It's a good idea to be alive
Two lessons from elders on the joys of living. Also: cooperative economics, patronage and other shit I'm bringing back from Black elders past
Me at Oak Street Beach. May 2023 - Chicago
PART ONE: Being Alive is a Good Idea
Quite some years ago, while flying, I listened to a conversation between the poet Nikki Giovanni and music writer-turned-podcaster, Toure. Nikki had just survived a stroke and was thrilled to be alive. Towards the end of their conversation, Nikki says what surviving a stroke taught her was that "It's a good idea to be alive."
I discovered Nikki’s words as a sophomore in high school. The school librarian—whose name I am forgetting, there goes my memory—and I struck up a friendship due to my habit of tearing through multiple books within a few days. After picking up a few books of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, she offered me a collection of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, from the beginning of the Black Arts Movement she helped to found to the mid-1990s.
Reading Nikki’s poetry as a fifteen-year-old who’d just begun to harness their words was life-changing. This collection of Nikki’s poetry had a very dank bibliography attached to it which led me to discover--and read--Audre Lorde, sonia sanchez (another founder of the Black Arts Movement), and June Jordan.
The words, the passions and wild desires, the fury, and the righteous rage, the sharpened anger, the luminous love these women had for their individual expression of their Blackness, their woman-ness, their Otherness while collectively reflecting back to the community our own beauty, our own grace, our own radical politic of care and culture work, stunned me.
I spent a third of my life in the bog of suicidal ideation so, I did not think it was a good idea to be alive. I spent a lot of time trying to sort out how to get rid of this bad idea that was living. The only time living felt like a good idea was when I was reading poetry, like Nikki’s poems, or when I was listening to a song on my Discman that activated what little serotonin was left in my gut. The secret self-portraits I made using window light and my little Canon Elph PowerShot felt like a reprieve from the very bad idea of being alive.
After a decade of failed attempts to succumb to the thick muck of liquefied earth, Nikki’s voice was in my headphones: “You know, I think being alive is a really good idea,”
Nikki’s work on Earth thus far has been a blueprint for how I would survive, because her words carried me, I lived long enough to discover living was a good thing.
The way she spoke of revolution, of the love of Black women, of the simplicity of coming back to a place you call home with people who helped you create that home, of the joy of being imperfect and bold, of the sadness of being human—a sadness best shared with other humans, as there was no escaping the fate of our species: sometimes we are sad, sometimes life is too hard, but always, always, we will find others to share the burden of living with and this is how we find joy, which is just another word for collective strength.
This too—sharing the burden—is a very good idea.
PART TWO: Money isn’t the only currency
Morning brunch with J.P. June 2023 - Chicago
A few weekends ago, I attended a workshop called Queering Wealth, facilitated by
and . The workshop coincided with my getting paid for some portrait work I recently photographed for the Chicago Reader *and* my newly developed first-of-the-month PTSD flare-up. Living a little over fourteen months not knowing if I was going to be able to pay my rent on time, and then, being threatened for the first time in my adult life with eviction towards the end of my lease didn’t do much to help my nervous system and my cortisol levels.I was starting to feel the creep of the end capitalism malaise so I put myself down for a nap. Usually, when the malaise hits, I just let it take over—a survival tactic of living under oppressive racial capitalism— and whatever plans I had tend to be overcome by depression sleep. Instead, I felt excited to support a fellow organizer and needed community in this moment.
Having navigated this cycle of financial despairing, I thought of something a good friend told me months prior, upon telling him for the umpteenth time about my financial woes, he responded with, “Money isn’t the only currency, O.”
This marble of truth came to me before the workshop started, and through the ninety minutes we all shared the phrase was made real with every testimony, every confession, and every brave restructuring of what wealth means outside of money. I had a space where my very real and very documented pessimism around the wealth gap isn’t a manner of not thinking "positively enough" or giving in to a "scarcity mindset" but is the result of centuries of stolen labor, systemic theft of land (2008 housing market collapse, the first wave of gentrification, 2; the second wave of gentrification, 2; third wave of gentrification, 2), debt peonage(student loans have single-handedly helped to limit the potential freedom my generational cohort of Black Americans ), and forced labor under threat of kidnapping (the prison system still siphons Black labor for little to nothing or for free)
Knowing this, I don't always have the capacity or the patience to hear morsels of wisdom. Most of the time, I am just trying to keep myself housed and fed and need immediate solutions to maintain my basic material needs.
What I enjoyed most about the Queering Wealth workshop was that, everyone on that call was clear-headed about what they had and didn’t have, and how having and not having has shifted their understanding of what it means to be ‘broke’ or ‘wealthy’ in a society of hoarders.
We all just held each other.
Two of my besties, my kin, my community. Feb 2023 - Los Angeles.
I left the workshop with the recognition that my community—my patrons—had spent the last several months investing in my labor and talent, aiding me in bringing to life the projects, art, and a business, I've been working diligently towards. The grocery money, bill money, and rent money were never given to me out of pity; no one was looking down on me, thinking me incompetent or incapable. Those were gestures of sharing the burden of living together—when I couldn’t carry the burden alone, there was always someone to help share the labor with me, to remind me they were one of many reasons living is a good idea.
I began to see how much luck I had intentionally cultivated over decades to be able to send a text or a voice memo and have whatever immediate need taken care of, just like that. I didn’t learn that from family of origin, I learned that from “strangers”, from people I hadn’t known yet were my family or my soulmates or my siblings.
My wealth has always been in the people.
Sometimes, I catch myself railing on about how we all need to start the damn commune already, not realizing the homies are already doing it! We been living in an autonomous, liberated world. Everything for everyone is already here.
The toughest moments I’ve had here in Chicago (and in my life, generally) have been the moments my brain was overridden by learned capitalist shame and I sought to carry the burden by myself.
If I have my kin—those to whom we “participate intrinsically in each other’s existence”—I have everything necessary to produce wealth: good fortune, or luck; happiness, or the collective sharing of the burden of living; well-being, to progress toward or realize a goal despite or because of circumstance; prosperity, receiving a result that is in one's favor.
Money is far from the only currency we have as a tool to procure that which we need and want because when we decide to participate in the existence of others, they often choose to participate in our existence, as well.
With community, there will always be food in your belly, a warm place to lay your head in the evening, an abundance of grace and understanding, and the feeling of being fully seen and known.
Vince Staples - Little Homies
PART III: Shout out to all my patrons
Official press release for Chicago Artist Coalition 2024-26 Artists in Residence
I recently became a 2024-26 Chicago Artists Coalition Artist in Residence! I was chosen from a pool of over two hundred applicants and then selected out of the group of fifteen to be one of six residents to receive studio space at CAC.
There is a small but mighty group of kin, made up of friends, colleagues, internet-only friends, other artists, mentors, business advisors, co-workers, and comrades who have consistently supported my labor. In gratitude for your investment in me as an artist, and as your kin, I’d like to extend the offer to be among the first to collect the art I will be engaged in making over the next twenty-four months.
Your patronage over the last several months made it possible for me to remain in Chicago to get this incredible residency and to begin to work on the six-month-long pop-up for my bookshop, Speculation Bookshop (pw: queeringwealth for a sneak peak ;), and helped me to keep thinking living is a good idea.
I’ve been interested in the concept of patronage upon discovering Zora Neale Hurston funded her anthropological research and her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, through various (white) patrons who wanted to do something “good and just” with their excessive, stolen wealth.
I also like Fannie Lou Hamer's expansion on the idea of patronage with the cooperative economics model of pig banks in rural Mississippi to keep her community fed while building a path to escape the debt patronage of sharecropping.
Everybody eats. Everything for everybody.
I admit I have neglected to think about who is collecting my art or that my art ought to be collected in the first place. In having patrons, I have more control over who gets access to my works, which means avoiding my art being profitable for others when I pass on.
Photographer Paul Octavius reminded Black artists via his Instagram stories a few weeks ago how often our work makes money for others after we die, often not having made us much money while we are living. I am choosing not to be a part of that phenomenon.
Zora's work was purposefully buried and forgotten, she died alone in a nursing home in Florida. Fannie's contributions, along with her historic run for President, were also purposefully buried and forgotten.
Their lives, too, are a blueprint for me.
Where can I succeed where they were cut short? Let's find out together.
I will be turning thirty-six years old on Saturday. I used to hate birthdays, but these days, it really is a good idea to be alive. I’m grateful for another year here on this spinning marble, with all of you!
Thanks to my patrons: Arem A., Danielle S., Lauren C. Alison C., River C. Laila B., Nader K., Nicky W., Melissa G., Jasmin W., Lee M. Kelly A., Natalie C., Carly R., Dianne L., Andi B., Bryant T., Sophie H., Dwayne S., Steph J., J. P. Bouverat, B. Worthy, P. Pham, Ana B., Peter S., Tina M., and S. Hillman.
Patrons will be entitled to first pick of works I make as a part of my CAC residency, primarily ceramics and prototypes for large scale photographs. Patrons will also have access to their pick of limited edition signed prints from my archive for your collections. The photographs printed for patrons will not be made available to the public at any point. Depending on production capacity, I may make limited pieces specifically for patrons' art collections.
If you, or someone you know, is interested in investing my Chicago Artist Coalition residency as a patron, you can contact me via this form.
If you are a fellow artist reading this newsletter, or someone who has already invested in my work in the past, I ask that instead of a monetary contribution, you send me a tip via the above form about a collector, curator, gallerists, fellow artist, or just about anyone you know who may want to become a patron or should know about my residency.
congrats on the residency! excited to see what creativity will emerge from this process. i recently completed another solar rotation myself (41!) and resonate with your (re)connection to the joy of living. it feels hard won, and i'm reveling in it.