Arts.Black

shawné michaelain holloway, Evan Ifekoya, and sidony o’neal come together around shared practices of engaging multi-dimensional space through the prisms of blackness and black queerness, and in the process they (re)imagine, (re)theorize, and (re)construct how modes of sensing, feeling, and being are disciplined by the environments we move through.

shawné michaelain holloway, Evan Ifekoya, and sidony o’neal come together around shared practices of engaging multi-dimensional space through the prisms of blackness and black queerness, and in the process they (re)imagine, (re)theorize, and (re)construct how modes of sensing, feeling, and being are disciplined by the environments we move through.

The following essay is an excerpt of Chloë Bass’ project WAYFINDING, currently on view in St. Nicholas Park (Harlem, New York). This version, produced for ARTS.BLACK, presents sections two and three of a six-part text, and is also available as an audio recording. WAYFINDING draws from several sources: landscape architecture teaching guides, reports on aging and disorientation from the National Institutes of health, and original personal narrative written by the artist.

Steve McQueen’s seven-minute, ironically titled Static (2009) is the first of fourteen works I encounter in his exhibition at the Tate Modern. On the screen hovering before me, in the Museum’s unlit gallery, I observe shaky close-ups of a certain world-renowned copper statue. I often see this statue framed within postcard-like images on Facebook, or counterposed to a moody sunset in the entry credits of a sexy sitcom; or set as the unbelievable object of destruction in a Marvel Universe storyline.

“A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility and women’s strength… Loves the Spirit… Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” Alice Walker, “Womanist,” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) Brown limbs melt together, shaping into the bodies’ grooves and surrounded by the blues of the indigo-dyed background. The faint creases and lines are a system of roots, heads cradled in maroon petals.

At first, the word “reluctantly” in the title of Akosua Aduma Owusu’s film, Reluctantly Queer, caught me off guard. I came upon it while browsing through a list of POV shorts featured on the Public Broadcasting Service. As a fan of Owusu’s work, I decided to play the film almost immediately, shifting only slightly in my chair, the sharp cramping of sciatica stinging me after a year of perpetual sitting.