Few calls to action have been as powerful in movement building as that of the Combahee River Collective in 1977. The collective, composed of Black feminists who identified as and with the working-class and lesbians, demanded an active commitment “to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression,” seeing as their “particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Decades later, this intersectional politics helped buoy the Movement for Black lives, Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100, and other 21st century campaigns for racial, gender, class, and sexual justice. In celebration of Black History Month, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and the boundless, ongoing relevance of the Combahee River Collective’s message, this event brings together key activists working at the intersections of Black and queer politics in New York City.
Very pleased to announce I'll be an artist in residence in one of the historic Nolan Row houses on Governors Island October 15-31st, 2018. The residency is supported by Works on Water and Underwater New York.
In Residence, I will workshop a performance that will walk the former waterline of the now landfilled Collect Pond, engaging the socio-ecological history at different points of the beach beneath the streets of Lower Manhattan. Historians believe the Collect was a kettle pond with 70 foot deep waters. Once the city’s primary source of freshwater, the Collect was a sacred place for the Lenape, New York’s indigenous people. It was fed by multiple springs which flowed north out of the pond and then west through a salt marsh that has also since been filled. Over two centuries of early New York, enslaved people were buried at the African Burial Ground on the Pond’s south-west shore. Later, many places on site served as stops on the underground railroad. Since its landfill, several carceral structures have been erected on the Collect.
In the WoW governors island studio space, I will create an installation, marking the pond’s former shape, and will develop the performance with visitors who come to visit my process. The walls of the studio will exhibit historical maps of landscape change from my research and photographs of past and current communities who live upon the Collect, providing additional context for the performance.
"The Black Beach and the Sea" at "ReSignifications: The Black Mediterranean" Palermo, Italy.
6/8/18, in Palermo, Italy, I am presenting my paper "The Black Beach and the Sea," at The Black Mediterranean conference. In this paper I expand on my work at Black Portraitures: IV, which drew from the writings of Edouard Glissant to theorize the archipelago in relation to being, blackness, and the climate crises responsible for the proliferation of new diasporas, with particular attention to how Glissant’s caribbean-born thought intersects with work about the black mediterranean. In doing so, I move from land to sea, from thinking with the archipelago to thinking with the aquipelago. Such frameworks challenge the coherence of territorial perspectives and encourage the accountability of a world in nuanced relation and temporal entanglements. I explore how "the Sea" may serve as a cognitive space for this work, as a point and platform of observation - a haunted place, a place of contemplation, connection, and care.
ReSignifications: The Black Mediterranean is the ninth conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body and its relevance to what is happening in the Mediterranean today. We received over 100 proposals that engaged in topics referencing activism, art, the global art market, politics, tourism, sites of memory, dance, music, film, and photography. At the backdrop to the conference will be the exhibition ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings, with the connected Wole Soyinka: Antiquities Across Times and Place. Collateral events of the MANIFESTA European Biennial of Contemporary Art, the exhibits will display the works of an array of international artists and the African art collection of Nigerian Nobel Prize for Literature Wole Soyinka, who will open the conference.
The conference is co-sponsored and held in collaboration with the University of Palermo, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography & Imaging, the City of Palermo, New York University’s LaPietra Dialogues, Institute for African American Affairs, and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Harvard University.
This panel considers islands as both sites and conceptual positions for black futures. The scholars and artists will explore both the material and socio-political conditions that islands may produce: isolation and enclosure, dependencies and linkages, peripheral fugitivities and radical political subjectivities. What do we gain from thinking about blackness as Archipelago? How do the material effects of racial-capitalism manifest in similarly bounded experiences around the globe? And how can thinking about blackness in this way open new lines of inquiry into the study of black social, political, and ecological experience? These presentations learn from the poetry of Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Braithwaite as well as scholarship of Carmen Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Michelle Stephens, who have long theorized the archipelago in relation to being, the continental, and blackness. Ayasha Guerin (NYU, American Studies), Amrit Trewn (NYU, American Studies), Lindiwe Malindi (University of the Witwatersrand, Sociology), Ron Morisson (University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts) and Justin French (Photographer, New York) will model methodologies for attending to images and cartographies of island-spaces that imagine alternative black futures.
This Valentines Day I'll be joining BUFU at Eyebeam to present work about my historical research in black archives and the labor of love that is archiving my own story. Please Join us!
Set on Freedom (SoF) was an artist retreat organized by the Open A.I.R. Artist Service Program at the Queens Museum for women, gender non-conforming, trans, queer artists of color in the summer of 2016. The program was held following violent tragedies like the mass shooting at Pulse and in the midst of several high-profile acts of police brutality that took the lives of Black people. Over the course of the year, a group of us, all queer artists of color from the summit, continued to hold space to discuss how the themes of displacement, dispossession, home, and strength have impacted our everyday experiences and informed our artistic practices. One year following the inaugural SoF retreat, the works presented in this exhibition and accompanying program series, Set on Freedom, were created during the our work to foster an inclusionary and mutually-supportive artistic community. Acting as self-disciplined cultural organizers during this process, we have explored their own representations of race, gender, sexuality, and love, de-centering whiteness and imagining radical systems of progress to uplift themselves as queer artists of color.
Pleased to be debuting new work with Rojas + Rubensteen Projects, a new contemporary art gallery + community hub in Little River, Miami. The gallery is committed to "Providing a platform to discuss global topics with diverse artists and emerging collectors, + creating an accessible space for locals, the gallery will be curated as an evolving organism of installations, painting, photography, sculpture, video + live performances."
My work will be a part of the upcoming exhibition "Swing State."
Swing State is about challenging systems of American power.
BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] III: Reinventions: Strains of Histories and Cultures is the seventh conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body. It offers a forum that gives artists, activists, and scholars from around the world an opportunity to share ideas from historical topics to current research on the 40th anniversary of Soweto. Presenters will engage a range of topics such as Biennales, the Africa Perspective in the Armory Show, the global art market, politics, tourism, sites of memory, Afrofuturism, fashion, dance, music, film, art, and photography.
The conference will be held November 17-19, 2016 in Johannesburg and held in collaboration with the U. S. Department of State, U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, Patrick H. Gaspard, Goodman Gallery, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Harvard University, New York University’s LaPietra Dialogues, Tisch School of the Arts and the Institute of African American Affairs.
Brownstone Bushwick documents the block activities of the largely Afro-Caribbean community who reside in turn of the century brownstone homes on the block of Linden street between Broadway and Bushwick Avenues in Brooklyn, NY. Since the mid 20th century, Bushwick has struggled in adapting to the crippling efforts by real estate speculators, mortgage brokers, banks and insurance companies in redlining their streets, and the “benign neglect” and “planned shrinkage” by local government. One of the strongest engines of community building for the Linden street block has proven to be the planting of trees and other nature, which has signaled, like flares, a call for collaborative neighborhood improvement to battle the onslaught of urban blight that engulfed much of the neighborhood around them. The Linden-Bushwick community garden has grown, since 1974, to host over twenty vegetable garden plots and provide nutritious sustenance for residents of the area. Using photography and oral history collection as methods of inquiry, “Brownstone Bushwick” builds a record of the efforts by resident individuals who have worked with nature to build a neighborhood deemed safe and attractive enough for its newcomers to gentrify. Homeownership, differences in lifestyle aspirations, nationality, race and gender, have all played a role in creating a diverse collection of Linden street histories. What unites these neighbors’ reflections on their time spent on the block, however, is a sense of shared pride, resilience, and empowerment that they have collaboratively built and find today in their dignified urban environment.
The Nation Published a photo-essay I wrote about the Rockaways, Queens NY in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.