Black Feminist Lessons vol. 2

Metallic juicy fruit bitmapping all over the suspended floor.

In studio image of painting in progress — an experimentation with acrylic abstracted ground/earth/world/sound on leather scraps layered with bitmapped images of Black femme being.

1. Make watering lists of self help. Heavy with desire wearing lip glossolalia.

2. If I follow the path of my creative spirit I will always have what I need.

3. No thing can hurt me, no thing can help me.

4. She picked up the room and spun it like a globe in her hands.

5. Beauty is enough. Beauty is enough. Beauty is enough.

6. Uses of the Erotic: Energy for Change*

7. There have been times where I was in such rapture over a Sam Gilliam painting that I was full body bummed, totally and completely melancholy that I couldn’t lay on the bench of the museum and spread wide open so I may touch, play, please myself to the vibrational rhythm of color sensuously dancing to somatic song.

8. An erotic aesthetic, something it seems only abstraction can do. Making itself available to your participation, it opens a portal of consent that is arousing. A painting that invites your curiosity is a painting that invites your pleasure.

9. Why abstract painting? Because it teases. At times withholding, other times it’s busting wide open for you…just for you.

10. What more could you possibly want and how could you possibly not want more?

11. Welcoming your begging, welcoming your restraint. Welcoming your longing.

12. The wait is over.

13. You’ve earned release.

14. Metallic juicy fruit bitmapping all over the suspended floor.

15. It’s okay to co, ummm here.

* The following sentence found in Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power published in Sister Outsider in 1984 is one I have been thinking about a lot lately: “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change”.