Time Machines at Visual Arts Center of Richmond
with Ayana Zaire Cotton, Curtis Newkirk Jr., Hien Kat Nguyen and Emily Okamoto-Green
The Visual Arts Center of Richmond presents “Time Machines,” an exhibition of work by the VisArts’ Annual Resident Artists for the 2022-2023 year: myself, Curtis Newkirk Jr., Hien Kat Nguyen and Emily Okamoto-Green. Please join us this Friday, March 10th for the opening reception at 1812 West Main Street Richmond, VA 23220, the artist talk begins at 5:30pm. Inside this group exhibition I’ll be showing a new body of work meditating on black feminist abstraction, opacity as a protective programming protocol, non-human being, and the sound of black feminist worlding.
This branching network of inquiry’s root directory is Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. Who reminds us dehumanization is not the end of the world but possibly the beginning of a new one. A new form of being where kinship with cattle presents a way forward and abstraction is a technology for holding and navigating the thrashing uncertainty that is our collective wildness and commitment to a remaining unnamed.
From this root directory I began engaging black feminist scholars who are presenting ancient and speculative modes of being, listening, and looking — engaging sound, photography, and text in new ways. Specifically I looked, listened, and lived to:
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
Listening to Images Tina M. Campt
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by Daphne A. Brooks
Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna Brown
Glitch Feminism: A Manifest by Legacy Russell
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Julie Mehretu
Sam Gilliam
Aretha Franklin
And all the other black feminist references that I’ve inhaled and metabolized, now circulating in my nervous system, lodged in my ear, underneath my fingernails, riding my spine, tangling my tongue, too illegible to cite
Joining the dehumanized a new song emerges, rivers hum, branches play, molecules moan and the cattle chorus can now be heard from the species that invented species. What inventions of departure and refusal might be produced in this new landscape of stone, sound, and screen? Improvisation is intelligence, inside this illegible aliveness, we glance at each other mid-song and realize we might be safe long enough to find our rhythm. This planet does not need human being. Perhaps if we want to continue to continue1 we must become something else entirely.
i am not done yet by Lucille Clifton
as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going
Published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, 1987