I am a Southern Black Woman whose words fall out her mouth like molasses. An Artist, Archivist, and a reflection of all the Black Women that have come across my path.
STATEMENT | DOCUMENTATION | INSTALLATION | CURATORIAL | ARCHIVAL | RESIDENCIES | FELLOWSHIPS
INVITATION
Art and archiving dance with each other to sounds of miles, coltrane, dizzy and especially rosetta. Almost inseparable. Calling and responding. Responding and Calling. Calling and Responding. Silence. And finding eachother, again.
Without the archive, there is no art. There is no conversation to continue. There is no homage to pay to ones before, before, before, before and before. Reaching back into your memories in a frail attempt to remember and to survive at the same time, you make something out something. It is here, that you are able to declare, “This is mine, this is me but this is also theirs and this is also them.”
What I have come to know as mine, I learned in the second pew of a southern Methodist Church. I watched my Grandmothers look so good when she put the hat on. I came to know the ritual of going to the altar to pray because my Grandfather knew that to whom much given, much was required. I listened to the hymns and the organs play as the ushers dressed their brown skinned hands in white gloves.
To explain to you how this conversation is on-going experience would be a disservice to my history. This Black Memory is expansive, not governed by time and surely not able to be encapsulated by a mere paragraph. But if I must appease you:
bell hooks said, “The word remember (re-member) evokes the coming together of severed parts, fragments becoming whole.” (1)
M. Jacqui Alexander also said, “Forgetting is so deep that forgetting is itself part of what we have forgotten. What is so unbearable that we even forget that we have forgotten.” (2)
Alice Walker also said, “I believe in listening—to a person, the sea, the wind, the trees, but especially to young black women whose rocky road I am still traveling.”(3)
Toni Morrison also said, “It is no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining ourselves.”(4)
Tina Campt also said, “Photography also provides a means of challenging negative stereotypes and assumptions about Black people in way that create a counter image of who they are, as well as who they might be or become.” (5)
And finally, Toni Cade Bambara asked, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.” (6)
I invite you to wander into the photographic collections of the history of my family. I invite you to meditate to mined sounds and samples from my Grandfather’s cassette and vinyl collection. I invite you to determine who you are beyond this moment of time. I invite you to recollect distant fragments of grief that you have held on to because once the reckoning frightened you.
This invitation has been given across time in many ways. When my Great-Grandmother opened the front door to say, “Come on in, You hungry?” When my Grandmother reaches her hand out to say, “Lock your doors be safe.” When my Mother says, “Do you need anything?” They’re all the same of making their own perspectives of their love tangible. I just so happen to be giving it back to you like so, in art.
1. hooks, bell. Art On My Mind: Visual Politics. p.64 // 2. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and The Sacred. p. 276 // 3. Walker, Alice. In Search Of Our Mothers Gardens. p.272 // 4. Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches and Meditations. p. 170// 5. Campt, Tina. Image Matters: Archive, Photography and The African Diaspora in Europe. p. 5 // 6.Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. p. 3
