and fellow artist and designer Norman Teague.

When that was announced they were almost a year into the joint commission A Way, Away (Listen While I Say) at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, a project that questions and extends the life cycle of architectural structures and urban landscapes by stretching the perceived confines of a vacant lot and challenging the idea that demolition is the end of a building’s story.

Then, seven short months later, it was announced that they would represent the United States at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, which resulted in Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See A Line) (2018), a collaborative, inhabitable sculpture they created with artist and master braider Shani Crowe.

Thrival Geographies is one of many projects and collaborations that make one thing clear–Hernandez and Williams aren’t just architects. They are also transdisciplinary artists working across sculpture, sound, movement, painting, and installation and whose work is informed, too, by their roles as educators at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Hernandez) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (Williams). These are some of the reasons why it’s impossible to read their work solely through the lens of architecture.

Their sensibilities as artists bring their work to the edge of seemingly uncharted territory — especially when placed within an architecture context — which has its benefits and drawbacks. The overwhelmingly positive response to their projects, particularly Thrival Geographies, fuels the rising trajectory they’ve been on for quite a while. However, with new territory comes the possibility that the authors of history within these professional fields, art and architecture, haven’t found the language to describe or engage makers like them quite yet, which leaves the work lingering in a suspended state, waiting to be locked down by a versatile and adept scholar, curator, or other wordsmith who can hold their own within and speak wholly to the concepts that they are constructing. But the silver lining of it all — and a benefit from the perspective of the curators and art historians of the world — is that there is plenty of room to maneuver and experiment within these new waters.

Read the full interview here…

[1] The 2018 U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Bienniale. The image shows an exterior view of the U.S. Pavilion at dusk with light glowing from the windows of the gallery spaces. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
[2] Detail of Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) by Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez, in collaboration with Shani Crowe at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion. The image shows a further detail of the outer structure, focusing on two large braids falling along the exterior. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
[3] Andres, Amanda, and Shani in a studio at Bridgeport Art Center, 2018. The image shows Andres sitting on the ground, Amanda and Shani sitting in chairs near him and Amanda is speaking as the other two listen. Photo by Ally Almore.
[4] Three separate close-up portraits of Shani Crowe, Andres L. Hernandez, and Amanda Williams in a studio at Bridgeport Art Center. The three of them are standing and looking directly into the camera. Photo by Ally Almore.

A series of interviews on Sixty Inches From Center for Art Design Chicago
September 2018

Excerpt:
”…as an homage to this celebratory moment for Richard Hunt and his teachers, I asked a handful of my teachers–Sherry Hazel (my mother), Dawoud Bey, Barbara Koenen, Cecil McDonald Jr., Amy M. Mooney Ph.D., Madeline Murphy Rabb, and Angelique Power–to share their memories of the people who have been a transformative presence in their lives as they have been in mine. And, also, the lessons learned from those people which they continue to carry through their daily lives. And as a tribute to one of my beloved teachers, Sabina Ott, I’ve also included a reflection on the influence and impact she has had on me and countless others over the years.”

Read the full essay here…

[1] An installation view of the exhibition Sculpting A Chicago Artist: Richard Hunt and His Teachers Nellie Barr and Egon Weiner. The image shows a wall where a black and white photograph of Richard Hunt standing outside on a pile of building scraps and materials. In front of the photograph are several dark sculptures on high and low pedestals. Photo courtesy of Koehnline Museum of Art.

An essay for Exhibitions on the Cusp (Tremaine Foundation)
February 2018

Excerpt:
Art is an arena that grapples with but wholly embraces the role of the body in how we understand visual culture, art history, and theory through performance art, lens-based work and other practices. With that in mind, it’s hard to turn a blind eye to fashion as not just an extension of that bodywork, but as an important piece of the puzzle that raises a fresh set of questions. Fashion makes us talk formally about construction, space, functionality, and the architecture of the body. But then, too, it begs us to discuss the body beyond the surface of the formal qualities by bringing in the realities of protection/safety, sexual expression, identity expression, dis/ability, touch, pleasure, pain and an autonomy over how much (or how little) we want to reveal—the somatic, emotional, spiritual, and psychological parts of ourselves, and not just the physical. As Frédéric Bonnet states in the short essay Desire—at Skin-Depth when talking about how conceptual understandings of fashion began to change in the late 1980s, “fashion saw a new liberation of the skin—the last barrier before the flesh—as an epicenter of sensations and a receptacle of desire. At last, fashion was coming closer to sensitivity1.”

And with a move like that, it’s impossible to keep it clean, clear, and confined.

But still, clearly expressing the distinction between the two worlds was an important premise on which Skin Tight was able to stand, and a way to explain the motivations of each featured designer. This contrast between art and fashion—which both have their own variety of historical evolutions—made the separate paths of influence and examples of disruption, expansion, and necessary experimentation much easier to discern. Within the context of the exhibition, these lines allow us to better understand the social and environmental influences of the designers in the show—for instance, how the activist spirit of the duo BOUDICCA showed up in their collections starting in 1998 and what made that different from things we’ve seen in recent fashion trends.

But here we are, fourteen years after Skin Tight was first exhibited within the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. We are now in a position where we can further consider how the conversation has changed while also reflecting on ways that the premise of Skin Tight can be expanded upon.

Read the full essay here…

Photo Credit (top to bottom):
[1] “Skin Tight: The Sensibility of the Flesh,” 2004, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo courtesy Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.
[2] Jae Jarrell examining her work at the Brooklyn Museum. By Heathart [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.
[3] Sky Cubacub, Rebirth Garments. Photo by Ireashia Monét for Sixty Inches From Center.
[4] Rational Dress Society. Photo by Lara Kastner.

An essay for Exhibitions on the Cusp (Tremaine Foundation)
February 2018

Excerpt:
"As museum spaces attempt to reach more black, brown, queer, and youth populations, they must contend with the challenge that museum workers and curators themselves are not always the experts. They must seek out knowledge and learn to be mindful of the nuances that come with displaying struggle and the hardships of people who don’t look like them, and find strategies for shaking off the problematic, Western, white lens through which these histories are often framed. They must ask themselves, “who is this for?” and be willing to confront the honest answer. They must examine whether or not they are willing to disrupt how they operate. And they must start with a sweeping internal overhaul rather than easier, external, outward-facing optics—like exhibition-making.

On the flip side, I also have questions for the justice workers, cultural workers, and artists—myself included—who decide to place themselves and their work in conventional exhibition spaces. Are we seeking the acceptance of the museum and/or the opportunity, resources, and clout that come with placing our work within their contexts? What is lost or gained in that process and how is power negotiated, shared, or demanded by the people who are asked to come in and help them remain relevant? What factors help us to determine which places hold us well and acknowledge our value and worth, and which ones are actually vampiric and should be avoided at all costs? And do we understand exactly what’s at stake when we make moves toward these spaces?

Creating a significant cultural shift in art exhibition and institutional practices, as in justice work, requires endurance. It doesn’t happen overnight. It is a lifelong effort and an ongoing conversation. There’s no perfect answer. In fact, the answer might be that it all needs to be completely dismantled—physically and conceptually.

While I stepped into this field because I trust and believe in art’s potential to be a tool for justice and I believe in artists’ ability to be articulators of struggle, restoration, and survival, complementing the work of freedom fighters, the people, and movements, I also recognize and constantly interrogate the limitations of traditional art spaces and their inability to hold and do right by the power, self-definition, and burn-it-all-down radical spirit of the people they’ve largely excluded."

Read the full essay here...


Photo Credit (top to bottom):
[1] Cauleen Smith, “Conduct your Blooming,” Black Love Procession in Chicago, July 2015. Photo by Kahlil Nommo.
[2] Heather Smith at Alphawood Gallery during the Protest Banner Lending Library Workshop. Photo courtesy of the Field Foundation.
[3] Entrance to “Black Radical Women, 1965-85,” California African American Museum, 2017. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.
[4] “Do Not Resist?” at Hairpin Arts Center, February 2018. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.
[5] “Our Duty to Fight” at Gallery 400, June 2016. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.

An essay for Sixty Inches From Center.
December 2017

Excerpt:
“We’re the only ones we can rely on to liberate ourselves…and articulate the specifics of our lives…”
– Kimberlé Crenshaw at the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Annual Conference: 40 Years after Combahee: Feminist Scholars and Activists Engage the Movement for Black Lives

“…my overall concern is with black feminist creativity in general and with the manner in which, in fields like popular music, opera, and modeling, media visibility may be allowed to substitute for black female economic and political power, whereas in more politically articulate fields such as film, theatre, and TV news commentary, black feminist creativity is routinely gagged and ‘disappeared.’”
– Michele Wallace, Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity

When I read the words of these women I’m reminded that I’m not alone in my thinking. The uneasiness or invisibility that I feel for myself and other Black women in different situations isn’t unwarranted or an emotional overreaction. It’s not my imagination playing tricks on me. Within cultural, political, and social spaces, the lack of care, commitment, and consideration for Women of Color (WoC) is often palpable, taking the form of a sticky web of presence and absence that drapes heavily over situations and conversations constantly.

When I argue for WoC to take the lead in the arts, people are compelled to start naming names. They ask, “What about [insert name of a highly visible WoC in the arts here]?” Yes, there are some–several, in fact. When listed (as I start to do later in this piece), the presence of WoC feels significant and undeniable. But as Michele Wallace argues in her essay, visibility does not equal power and it does not protect us from disappearing into the buried alcoves of history. Depending on whose hands are dealing the cards, these examples of visibility can be superficial and sometimes lack the depth to make them feel like a convincing example of our experiences and existence, or hold any sign of authenticity.

Visibility is significant, no doubt, but it’s basic. It’s the low hanging fruit and the easiest thing to do. Sometimes it’s simply tokenism for the sake of ‘good’ optics and diversity initiatives running wild and unchallenged. For example, when choosing an image for a website homepage, newsletter, or institutional Instagram feed, make sure it’s got some PoC in there as evidence that you’re inclusive. Every once in a while, put some extra marketing dollars behind that event inviting important PoC and WoC voices to the mic and the stage (and be sure to snap some photos of that beautiful Black and Brown audience that shows up for them). This is shaky evidence–too shaky to be taken as true care and inclusion.

If that’s the least that can be done, then what is the most–or at least more? More looks like the people behind cultural organizations and platforms being WoC. It can also look like WoC pushing for, making space in, and claiming leading positions at these organizations. It looks like having access to resources and opportunities to build our own organizations, institutions, and platforms from the ground up, if that’s what some WoC desire. The most looks like me no longer needing to write these words and make this case because the examples are clear and abundant, constantly growing and not discounted.

Read the full essay here...

Photo Credits, top to bottom:
[1] Photo is takin inside of the original location of DuSable Museum on South Michigan Avenue, circa 1961. Photo courtesy of the Chicago Defender.

[2] Installation view of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2017. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.

[3] Installation view of We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965 – 1985 at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 2017. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.

[4] Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs, Faces A La Picasso, linoleum block print, circa 1968.

A Reflection for Artslant.
September 2017

Excerpt:
"This more recent example is one of many that demonstrates how musicians have been claiming space and strolling into the physical and intellectual spaces of Visual Art, usually through their everyday relationships with and proximity to visual artists, filmmakers, and performance artists. And artists sometimes do the same—lending their ideas and aesthetics to musicians through the visuals that surround the sound. Even the language becomes shared between them. We can describe a visual artist’s process by waxing poetic around how they create rhythm through improvisation, how the colors they use cause a visual vibration, or the ways in which artists sample and remix from the great wells of history and visual culture. We can talk about a song as a complex collage with gritty texture, and then interrogate the alignment with or divergence from current or classic approaches to composition.

In many ways, fluid maneuvering around distinguishing lines contradicts how we’re taught to define, sort, and categorize ideas for the sake of communication and education. Once we begin to move outside of the classroom or other spaces that are in the business of organizing thought and information, it becomes clear that the world doesn’t operate so neatly. The dividing lines and boxes are permeable and they dissolve, suggesting that they may have always been unstable or an illusion. As the lines disappear we are asked to unlearn our self-imposed limitations and confines.

Solange is of this tribe—one that demands and promotes an expanded understanding of art’s definitions and refuses to follow any rules that interrupt the frequency she’s operating on. Although she may not have planned it this way, art has taken permanent residence in her practice; the cover of the album True was created with artist Mickalene Thomas, her hair has been styled by photographer and masterful hair braider Shani Crowe, and the videos that she and her husband directed were infused with the cinematographic eye of Arthur Jafa. The past year has taken her from the stages of Pitchfork, Afropunk, Essence Festival, Panorama, Saturday Night Live, the Kennedy Center, and Radio City Music Hall to the galleries and auditoria of the Pérez Art Museum, Menil Collection, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, and soon the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which was founded by artist Donald Judd."

Read the complete essay here...

Photo Credits, top to bottom:
Stage view, MCA Talk: Solange Knowles, MCA Chicago, September 13, 2017, Photo: Alice Feldt, © MCA Chicago.

All other photos from Solange performances and videos, courtesy of the artist's Instagram.

Foreword for the book In The Company of Black by Cecil McDonald, Jr.
Published by Candor Arts
April 2017

About the book:
In the Company of Black is a book of photographs by multi-disciplinary artist Cecil McDonald Jr. For the past seven years, McDonald has developed a body of work focused on what he describes as “extraordinarily ordinary” people: educators, artists, administrators, business owners, teachers, and students. “I’m bringing together images of Black people who represent everyday folks.” Complemented with an essay by Tempestt Hazel and poems by avery r. young, McDonald’s In the Company of Black addresses and responds to the vast inaccuracies of Black humanity depicted within American society.

“When it comes to Black people, America is fascinated with extreme poles: either showing victims of violence, pain, and poverty (Black misery) or famous athletes and entertainers, and icons of popular culture (Black exceptionalism). This false dichotomy denies Black people the individuality and full spectrum of humanity that is so readily offered to the white population in this country. The photographs that I’ve been making ask the question: where are the people who make up the space in between? Here they are, they are important, they must be seen!” — Cecil McDonald, Jr. on In the Company of Black. 

-
Published by Candor Arts in a handmade artist book edition of 100 copies, In the Company of Black will be released on April 28th at Filter Photo; a larger softcover edition is scheduled to release in the Fall of 2017. Books will be available for purchase and signing. The artist will share a few words on the project and there will be a reading of some texts from the book.

Learn more about the book at Candor Arts' website...


Photo Credit (top to bottom):
[1-3] All photos courtesy of Candor Arts.

Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
March 2017

In the final minutes of Viral Representation: On AIDS and Art, a day-long conference held at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center that presented research on artistic responses to AIDS as part of the exhibition Art AIDS America, I found the nerve to raise my hand and pose a question to the roundtable that included all twelve speakers who presented or spoke that day.

“Where are the women?” 

Tangled up with many other unnecessary words, the question slipped out of my mouth clumsily as words do when they’ve been stuck in my throat for a while. There was a heavy silence that followed as the speakers, only two of which were women, looked at one another to see who would offer a response.

Joshua Chambers-Letson, an assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern, cut the silence by refining my question—“…women of color.”

Where are the women of color? Or the women? Or the people of color? Or youth? And others largely omitted from these conversations and this research? Where is the information buried? These questions—which have been raised by others such as Kia Labeija and Sur Rodney (Sur)— have been on my mind since I first went to see the show at the Alphawood Foundation’s newly adapted exhibition space in Lincoln Park. These questions seemed like obvious ones. They were the loudest silences in the building during my walkthrough of the exhibition with curator Jonathan Katz back in December. While not completely absent from the exhibition, the low presence of these voices within this art-world context doesn’t quite reflect the scale of the nation-wide impact that AIDS was having (and continues to have) on these communities within the US during the 80s and 90s. If one were to rely solely on what the gallery walls tell us, a viewer might be led to believe that the artistic response to AIDS began as a mostly white American undertaking that revolved around gay men.

That narrative begins to expand once you start to dig into the other parts of the exhibition. The catalog, packed with essays, additional points of reference, and beautiful plates for each work, offers more information for those who are curious, though it only goes so far as to include works from the original exhibition and not the artists who were added to customize the show based on each new location as it traveled starting with a preview version in Los Angeles to full versions in Tacoma, Atlanta, and the Bronx before settling in Chicago. (Chicago’s iteration had the largest addition to the exhibition roster with several relevant local artists incorporated into the checklist.)  

Then, Chicago showed up as only this city can through an ambitious lineup of programspresented by Alphawood Foundation, QUEER, ILL + OKAY, and a long list of partners in many corners of the city. The exhibition was pulled further into a present-day context through performances, talks, symposia, screenings, AIDS education events, tours, readings, and sister exhibitions—all of which helped to address the blindspots and blanks left exposed in the voids between works on gallery walls. It was in the programming where women, people of color, the Ls, the Bs, the Ts, the Qs and many others who are obscured from view were given microphones. 

Although we are often told to consider programming, publications, and the objects on display all as separate components that together make the whole, the truth is that these parts aren’t circulated and moved forward in history in the same way. Some parts stick while others evaporate or become fragments, remembered in the minds of individuals, photos on a hard drive, a buried Facebook post, or a video in the abyss of Youtube. These events reminded the curator in me of the inherent limitations of static exhibitions and why programming is so important. Then, it reminded the historian in me of how often programming is ephemeral and doesn’t reach as wide an audience as an exhibition does while a catalog, often created leading up to an exhibition, fails to document the important dialogues and art generated once artists, writers, scholars, advocates, and the public encounter it. All parts of an exhibition are not treated equally by history and our collective memory. Chances are the work that comes after Art AIDS America will be built primarily from what was easily commodified—in this case, the catalog and maybe websites and reviews, along with some printed programs and other collateral. But this work is far too important to let its elements slip away.

It took me over three months to write about this because I needed to watch how it all unfolded. Also, for me, the conversation around Art AIDS America being presented in Chicago wasn’t simply about creating press around this opening moment. Nor was it about the giant and generous gesture of the Alphawood Foundation to make space for this exhibition when other major institutions decided not to. More than anything, Art AIDS America provides an historical backdrop to the complexities of these three A’s—art, AIDS, and our country. It is a physical, mental, cultural, and extremely personal site for shaking out the nuances. As silly as it would be to claim that exhibition-making is easy, the truth is that doing the research, collecting the work, developing didactic materials, and mounting it in a space is the easy part of this project when compared to the work that comes next, which is to address the big questions that remain: Why are people of color largely absent from the mainstream understanding of the early impact of AIDS in the United States, and even more so in conversations about the artwork that was made in its immediate wake? With so many people of color, particularly African Americans, affected by HIV and AIDS making up such a small piece of the most widely circulated foundational narratives, what is the curator’s role in derailing those fractured histories? How do we measure due diligence in scholarship and curatorial practice? Then, what conversations need to be had about the privilege and the freedom to fight and struggle in public versus having to pick and choose your battles because deciding between fighting for the survival of a wider community impacted by AIDS and fighting for your own individual survival as someone who is othered within the othered (positive, queer, woman, of color) can all be considered a matter of life and death?

I say this not as a negative critique of Art AIDS America, but more as a critique of the fragmenting nature of exhibition-making, and as a call to those building on this history. I challenge those of us who work to fill in the gaps and pull these stories forward to see this as a point of departure into further and fuller research. I challenge us to find additional ways to capture what happened here, seek out the voices that are missing, and thoughtfully pursue a variety of ways to make this information easily accessible five, ten, or fifty years from now. 

I have to say it again. Creating an historic exhibition that is anchored in the early years of AIDS and tracks its cultural and social impact in the US is by no means an easy task. The work presented and uncovered is nothing short of admirable and incredible. But the shaky responses to the question I posed at the Logan Center makes clear that there is still quite a bit of work to be done. And here we are in the final week of the show. It is from this position of looking back while standing at what could be seen as a new starting line that I share my conversation with curator Jonathan Katz that happened in December.

Read the interview with Jonathan Katz here...

Photo Credit (top to bottom):
[1] Installation view. (Foreground) Trojan Boxes by Adam Rolston; (Background, left to right)Joey Terrill, Kia Labeija, Frank Moore, and Dean Sameshima. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.
[2] Installation View. (Left) Barbara Kruger, Jack Pierson. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.
[3] (Right) Derek Jackson, Perfect Kiss, slideshow, 2007. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.
[4] Installation view. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.
[5] Installation view. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.
[6] Ann P. Meredith, Until That Last Breath! San Francisco, Ca, 1987. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.
[7] (Left) Tino Rodriguez’s Eternal Lovers, Oil on wood, 2010. (Right) Whitfield Lovell. Photo by Sixty Inches From Center.

An Interview for Sixty Inches From Center.
March 2017

My first experience with AJ McClenon's work happens to be my most memorable. It wasn't as part of an exhibition or screening, but while quietly seated in public solitude, headphones on and computer screen inches from my face. The first time I watched the collage video Things to do like breathing it set the tone for how I now prefer to view the videos and audio tracks--by bringing it in close, almost inescapable, sensory proximity. At that all-consuming distance, partially immersed but still aware of my surroundings, is where the core of the work presents itself--at least to me. It was there where my own anxieties found something familiar.

McClenon's layering of sound and image, and use of repetition creates a hypnotic agitation that is a signature of the work, particularly the time-based pieces. The form of the videos thickly coats the content, providing them a lens that works to help us as viewers to understand how things like the struggle with mental health, a shifting sense of belonging, and the jurisdiction we have over our bodies and lives impact how our stories can be told. It's artistry that requires us to look and listen closely for not only the obvious or more covert narratives, but also how they're being delivered. It can be easy to miss the message by reading it all as purely personal. Sound, image, and autobiography aren't the only things being stratified. Scratch the surface and underneath you'll find archives of McClenon that expand beyond a singular voice and into something that bridges a distinct east coast/third coast understanding and a historically-informed, contemporarily-centered but deeply personal exploration of the nuances of Blackness across spectrums of age, gender, wellness, and other ways of being.

As McClenon continues to build a presence across the city, we took some time to discuss how the current practice has evolved from focusing primarily on sculpture and painting to video and sound, the ways in which health can impact life and art-making, the ongoing efforts to collapse hierarchies, and the variety of narratives and storytelling techniques stretched across these different bodies of work.

Read the interview with AJ here...

Photo Credits, top to bottom:
Portrait of AJ McClenon at Beauty Breaks. Photo by Ally Almore.
Still from Busing, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
Stills from Traveling, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.
Beauty Breaks, Session 1 at F4F. Photo by Ally Almore.

Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
December 2016

Of the countless exhibitions, essays, programs, and projects that are dotted throughout Chicago’s art history and the world because of Hamza Walker, there’s one that sits at the forefront of my mind. The show was Suicide Narcissus, an exhibition he organized at The Renaissance Society in 2013. I visited the exhibition multiple times for the sole purpose of seeing the piece Leviathan Edge (2009), a 30-foot long suspended skeleton of a sperm whale by Lucy Skaer, which was enclosed by a series of walls, making it mostly hidden in plain sight within the gallery space. Though it was largely closed off, there were small gaps in the walls, occasionally revealing series of vertebrae or the massive skull, bringing me closer to a whale than I had ever been. There was something I enjoyed about my access, visual and physical, being restricted, not getting the satisfaction of being able to see everything easily, and having to fill in the blanks of what I was seeing. Looking back, I realize that I was attracted to that piece because of my appreciation for mystery and the charge given by the artist to complete the fragments for myself if I chose to.

I bring this up because Leviathan Edge serves as a kind of metaphor for how Walker has operated during his thirty-two year chapter in Chicago–a steady voice with a hint of stealth, whose presence whispers at times and becomes emphatic and booming at others. Since the ’80s, he has worked behind the scenes and alongside many to support Gallery 37,  Urban Gateways, Randolph Street Gallery, and the art collections at Chicago Public Libraries. He has taught classes, visited many artist studios, voiced his thoughts on panels, and sat in on endless crits, nurturing a generation of artists, writers, and curators. He has built his jazz chops with Southend Music Works and under the moniker Mandrake for WHPK, and given shape through words and exhibition-making to the Renaissance Society and the artists it shows from around the globe. He made the original 53rd Street Hyde Park Art Center into a semi-secret indoor haven for skaters before the skate parks well-known today started being built around the city. Then, marked with the scratches and tracks of Chicago skaters, it has been exported to Germany and San Francisco, with a final landing place in Los Angeles. The list is long and endless.

I say this all to say that we think we know the full mark that Walker has made over the last three decades, but the truth is we may never get a full view. Even as a transplant, it’s impossible to truly see roots that have reached the depths that his have. For now, we will hold and appreciate the slices, vertebrae, jawbones, and fragments that make up this chapter and lead into the work that he will go on to do in the next.

Nevertheless, I wanted to collect as many fragments as I could before he made his exit to Los Angeles as the new Director of LAXART. So, at a small coffee shop in Pilsen, Walker spun a web of memories, many sparked by gold-marked tangents, leading to the cast of characters, spaces, and experiences that he’s collected since landing in Chicago from the east coast in 1984.

Read the interview with Hamza here...

Photo Credit:
Portrait of Hamza, Installation view of Several Silences, Leviathan Edge in Suicide Narcissus, and Installation view of Spec. All images courtesy of the Renaissance Society.

Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
December 2016
 

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a lover of libraries, archives, and printed matter more devoted than Marc Fischer. He’s known for a long practice of discovering, creating, and distributing books and ephemera, making him a regular at libraries and post offices throughout the city. It’s practices like Fischer’s, which pays close attention to how, why, and what libraries, museums and archives collect, that have served as inspiration for the work that we at Sixty do, as well as our focus and approach. In 2007, he founded Public Collectors, a project that uses publishing and exhibitions to give glimpses into people’s personal collections–ones that usually go unseen. Prior to that, he and Brett Bloom founded Temporary Services, a project started in 1998 which also holds under its umbrella Half Letter Press, whose publications I’ve come across in Los Angeles, New York, London, and many bookstores in between. 

But his commitment to printed matter in a time of digital dominance isn’t exactly what makes these projects get the notice that they have over the years. It’s the strength of the content and Fischer’s ability to shine a light on things we often don’t pay much attention to, never knew existed, or often take for granted.   

This is certainly the case with Public Collectors’ latest publications, Library Excavations, which is an ongoing series of booklets created from content found on the shelves, in the stacks, or in the archives of the Chicago Public Libraries. The first four forefront topics that lie just below the surface of things that confront and concern us everyday–incarceration, the music industry, racial biases and profiling–but presented in a way that minimizes a heavy-handed or swayed contextualization, allowing for the content to speak, pretty loudly, for itself. Even with these four publications that alone have so much to say, Fischer took some time to explain his process for selecting the content of each book and why he finds such value in libraries and repositories.

Read the full interview with Marc here...

Photo Credit (top to bottom):
[1-4] All images from the Library Excavations series of publications by Marc Fischer. Courtesy of Half Letter Press.

An Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
November 2016

At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell
& Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself
with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the
strawberry fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer, 
& the sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio
nightsky. I am a weapon.

–Krista Franklin, from Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2

I describe Krista Franklin as a poet and an artist only for the sake of offering an entry point into her work. It’s true–she is a fierce wordsmith and maker who moves naturally, yet distinctly, between words and paper. Those of you who know her work may be equally as familiar with the rhythm of her prose as you are with the beguiling tactility of her collages and handmade papers. You may know it at first sight or sound. But the initial encounter one may have with her work is simply an enchantment, a quick and captivating tool that forces a pause. Once you stop to stand still and sit between the lines or underneath the layers, there are pasts, presents, futures, and other worlds being agitated and conjured. With fluency, Franklin makes visible places and intelligences that are accessed by anointed scribes who have taken on the responsibility of translating the cultural and social detritus of humans, androids, and ancestors into a language that we can begin to understand.

Franklin is a storyteller and a vessel for well-known histories, things unwritten, and realities that have yet to be, which is why defining her as only an artist or a poet is inaccurate. Her work demands that those titles be interchangeable with historian, educator, caretaker, life scholar, ethnographer, anthropologist, and receiver. 

Her flow between roles is mimicked in the work that she makes. In poems and on paper, Franklin reveals herself as a master sampler who builds bridges between a vast range of elements and references within a profound sea of influences and experiences. Each work comes with its own laundry list of liner notes and citations. To describe her work I could as easily cite the poetry of Fred Moten and Amiri Baraka, writings of Ishmael Reed, or the worlds of Octavia Butler as I could the collages of Hannah Höch and Romare Bearden, or the chameleon-like characteristics of Grace Jones or Prince Rogers Nelson. I could use the lyrics of Bad Brains, the album covers of Parliament/Funkadelic, the music videos of Outkast, or the echoing sound of voices that linger above 47th street in Chicago on any given day to bring it back into a place of Black sonic culture. Then, within the same breath, I could speak about the recurring lyrical and visual motifs that show reverence for the grace of Black women, youth, and street scholars while channeling the supernaturalness of veves, afro picks, cowry shells, and global Black memorabilia.

Then there’s how she lays plain the underbelly of these mondes, expressing truths often thought but rarely said, as messy and monstrous as they may be. She does not discriminate between the celebrated and condemned strata of the landscapes she traverses. Unflinchingly, she approaches them with an unconditional love and discerning eye whereas most people would be left stunned, shook, and fleeting.

By sharing her origin story, Franklin offers traces, not a blueprint. She is one of those artists whose style and technique is often imitated but never can it be duplicated because her radial disposition is organically constructed through insatiable curiosity, instinct, and learning through living, making her process and approach distinctly her own. The Krista Franklin blueprint can and will never be written down. Instead, she will leave you with shapeshifting breadcrumbs so mighty and nourishing that you’ll feel full while eventually realizing what you actually got were hors d’oeuvres. In our conversation she offers some insight into the seeds of her life’s work by starting from the beginning.

Read the interview with Krista here...

Photo Credit (top to bottom):
[1] Portrait of Krista Franklin taken during a visit with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Teen Lab, November 2016. Photo by RJ Eldridge.
[2] Ophelia, photograph and mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist.
[3] …voyage whose chartings are unlove (Detail), altered book and mixed media in aquarium, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist

A Response for Sixty Inches From Center
September 2016

After reading the book and attending the release of the 28-edition hardcover version, I wrote a response to Moonwork, a book of poetry by Bay Area writer A-lan Holt. Read it here...

Purchase the book from Candor Arts here. 

 

All photos courtesy of Candor Arts.  

An Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
September 2016

Viktor lé. Givens‘ work, which is primarily performance, sound, and installation, exists in a continuum of making that is inhabited by writers and storytellers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. The vocabulary used to categorize their style has trouble fully holding them, so what’s required is a new category. One that resembles a recipe kept alive not with precise measurement, but through muscle memory, making, and an awareness of hidden ingredients. Their work is called fiction and speculative, but I resist the limits of those labels. Describing it only as imagination and conjecture doesn’t recognize the knowledge, truth, and undefinable substance that is embedded within it.

In one of my favorite Toni Morrison speeches, The Site of Memory, she pulls the words of Zora Neale Hurston who said, “Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” In other words, there is truth and knowledge to be found in the marrow of our bones. It is a crucial part of how we retrieve and construct our lost and fragmented stories, traditions, and legacies. It is not fiction in the way you may understand it.

Morrison goes on to say:

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu – the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records […] – is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what […] distinguishes my fiction from autobiographical strategies and which also embraces certain autobiographical strategies. It’s a kind of literary archeology: On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork, you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the […] remains – in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth.

Though the form is different, I believe that lé. Givens’ work is a continuation and adaptation of the methods used by storytellers like Hurston and Morrison who find truth in their bodies and use the whispers of archeological sites (mental and physical) to piece together Black pasts. His most recent exhibition at Rootwork Gallery is an example of this. The In Between Space: Black Magic. Black Manhood. Black Matter is the final chapter of lé. Givens’ series of archeological installations dedicated to Black men with supernatural abilities–the “sight seeing, dream catching, street prophesying alchemists.” It opened at Rootwork Gallery under the curatorial eye of the gallery’s founder, Tracie Hall.

Just as the show was being installed, lé. Givens and I discussed his Texas roots, the often overlooked magic of Black men, and why deep personal excavation became such an important part of his practice.

Read the interview with Viktor here...




Photo Credit:
Portrait of Viktor lé. Givens in front of Rootwork Gallery prior to the opening of The In Between Space, September 9, 2016. Photo by Janelle Vaughn Dowell.

An Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
September 2016

Dawoud Bey’s presence in Chicago makes it easy to forget that he was not born and raised here. Although Chicago has been his home since 1998, his signature approach to portraiture traces back to his days growing up in New York, living with his family in Queens and refining his eye on the streets of Harlem. This is the place where his work always comes back to. In everything from his Polaroid Portraits to the Class Pictures and The Birmingham Project, there is evidence of the same subject sensitivity that was first brought to his Harlem, USA photographs, which were taken between 1975 and 1978, and exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979.

For Harlem Redux at Stephen Daiter Gallery, Bey has coupled Harlem, USA with a new series of photographs that capture recent physical and demographic shifts of the neighborhood. To make the nuances and tensions of change visible, he takes a step back from making people the dominant focus and instead forefronts the landscape. Blurred streets, hard dividing lines, and a recurring motif of temporary, grid-like fences, tarps, scaffolding and other common signifiers of gentrification serve as symbols of erasure, looming displacement, and the detachment that makes it all possible.

The simple act of dovetailing these photographs for Harlem Redux provokes a set of questions that are harder to access through each series separately. Apart, they speak volumes–primarily to each of their respective moments in time. Harlem, USA freezes an expansive, manifold richness of Black life during a complex golden era. Then, the newer photos transport us to the present moment and make visible the changes and traces that have ebbed and flowed in the area for years, and have now reached an unsettling peak. Together, these two bodies of work bookend a forty-year transformation and rouse curiosity about the time in between. To Chicagoans, these photos may feel like a familiar and painful paradigm.

Just before Harlem Redux opened earlier this September, I had an exchange with Bey about his formative years in New York, what made him relocate to Chicago, and his take on the remaking of Harlem. 

Read the interview with Dawoud Bey...

Photo Credits (top to bottom):
West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, archival pigment print, 2016. © Dawoud Bey. 

Former Renaissance Ballroom Site, archival pigment print, 2015. © Dawoud Bey.

At a Tent Revival Meeting, Gelatin silver print, from the series “Harlem, USA,” 1977. © Dawoud Bey.

A Girl at Number 100, Gelatin silver print, from the series “Harlem, USA,” 1975. © Dawoud Bey.

A Man on the Corner of Lenox Avenue & 125th Street, Gelatin silver print, from the series “Harlem, USA,” c. 1976. © Dawoud Bey.

All photos courtesy of the artist.

An Interview for Sixty Inches From Center
July 2016

For those who aren’t convinced of the complexities that abstraction can hold, I offer the work of Jovencio de la Paz to persuade you. Once you get past the boldness of his large fabric or felted surfaces and move through the elegance of overlapping shapes lingering in space, you’ll find something symbolic, celestial, ancestral, and deeply political. The way he approaches form and materials evidences a careful consideration of the heavy repercussions of colonialism and trade, art history, and contemporary life. He takes these anchors and combines them with a personal yet widely relevant symbology that embraces the range of his cultural inheritance. He employs all of it and then some from his perspective as an immigrant to the United States from Singapore, as an artist harnessing the tools of queer aesthetics, and as a maker using materials and processes that have countless generations of makers behind them. The result is a synthesis and translation of a highly personal and global visual language.

After receiving his MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, de la Paz moved to Chicago and continued to investigate fibers and performance through an active studio practice and co-founding the Craft Mystery Cult, a collaborative that seeks to, in short, “remind each body of its own agency”. Somewhat recently, he relocated from Chicago to Eugene, Oregon–a move that has only continued to help him define and refine his craft. He now teaches in and heads the fibers program in the Department of Art at the University of Oregon. Most recently, his show Skin Broken by Prisms closed as the final exhibition for Carl & Sloan Contemporary in Portland.

Just before the opening of his exhibition, we had a conversation about movement and migration, the role of artists and abstraction in revolution, and the poetics embedded in batik’s lost wax process.


All photos courtesy of the artists, except the last screen shot of our Skype conversation.

An Interview for ArtSlant.
July 2016

In April 2019 ArtSlant ceased operations as a publication. Below is an excerpt of the introduction, and you can read the text-only version of the interview here…

I spoke with artist Maria Gaspar about her upcoming project RADIOACTIVE: Stories from Beyond the Wall on the Fourth of July. We talked about mass incarceration, a central subject of Gaspar’s work, on a day that asks people in the US to reflect on freedom. Days after Gaspar shared her thoughts on art and disruption, names like Alton Sterling and Philando Castile started to break open the stitches of old and new wounds and raise questions about freedom. I couldn’t ignore the timing. 

In The Face of Human Rights, Carlos Fuentes writes, “perhaps those who lack freedom understand its value better than anyone. Those who take it for granted are those who risk losing it. And those who fight for it must be aware of the dangers implicit in the struggle to obtain it.”

History and the unrest of the present make painfully clear the ways in which police violence, the unjustifiable revoking of freedom, and mass incarceration are inextricably linked. If you need proof, you can look to the efforts in Chicago of organizations like Project NIA, Enlace Chicago, BYP100, Assata’s Daughters, Stop Chicago, We Charge Genocide, and others who continually work at their intersections. If it’s not calling out to you loud enough from the streets and digital space, you can find the evidence in exhibitions like our duty to fight at Gallery 400. Organized by Black Lives Matter Chicago and many of its allies, the show featured a collection of ephemera, documentation, artistic responses, and family collaborations around these concerns. It was all contextualized in a powerful statement and a list of harrowing statistics that outline many of the symptoms of each cause. 

With these injustices and the attention they need—and even with many of the aforementioned organizations counting artists among their members—the question of what art can do comes up time and time again. But how does amplifying these issues happen now through artistic moves?

I landed on an essay in journalist and music critic Jeff Chang’s book Who We Be: The Colorization of America. In it he talks about how art, music, and writing have the ability to help us understand one another’s pain and joy. He uses the words of musician Vijay Iyer to consider how sound in particular can melt away the visual obstacles that keep some people from experiencing empathy for others, specifically those who look different or have experiences different than their own. Sound, he suggests, can dissolve the visual biases of color (or gender) that prevent people from connecting or achieving understanding on a basic human level.

Alongside these ideas and efforts is the work of Maria Gaspar and The 96 Acres Project. 96 Acres is a project she started in 2012 that uses a range of artistic and pedagogical approaches to talk about mass incarceration at Cook County Jail (the site of which is 96 acres) and how it impacts Black and Brown communities in Chicago. Along with artists, educators, and stakeholders within the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the jail, Gaspar is growing an archive of audio testimonials, artistic projects, and curricula that tell a different story about mass incarceration. 

Recently, the Rauschenberg Foundation named Gaspar one of the 2016 Artist as Activist Fellows in Racial Justice + Mass Incarceration. Through this fellowship, she and the team will work with people inside the jail to produce a new series of projects that build on the work that has already happened outside of and on its walls.

With RADIOACTIVE: Stories from Beyond the Wall, a series of audio recordings and projections on the jail that Gaspar will produce during her fellowship, she is continuing to work with those most impacted by Cook County Jail. This includes thinking about what sound, the disembodied voice, and other art forms can uniquely communicate and what disruptions they can cause. Gaspar is thinking about these things at a time when recording is seen as a radical act, a necessary attempt to protect ourselves, an effort to maintain power over our stories, and a tool for exposing the blindspots of American freedom.

On Independence Day, I spoke to Gaspar about RADIOACTIVE, how it relates to her overall practice, and the work that has happened through 96 Acres.

Read the interview with Maria here...

All photos courtesy of the artist.

A Letter to Kerry James Marshall
April 2016

Artslant asked me to write a review about Mastry, the survey of work by Kerry James Marshall at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. This essay was written as part of To You, From Me, an ongoing series of epistolary writings to artists and curators who have significantly impacted my thinking over the years.

Read the letter-essay here...

In April 2019 Artslant ceased operations as a publication. You can read the PDF of the essay here… 

All photos courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Installation photos: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

A letter-writing collaboration with Good Magazine about my complicated love of Chicago.

My love of Chicago is nothing like yours. 

It doesn’t come from knowledge and a perspective of someone who was born and raised here. I come from Peoria, Illinois, which has a love story of its own. This love, the one I speak of, comes from someone who chooses to now call this place home. This place, with all of its beauty and its faults. Embracing all of its messes that I willingly inherit. I love this city with a kind of love that is unexpected, constantly nurtured, frequently tested, and feverishly cultivated. One that embraces the complicated, unapologetic, stubborn, and enduring tangle of it. 

My love for this place challenges me to look back while pushing forward. It’s deeply rooted in the nostalgic, pliable, and ephemeral, yet it works tirelessly to acknowledge and find footing in the present and permanent. This love finds purpose in struggle—standing firm on my beliefs, testing comfort zones, and embracing a perspective that evolves through the daily lessons my unconventional, hybrid family teaches me.

I cling to the things I love and try to recognize and see beyond the things I don’t, in hopes that I won’t make a thoughtless decision or say something I can never take back. 
 

I’ll admit that I’ve thought about leaving many times, usually in the wake of...

Read the entire love letter to Chicago...

An interview with Faheem Majeed for Sixty Inches From Center. A version of this was also published in the book Support Networks: Chicago Social Practice History Series.

If you were to dig into the corners of your closets, mine the contents of sealed boxes and locate the residual objects of your existence then pull them all together, what story would it tell about you? This was the process of artist Faheem Majeed as he began to create his most recent installation Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden for the Hairy Blob exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center. Instead of simply using his own history as source material for his work, Faheem combined his experience as the former Executive Director of the South Side Community Art Center and artifacts created, used and set aside throughout its rich seventy year history to re-imagine its past, more clearly understand its present and visualize its future.  Before we witness the activation of  his piece through invitational performances in the coming weeks, I asked Faheem to tell us more about his relationship with the South Side Community Art Center, where the title of the installation stems from and the path that took him from being a traditional sculptor to an artist who could more effectively articulate his thoughts by not settling for a single medium.  

Read the interview...

An interview with Jan Tichy for Sixty Inches From Center

“What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what’s in storage tells you even more…” - Fred Wilson at The Sackler Conference for Art Education, 2010

When anyone brings up the idea of an artist occupying a museum and mining the collection my thoughts almost instantly go to artist Fred Wilson. His 1992 project Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society is often cited as a catalyst for the turn of a critical eye to cultural institutions and how they relate ethically to their staff, their collections and the public they seek to educate or connect with. Now, twenty years later, the invitation to artists from institutions has far from expired. Some, like Wilson, have used it as a chance to offer a form of institutional critique. Others, like Maria Pinto, use it as a chance to place their work within completely new and unexpected contexts. Somewhere between those two intentions lies the work of Jan Tichy. His recent collection-mining exhibition 1979:1 – 2012:21: Jan Tichy Works with the MoCP Collection calls into question the true meaning of accessibility for a museum collection while at the same time using his own work to push the boundaries of authorship. Blurring the lines between his work and that of contemporary masters, Tichy has reimagined the MoCP’s collection from the position of artist, curator and viewer simultaneously. Just before the exhibition closed this past December, Tichy took some time to look back on the year he has spent becoming familiar with the collection and how the exhibition came together in the end. 

Photo Credit:
Installation view of East Gallery. Jan Tichy, Installation no. 15 (Siskind), 2012. 3-channel HD video installation, 11min. (Image courtesy of the artist.)
Larry Williams, Rural Saturday Night, 1973. Gelatin silver print (Left, 1979:1). Zacharias Abubeker, Obelisk, 2011. Screenprint. (Right, 2012:21). Image courtesy of the artist.
Installation view of West Gallery, collection pairings. (Image courtesy of the artist.)
 

An interview with Marcelo Grosman for Sixty Inches From Center

It is not everyday that we are confronted by work that stops us in our tracks, works at our psyche and leaves us wanting more. When I first laid eyes on the work of Argentinian-born artist Marcelo Grosman, I couldn’t help but wonder who the artist was and who were the people in these spellbinding and unsettling images. Guilty!, the most recent show of Grosman’s work at The Mission Projects, brought together Chicago-specific works that used the open image source provided by the Illinois Department of Corrections Inmate Database to create a show that was not only visually arresting, but act as a window into the disturbing truths that weave themselves into our local and global systems of control. During his visit to Chicago in late September for Expo Chicago, I got the chance to speak with Marcelo and The Mission Projects director, Natalia Ferreyra, about his constantly evolving relationship with photography, process and purity in portraiture, and his desire to reinsert the aura back into the duplicated image.

Read the full interview with Marcelo Grosman...


Photo credit: Images courtesy of The Mission Projects.

Written for the monograph of EJ Hill in April 2013

This writing is part of "To You, From Me," an ongoing, lifelong series of epistolary writings to artists and curators who have made a significant impact on my life and my understanding of art. These writings are an ongoing, personal interpretation of particular artists' and curators' work that weaves together fragments of memories, the receiver's public and online presences, and contextualizes them within different art histories and practices, including my own. These letters are meant for an audience of one—the artist they are written to. All other readers are just eavesdroppers on the conversation.

This series was started in 2013 and recently selected for further development through a residency at the Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL) and the Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada).

EJ,

I remember the day you left Chicago for Los Angeles. It was the last day of July and I was at my job. I stepped out of the office to call you before you headed off to the airport. I sat on the north staircase between the first and second floors, phone pressed to ear, trying not to sound too sad when I asked you how you were doing. I didn’t want you to leave. It was hard to see you go, but harder for you, I imagine, since you were closing one chapter and opening another.  There, on the stairs of the Chicago Cultural Center, I said a bittersweet goodbye and prepared myself for an EJ-less Chicago.

I never expected your leaving to have the effect it did. While distance from your physical presence was hard, this space brought me to a deeper understanding of the work that you do. Over the past two years, so much of your work has been relayed to me in fragments—photos, writings, conversations.  These pieces and parts have been my sole frame of reference.  This has forced me to take a new look at my intellectual and emotional reactions to your work, as well as how my relationship with you influences and enhances my interpretations.  That has been eye-opening, to say the least.

Attempting to write about you and the work that you make while trying to maintain some level of objectivity is laughable. To not pull from every moment that has shaped my experience of your work would be a disservice to you, your lifework and our friendship. So, I’m pulling from it all-- your Tumblr feeds, our 4am phone calls, and our conversations over food and drinks during brief cross-country visits. I’m pulling from my version of what has been said in our hugs and shared moments of silence. And what I hope to create is an honest homage to some of your pieces and how they have impacted my thoughts. This is my attempt to articulate what has felt like an extension of my own struggle over the past two years through the generous work that you do.

Your lifework is about the love. Exposing the flaws. Refusal. Acceptance. Learning through doing. Learning through mistakes. The hideous beauty of failure. Our collective alienation. The things hidden in plain view. The things we refuse to talk about. What words can’t express. The things we ignore. The things we acknowledge. The absurdity of our situation. The therapy we find in one another. The therapy we muster from what we do and how the same thing that offers solace and clarity simultaneously generates anxiety and confusion for ourselves and for others. It is about the spaces and conversations we choose, refuse and unwillingly contribute to. It is about not speaking in definites. It is about uncertainty. It is about testing the quality and credibility of accepted sources of knowledge. It is about confidence in ourselves and our experiences as powerful sources of knowledge.

It is about survival. Resistance.

It is not about being polite, pretty or packaged for convenient consumption.

It's about learning through living.

 

I. Power // Position, Dynamic, Shift // Unveiling the Thing
Better Than Flowers, November 2011

“...interestingly enough, in a very rare and beautiful moment, the power dynamics that have existed for hundreds of years between artists and the wealthy had been reversed. The performance lasted only a few hours, but during those few hours, from a seemingly degraded position, I silently dictated an entire conversation.”

- Better Than Flowers, October 20, 2011.
 

Just weeks after starting at UCLA, you participated in that gala--you know the one. I can’t begin to describe what came to mind when I imagined you, head poked through a hole in a dinner table as you slowly and silently rotated your body and your gaze from person to person.  Even more arresting than my mental image of that scene was Better Than Flowers, a reflection on your experience of the event. I clearly remember the controversial conversations that people were having around Marina Abramovic’s vision for the fundraiser and the discussions we had before and following it all. I remember the argument that art is work, and artists should be given the same amount of courtesy and respect that any other worker gets on the job. Artists should demand it.

In hindsight it is clear that your decision to participate, while conflicted, conjured up some unsettling and lasting questions. This becomes apparent in your writing and in several of the works that followed.  Rather than seeing yourself as a tool to be used by the powerful few, you saw this as an opportunity to come face to face with a facet of the art world that is so often a bit mysterious to the ones who make the work off of which the whole system is built. You saw it as a way to confront it. To understand it by looking it squarely in the eyes. A jolting and admirable quiet victory. I was floored by the courage it took to not only face the thing, but to put yourself in a tense situation with no way of knowing the outcome.

Arguably, you taking a place as the centerpiece of this odd, congratulatory table of wealthy museum patrons led to a shift in your understanding of the artist’s position in this field’s social framework, and how one’s individual actions participate in a much larger conversation.  You were digging deeper into something universally relevant, filtered through the lens of personal experience--a quality that is threaded within your work and also a key to realizing its impact. While some were rightfully arguing against participation in the name of self-preservation and a call for change, you came face to face with the ones pulling the strings, in order to make your mind up for yourself.

I see this as one of several experiences that led you down the path of artist as activist. Though when used recklessly that term can cause me to cringe, it is true. You claimed and owned a sense of agency that reached far outside of yourself and wasn’t always explicitly present before. You got closer to equipping yourself with the critical questions that would ultimately pave the way for unforgettable and challenging performances. Your part in this piece was playing into a much larger question.  One that brings underlying issues to the table--the value of cultural production, what role the art/artist plays in power dynamics, and the mental, emotional and physical strain put on any artist willing to challenge these topics. You were uncovering the thing.


II. Personal Peace/Piece
Drawn, December 2011 UCLA Graduate Open Studios

“My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up … share what’s unspeakable … offer unsolicited criticism … defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse, that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public.” — Krzysztof Wodiczko; Oct. 18, 2011

In the kind of work that we do I’m afraid there may be no endgame. It is likely that we will always be working towards reconciliation through struggle. Shedding some blood and getting bruised.  And it is your struggle that shapes you.

For me, Drawn was the first in several performances that stepped into the territory of activism in an atypical form by being extremely confrontational and by challenging the very nature of the thing--the thing being the system that we as art makers have chosen to participate in, the thing that holds us but doesn’t quite understand us, the thing that we love and hate, the thing we invest our whole selves in. It’s romantic suicide. It squirms at our request for flexibility in thinking and form. To change, it will require blood.

I remember in December 2011 when UCLA’s Graduate Open Studio event happened and you made Drawn. I saw the photos. Dressed in a white button-up shirt, black slacks and black tie (which has become somewhat signature attire for your performances), you dragged your tongue over every surface of the exhibition space within the graduate studio building, around and between the work of your fellow MFA candidates. You know--you were there.

I’ve always seen open studio events like this one as being directly linked to the pressure to produce something and show evidence of work done while in the program up to that point. To show progress. This is easy for artists whose practice and process directly results in the production of an object. Something obvious. Easily consumed. Evidence.

But what to make of an artist like you whose practice and process result in things that are often intangible or disjointed when separated from the artist? And how do these traditional (maybe outdated) but seemingly necessary situations accommodate work like yours? They often don’t. Your studio extends far beyond the walls of UCLA. And though your work has often been seen within the contexts of formal or alternative exhibition spaces, the full extent of your work cannot be captured by these familiar cultural settings. Seeing the progression of images documenting Drawn, and the faint trail of blood that started to follow you around the space, I couldn’t help but wonder why we bleed for this thing that has no intention of bleeding for us, but would rather package, export and benefit from our struggles, and manipulatively coax us into conforming?

But I don’t think that you were bleeding for the thing. You were bleeding as a way to understand and question the thing--for yourself and others like you.

I remember talking to you within days following the performance.  Faculty at UCLA required that you repaint the walls of the exhibition space, erasing the kind of evidence that the event demanded in the first place.

The structure of the academic institutional setting and the etiquette it demands is sometimes in direct conflict with the morale of the artists who enter and emerge from it. This conflict can make work like yours seem idealistic and futile if taken at face value. If that’s where someone stops, they are missing the point. The strength in works like Drawn lie only in part by experiencing the act itself--the memories and feelings that those who attended the event left with. The mix of unsettled emotions or empathy that comes with watching you bleed for them, for the thing. The strength is largely in the residual (the blood) and the aftermath (masking the mess). The seeds that are planted. The thoughts that are nurtured. A sense of unrest. The work that comes next.

III. Resistance
Frameworks, at the UCLA MFA 2013 Preview Exhibition; November 1, 2012

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” - Martha Graham, October 29, 2012

Your work is a consistent reminder that it is not about the object. It is about the experience. The empty frames that were exhibited in Frameworks reiterated that as they stood in as the outer layer of the performance, just scratching the surface of it all. And again, if that is where someone stops, they are missing the point. For me they were all at once a cunning peace offering after Drawn, a signifier of potential and a nod to the shortcomings of documenting performance.

So, then why even do that--poke and placate after Drawn? I think “Why?” may be the shortest and hardest question that has ever existed. Sometimes I cannot stand it. How do you even begin to answer it? “Why?”--“Because it needs to be done.” “Why?”--“Because I have no other choice.” “Why?”—“Because there is no other way.” “Why?”--“Because I want to.” “Why?”--“Because I’m curious.”

I imagine you got that question from several people as you positioned yourself and braced your body at the door of the gallery for the performance component of Frameworks.  You were not making yourself into the gatekeeper but becoming the gate. It’s interesting, the idea of a gatekeeper and the permission-grantor. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me that it is usually presented as a necessity. Someone standing at the gate, peeking out from inside of a locked door at everyone outside. A mediator of quality, the best, the essential. A keeper of an understood and established order of things.

My biggest qualm with art history as it was taught to me largely stemmed from this idea. Who are these people who decide what is written and what goes in the books, curriculum and archives? What did it take for them to gain that position? And who gave them that authority? Why can’t we decide for ourselves and posterity? How does one stand in the middle of an established system and question it in a way that really complicates complacency and doesn’t simply seem trivial and hopeless?

Maybe it takes stepping up to the gate and challenging the keeper’s authority--whether they realize what is happening in a way that sparks reevaluation or affirmation. Or maybe it takes realizing that something just needs to be done. Let’s not float through what always was, as if that is how it always has to be, as if that is all it can be. Occasionally it takes us saying, “Fuck it,” and risking it all. Your time at UCLA has come with a thread of stern talking-tos and resistance. But time and time again you’ve taken the risk. Some might ask who in their right mind would put this education, this promising trajectory, all of this in jeopardy? But on the contrary, I ask how any of us are expected to maintain a right mind when stifling this life force that Martha Graham is speaking of. The energy that whether acted upon or oppressed puts you at risk.

Just one year prior to this you were looking on from a completely different place and position. To the world outside of you, you were the spectacle at that gala. But from your eyes, you were in a position of power within that dynamic.  You were commanding the conversation. This time, though you made yourself the line between two ‘sides’ rather than on either side of it, the watchers became the watched for as long as time permitted.  And then no one was safe from agitation. I often go back to what Geoff Tuck wrote in Notes On Looking’s lengthy account of that night:

“...I talked myself closer and closer to and inexorably smack into the recognition that what really bugged me about EJ’s performance might be, probably is, that after 7:00 he made me feel like one of the people on the inside. My commonality with them was as one inconvenienced. I became crabby about my loss of agency. I begin to understand really that the focus of EJ’s performance was the border itself, and not the people on either side of it; therefore continuing his performance was necessary, his actions did not judge the border, they drew attention to it.”

And that is such a beautiful place to be. That’s atypical activism--one that forces both sides to relate to one another in a completely unexpected way. You found a way to not take sides in that critical moment. Dissolving the ‘us’ and ‘them’ to become the ‘we’ or flipping the ‘us’ to be the ‘them’ and using a very basic understanding of illusionary personal power as the tool.

IV. Survival + Silence.
Tell; April 1 - May 3, 2013

“You can’t touch silence. You can’t see it. But what does a representation of silence look like? What is the container of silence? I’m thinking of silence almost as a potential energy. The moment right before sound. Something just waiting to happen. The calm before the storm… Just like the filling of the balloon. Potential. But at a certain point, the balloon will only hold so much. Its walls, its boundaries will give way and violently release the very thing that it was made to contain. How tragic.” - EJ Hill; April 5, 2013

Each individual’s relationship to silence is different. In the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about your relationship to it as I’ve been around to witness it, and more importantly your relationship to nonverbal communication. Months ago I became much more conscious of how you use it as a tool to reveal what is at the core of how people relate to one another when face to face. In Tell, silence becomes a test of our ability to connect and a meditation on the limits and holes embedded in spoken language. I remember during a dinner at The Perch we said our hellos, you made a joke, I laughed, you responded to my strange random thoughts, we laughed with others--and you never spoke a word. It took me quite a bit of time to realize that we were having a fulfilling conversation through gestures, facial expressions, prolonged eye contact, posture and shifting stances. It takes a certain kind of knowing in order to do that successfully. It also presents a challenge. You became the spark that silently and astutely forced everyone you ‘spoke’ with to reevaluate their communication and ‘listening’ skills--their ability to say something and not receive the instant gratification of a comparable response through spoken language. For some of us it becomes a dance at the edge of our comfort zones.

When you took your vow of silence as your final thesis piece, I was reminded of that night. I started to question spoken and written language and how it is deceivingly associated with clarity between people. Silence can be a vehicle for clarity--personal and interpersonal. Some things are beyond words. Our voices can be misleading. In some ways, relying on our body in the absence of speech in order to express ourselves creates a new kind of understanding that has become somewhat unfamiliar in the world we live in now.   In life nonverbal cues are a piercing way to express ourselves to one another. Not to say that people don’t do it now, but so much of our daily lives are centered around words and images that are detached from our bodies, fragmented, abbreviated, edited and delivered through technology. So much more can be said through a hug than through words, a photograph, drawing, painting, sculpture or any other object.

And that is exactly it. That is why the art that you make should not be called artwork. That word implies something which your work is not--an object standing in as a representation of something else, an object meant to communicate through a filter and at a distance. Lifework, what your work is at this moment, doesn’t allow for distance. It is immersive. It stares us directly in the eye. We can feel its breath on our faces--a breath that has pushed towards us from the other side of a video screen until you fall exhausted on your studio floor. A breath that has provided a disarming breeze for the wine glasses of the wealthy. A breath that has kept you going as you have pulled yourself across fields, streets and gallery floors. A breath that has helped feed oxygen to your muscles as you have wrestled this thing. The breath that fills the balloon.

My deep appreciation of your work doesn’t simply stem from our friendship, a bias that could potentially make my reading of your work dismissible. It comes from a certain indebtedness that I feel to you for getting me closer to clarifying my own muddled understanding and acceptance of this thing through the questions and conversations that arise out of the work that you do.  As you wrote eight days into your vow of silence, “I am not making the work, I am living it.” That is felt.  Your work exudes sincerity and authenticity. I am grateful for who you are and have always been. And what you will continue to be and evolve into being. Whether silent, bruised, bleeding, clinging, questioning, screaming, recharging, or asking for more, I feel fortunate for being able to travel with you.

All quotes were taken from the Tumblr page of EJ Hill on the indicated date, with the exception of Geoff Tuck, whose quote was taken from the interview “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or ‘I only paid for it!’, thoughts on a recent performance”, published on the blog Notes On Looking on November 12, 2012.

Photos by Matt Austin.

An interview for Area Chicago.
April 2014

The exhibit Recess, curated by Tempestt Hazel, was at the South Side Community Art Center(SSCAC) at 3831 S. Michigan Ave., from October 11 through November 9, 2013.  It included the work of contemporary artists as well as artists from the permanent collection of the SSCAC. AREA Chicago had an extended email discussion with Tempestt Hazel about the show. The excerpts included here describe how Tempestt’s response to paintings from the SSCAC permanent collection depicting childhood from earlier generations led to a rethinking of the importance of play and imagination for African-American art today.

The idea for Recess originally sparked from my familiarity with the South Side Community Art Center, its history, and the fact that it has a permanent collection . . . a collection that is housed in and a testament to the cultural history of the neighborhood that has been my only home since I moved to Chicago. For months I combed through every single piece in the collection. Honestly, I reached a bit of a block after a while. The collection can be electrifying, debilitating and poignant all at the same time. Then when you consider the larger social and art historical context that it was created alongside, the gravity of it all becomes pretty intense. I started pulling the pieces I responded the most to, which were often the pieces that I found to be unexpected. The first ones I pulled were “Ghetto Boy” by Ben Bey and “Cat’s Cradle” by Al Price. With both of these paintings there was something unsettling, imaginative and nostalgic about them and that strange mix of feelings stuck with me. There was something that transported me back to my own childhood and imagined childhoods of family, friends and strangers that I could never really know. I think the sense of nostalgia that I felt when looking at pieces was triggered by different relationships I’ve had with histories—my relationship with my parents and the history that I’ve learned through their stories and photographs, also my relationship to history and popular culture that comes by way of the kind of work that I do, primarily with contemporary artists, archives and ephemera. And then my own experience has filled in the gaps. 

That was the seed and the show grew from that point.  When I made it to a dozen or so pieces and started getting an idea of the other artists I wanted to bring in, I started to realize that the show isn’t simply about play and imagination.  It’s also about allowing ourselves the space and permission for that youthful, limitless spirit. When I say ourselves, I don’t just mean people, I also mean institutions—particularly culturally specific spaces. Recess started to become a show that asked us to re-imagine what exhibitions at a Black art center could be. Must they always have the weight of struggle and strife, which is only part of our history? Or can they offer us a way to expand on what tends to be a one-dimensional and diluted view of the Black experience? Play and imagination served as the entry points into a larger conversation about the limitations we put on ourselves as individuals and in the cultural work that we do.

Just to clarify, I don’t think that we should ever forget the struggle or ignore history. Histories and legacies are undeniably important to keep in mind with everything we do as artists, organizers, scholars, etc.  But what I am suggesting is that despite how ubiquitous struggle seems to be in Black communities and history, it is not the only story that we have. Instead of our cultural production always being a very didactic lesson in the struggles and obstacles of a people, we must take the time to tell other stories.

This way we have examples that illustrate our full humanity. Yes, we have struggled. But we have also loved. We have also forgiven. We have also played. We also imagine and fantasize. We daydream. We build. We shape shift. And our institutions should allow space to illustrate those things in addition to the strife we’ve had to overcome. One of my favorite James Baldwin quotes is, “I am what time, circumstance, and history have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all.” I think this perfectly articulates my point.

What I was thinking about when I came up with the title Recess was several different things. First, I wanted this to be an opportunity for an exhibition at a historically Black institution to not be about a limited, often seen view of Blackness. I was hoping it would be a momentary break from that. I wanted it to be a space that offers the things you don’t usually see portrayed when going to an exhibition at a historically African-American space like the South Side Community Art Center. I wanted it to be a bit of relief from that. Also, in all honesty, it was partially a response to the exhibition that was up before Recess. It was incredible, but extremely heavy.

Then, I was thinking about imagination and unlocking that, which calls for a dig into the depths of our mind. The recesses. Expectations or pressures are often what keep me from being able to tap into that. To release limitations. Get weird, get crazy and get strange. Ultimately the title was me thinking to myself, “Let’s have recess so that we can tap into our recesses . . .” It’s kind of silly, but I think I/we all need that from time to time. Re-imagine, rethink and shake off the things that are keeping us from moving forward and experimenting.My intentions with Recess were to say something about how locking ourselves into a one-dimensional understanding of what artists make, where they make it and what it speaks to is oppressive—not only for the artist but also for the viewer. Playfulness, imagination, the ability to daydream—these are activities that promote mental freedom.

Introduction to an article series on Sixty Inches From Center

What is Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism?  The art historian in me finds it exciting to be in the middle of a rapidly advancing movement that is all at once undefined but unmistakable in presence, expanding and unfolding, and setting the tone for new waves in art, music, fashion and cultural production at all levels. The chapters of most art history textbooks I’ve come across have made it clear: our understanding of art and how it fits into a historical context is often shaped by historian-identified movements that are pinpointed late in the game or in hindsight. With these things in mind, I have borrowed the title of cultural critic Mark Dery’s essay to create the Black To The Future Series–a series of interviews that pose questions to several artists who have identified their work as Afrofuturist and/or Afrosurreal with the hopes of allowing the practitioners to be at the center of determining what it is.

Though the philosophies behind these movements have been around for quite some time and at the heart of some circles for nearly a century, Afrofuturism and the Afrosurreal have increasingly gained momentum in the last decade or so.  They seem to have found new nourishment through artists who have stepped forward to add fresh stems and leaves to the roots established by legends such as Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra and countless other foremothers and forefathers. This has resulted in the conceptually abysmal and beautifully rendered work landing on radar of larger institutions, being the subject of exploration by some noted art theorists, and being woven into the fabric of major exhibitions. 

But the truth of any artistic movement and what makes this moment one to be savored, in my opinion, is an age-old one. Movements don’t start on the walls of museums. They begin on the ground with electrifying dialogue in intimate spaces, on the walls of homes, studios and off-the-radar galleries, and during the of off-the-cusp performances by those pushing new limits, exploring new territories and attempting to capture the transcendental at the edge of comprehension.  Chicago is rich in this right now if you know where to look.

Image Credit:
Krista Franklin, "See Line Woman" Collage on book, 2011.
D. Denenge Akpem, Installation for Extreme Studio, June 24 - July 21, 2010. (Image Credit: A+D Gallery.)
Avery R. Young, reconstructed blk; waka flaka flame blk!, letter press sheet music, 2012. (Image courtesy of the artist.)
Krista Franklin, "Do Androids Dream of How People Are Sheep" (Detail), Mixed medium collage on watercolor paper, 2011.
Cauleen Smith, A Star Is A Seed, Installation, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012. (Image Credit: Tempestt Hazel.)
 

Written as the exhibition essay for Nailed, an exhibition of Helen Maurene Cooper's work at the City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower

The subculture of nail art has made its way from the salon and city streets and into trailblazing art spaces through varying degrees of familiarity.  It has become a tool used by artists and curators that offers a way for an art audience outside of this subculture to newly engage in something that was previously a regular practice of certain segments of society.  As it is dropped within this new context, it can become diluted and lose the roots of its traditions. What separates Maurene Cooper’s take on nail art from that of other artists is her attempt to assemble a more holistic view.  Unlike her counterparts who have re-contextualized nail art in a way that caters to flash fad consumers, Cooper reverts our attention back to the root by highlighting the imagination in the craft and the long-term, ever-present patrons of this art.  Through Nailed, Cooper has made a place for this art form to exist within a contemporary art dialogue without excluding the people and culture that are at its foundation.  

In the early iterations of this work, Cooper pushes the limits of photography by approaching the work like a painting or collage.  The imagery is thick and impenetrable. The color vibrates.  The textures are tactile and luscious.  The photos are a playful reference to the density often found in abstract painting or the careful composition of a still life.  The objects in the photographs build upon themselves with a strategic overlapping often used in collage.   What makes them captivating, along with this alluring mix of elements, is the rhythm achieved throughout.  This rhythm leaves our eyes in a state of unrest as they move back and forth from one depth to another, weaving in and out of focus. At this point the pieces don’t simply act as photographs. They become all of these mediums at once, causing us to occasionally forget their true flatness.  The images more or less blur the lines between the nails and the background materials.  We’re inclined to get lost in a sea of unexpected yet familiar objects—objects that could easily be a source of inspiration for the design or become incorporated into the nails themselves.  Just as the artist's photographs mimic the approach used by painters and collage artists, the layering of color, the building of texture and the creation of depth imitate the techniques of nail technicians.  Like her photographs, the nails are a hybrid of materials and styles achieved through elaborate brush strokes, metallic pieces and what is referred to as “junk”—the three dimensional objects built into the design of the nails.

 As we move into the more recent portrait work, Cooper takes a step back from the nails and their world of inspiration.  The people who create or carry these tiny works in their daily lives become the focal point. By doing this, she makes it clear that the creator and the wearer of the nails are an essential part of the dialogue. At this point the work stops being an investigation into and a stretching of the medium.  It now becomes a chance to put a face to the hands. Nevertheless, it is still in conversation with the elasticity of her medium.  Only now it is speaking to portraiture’s ability (or lack of ability) to depict personality or a constructed identity.  

This identity begins to further take shape via a negotiation between Cooper and the women she is photographing. At times you can see much more of Cooper's direction in the composition as the gestures subtly reference poses that have become motifs in portraiture.  On other occasions we can see that it is slightly more loose, collaborative and impulsive.   
 
Rather than simply capturing or facilitating the consumption of nail art by an art audience,  Cooper has chosen to fully immerse herself in the culture by incorporating it into her own identity.  From early on in the series she has worn nails in the style of the ones she photographs.  As a result, her hands have become a key for access into the world she is documenting.  The technicians and regulars at Jazzy Nails, the salon that sets the scene for many of her photos, who once looked at her suspiciously, now see her as family.  It is arguable that the level of comfort with her subjects and the ease of collaboration were a direct result of this display of commitment.  Though the details of Cooper’s personal style decisions aren’t explicitly present in the photographs, it lends itself greatly to her process and becomes apparent in her most magnetic portraits.  The success of the series has come to depend on this simple action.
 
The title Nailed suggests that the nails are at the center of the exhibition.  But as is often the case with portraits, whispered side notes and quiet details begin to compete with the expressions of the subjects.  This conflict can easily be seen as problematic and damaging to the clarity and conciseness of the series.  But instead, consider how Cooper’s shift in approach may be her cunning way of redirecting your thoughts away from the superficial and pulling you closer to what is deeply rooted at the core of this work.  The color, composition and the eyes of her sitters draw you in.  But the questions that the photographs raise are what keep you there.  Who are these women?  How do they relate to one another?  How do they relate to the photographer? What is the intention and motivation behind placing this subject within an art context, which is oftentimes uninviting to the very people it is documenting?  Can nails be indicators of class and social status? And how does that change when the setting they're created in is different?  When does this work become exploitative?  What happens when the fad fades?  By putting aesthetics aside and focusing on Cooper’s conceptual devices we can begin to see how Nailed reaches beyond the realm of abstract photography and portraiture. It serves as a stepping stone into discourse about subcultures being launched into widespread popularity for better or for worse, the politics of access, and how nail art can play a role in acceptance or exclusivity.  
 
Within the context of the recent fad of artists and curators who use nail art as a device for engaging audiences, Nailed offers a refreshingly nuanced and comprehensive look.  By turning a lens onto the alluring and unexpected visual components of this craft as well as the people behind it, Maurene Cooper proves that nail art can be much more than a form of adornment and fashion. In her work, nail art is a way to push the boundaries of photography and call into question the exploitative tendencies in popular culture and art.  It is a magnifying glass on the underpinnings of our social interactions. And for her, it has become a way to establish and connect with a new extended family. Through Cooper, nail art ceases to be singular.  The nails are beautiful and biting.  They are alluring and provocative.  They serve as the springboard for Cooper to investigate her medium, but also bring to light the social discourse that is inextricable from her process.   


Published for the exhibition Nailed: Handwork at City Gallery, a gallery of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events in Chicago, IL.

Photos: 
Dice, streamers and swirls, archival pigment print, 40" x 26", 2011Rocker, archival pigment print. 20" x 24", 2013.

An interview with Matt Austin for The Coat Check at David Weinberg Photography

Forward motion is inevitable. It is something that most of us accept as a part of life. Art-minded individuals tend to be particularly sensitive to this intrinsic vanward impulse, which makes the occasional chance to stop and reflect something to be appreciated. Almost two years after our initial interview about the series Talking With Fear About Dying Tomorrow, Matt Austin and I once again found ourselves in conversation about the photographic fragments of his travels several summers ago. Only this time around a selection of photos have been pulled from the series and placed within the context of  Everyday Always Trying, the inaugural exhibition of The Coat Check at David Weinberg Photography. Revisiting the past isn’t always easy or even desired, but we tried it anyway–perhaps channeling the ideas at the heart of the exhibition. Over drinks on a  warm fall evening, I got the opportunity to ask Matt about the different definitions of impulsive, the value in our attempts and who to call if you’re looking for a good time in Fargo.

Read the interview with Matt Austin...


Photo Credit:
From the series "Talking With Fear About Dying Tomorrow", (Images courtesy of the artist)

An interview with Natalie Krick for The Coat Check at David Weinberg Photography

Natalie Krick‘s photographs are messy. Though visually striking and impeccably executed, her photographs evoke the clashing of belief systems and the disruption of accepted norms, and that often comes with contention and messiness. Her ongoing series Natural Deceptions blends Krick’s identity with that of her mother’s and uses the styling and staging that is often found in the pages of fashion magazines as an apparatus to question femininity, sexuality, age and our own skewed views of beauty.  In light of her upcoming solo show at The Coat Check on July 12th, I sat down for coffee with Krick to discuss the complexity of her work, what it is like to create intimate portraits of her mother and her fascination with the deception at the core of photography.  

Read the interview...



Image Credit:
Mom Laying In The Front Yard, 2012. (Image courtesy of the artist)

Written for G.R. N'namdi Gallery's (Chicago) College Collector Magazine in May 2010
 

Richard J. Powell is an artist-turned-professor of African American and African art at Duke University. Powell is an authority on Black visual culture and has produced several important books, essays, texts, and exhibitions on the subject—many of which have acted as study materials or references to be cited in my own investigation into this genre of art.  His body of work falls in line with a list of today’s significant historians such as David Driskell, Deborah Willis, Kellie Jones, Sharon Patton, Lisa Farrington and so many others that would make the late James A. Porter proud.  It’s safe to say that Powell is at least partially responsible for my own commitment to art history and documentation of artists of color working in all mediums of the visual arts.  Therefore, when Dr. Amy Mooney, a professor at Columbia College Chicago, extended to me the invitation to attend a seminar with Dr. Powell, I jumped at the opportunity. 

Traditionally, during this kind of seminar, attendees are asked to read a selection of essays, articles or chapters from a book that would be discussed later during a scheduled roundtable session.  We were asked to read two articles.  The first was the chapter The Aesthetics of the Fragment from Sappho is Burning, a book by Page duBois, a scholar of Greek, Feminist Theory, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  The second was the chapter Luna Obscura from Powell’s latest book Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. 

When first reading the texts, I couldn’t make a solid connection and entered the seminar curious as to why Dr. Powell chose them.  duBois’s text explored the writings of Sappho, an Ancient Greek poet whose fragmented work is thoroughly studied and analyzed in this chapter.  By doing this, duBois asks us not to make attempts to create a whole out of the parts we are given, but to look more thoughtfully at these fragments and our relationship to them.  She suggests that “rather than focusing on the restoration of lost wholes, or even on the tragic impossibility of the reconstitution, rather than looking exclusively at the real, the past to which we must always have a fleeting and receding relationship, perhaps we should look also at our own desires, our investments in these lost objects, these shattered fragments of the past.”

This effort to construct a whole and pursue a complete narrative is the underlying and exhausting task that comes with the title of art historian—at least that was my understanding going into the seminar.  As duBois pointed out, and Powell strongly agreed, as art historians it can be more productive and even groundbreaking to investigate what we do have as if it is a whole–at least all of the whole we are going to get on this day, at this moment.  As historians and investigators of material culture, past and present, Powell and duBois suggested that we acknowledge and accept that we will never know it all.  We will never have a whole.   I unknowingly let out a mental sigh of relief at this thought.  It was a liberation of sorts for me as a future art historian.  The attempt to construct a whole in relation to any kind of art is an impossibility that weighs heavily.  Powell even spoke of his attempt to find every available bit of information he could possibly find on supermodel Donyale Luna (1946-1979) as he was putting together Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. In this seminar setting, sitting across from such a major figure in Black diasporic art history, I got to hear Powell tell of his “A-ha!” moment when he realized that finding out and writing on every detail about the magnificent and statuesque Donyale Luna was not the most important part of his investigation.  Like duBois expresses in her reading, when writing on Luna, Powell made the decision to “attempt a reading that accepts some very broken lines…as they stand.” In other words, he released himself (and consequently released me) from the daunting task of constructing an illusionary whole view in favor of a an exploration that works with the bits that remain through his research into a profound figure in the history of Black portraiture.

Image Credit:
Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, cover image.
Donyale Luna, Photo by Bddy Brofferio. Paris Vogue, December 1966.