"For where two or three are gathered together [in my name], there am I in the midst of them"
On collective Black joy, the spiritual power of gathering, and the Black Artistic Brain Trust (tm)
Excerpted from my journal:
18 September 2023
What an absolute wonder you are! I’ve spent this morning musing over how everything I need is just inside of me, being held gently by all of my selves. I spent this past weekend in a room filled of Black people who were all so brilliant, funny, kind, thoughtful; deep thinkers. I’ve found myself in rooms like this quite a lot as an adult, and being in the room at the 10th anniversary of the Black Artists Retreat aided in me recognizing how often I’m invited into Black gathering spaces and how often I’ve created gathering spaces throughout my career —how the act of gathering is integral to my artistic practice.
I shared a dance floor with Corinne Bailey Rae, whose voice comforted me in my young adult years in Chicago! I listened to Arthur Jafa being his best trickster, transgressive self. Danielle Scruggs, zakkiyyah najeebah o’neal dumas, and Britt Julious were also invited —peers of mine, artists in my cohort I deeply admire and have had the pleasure to work with and alongside. Then, all of the amazing folks I met, whose projects and ambitions filled me with such excitement as I could begin to see my own potentiality as an artist at this juncture in my life and career.
I haven’t yet absorbed all of everything this weekend offered me and it will likely take several years to full metabolize and grasp the depth of connection and experience this gathering will yield but I do know I have a better sense of clarity, a deeper sense of how things take time to come into full being.
Being an artist is really learning to explain what it means to live a life on one’s own terms. I didn’t have my own terms until very recently. That’s a significant place to begin, I think.
I now know the sort of life terms by which I am seeking to live so now the blueprint can be revealed to me. This past weekend at the BAR was absolutely the beginning of the blueprint being revealing itself to me. I can feel a breakthrough nearing and I had to come back home to Chicago to start the necessary process of pruning, weeding, uncovering, making room for the flowers of my life to blossom.
What a wonder you are, teenage self! Your dreams radiate with crystalline clarity and I am honored to assemble the necessary tools to make your vision our lived reality.
What an honor, what a gift.
To be completely candid, this was not the update I was planning on for this month’s newsletter, but isn’t that the way life is? It is fitting, however, as I was planning on sharing a few pages from my upcoming monograph, Advances to Freedom, so it seems the Universe and I were in cahoots all along. I’ll be sharing those spreads and some photographs from the body of work I’m currently chipping away at that is exploring Black memory, queer Black representation, gender performance and the body as archive and the archive as self making/self creation.
From this point forward, this newsletter will become my public sketchbook — I’ll share my artistic process, including my explorations in sculpture and performance, alongside my research practice as I’m working the archives the way one works roots. I’ll be casting spells and working in the imaginary in ways I’ve longed to explore, and I’ll be sharing a good deal of that here, with you all.
I’m really, really, deeply excited about this new chapter — My atoms are vibrating with possibility and my child selves are excited to come out and play!
I’ll, of course, still be writing essays and sharing them here as I work to better integrate all facets of my artistic practice. As always, I am thankful for your presence here and I’m looking forward to this unfolding, this becoming, with each and every one of you present.
I leave you with this spell cast by my BAR retreat cohortian, Corinne Bailey Rae.
Until the next missive,
x O
This was a joy and wonderful to read. I'm enjoying your thoughts and your sketches and can't wait to see what else comes out of that incredible, vibrant, multitude of selves.