“The ‘envisioning justice’ conversation is like – I don’t know, I think people try too hard to think about what it will look like.” Ryan Keesling had just pulled out his phone and was pointing at a photo on Free Write Art and Literacy’s Instagram page as he spoke. It was a flyer for YAS! Fest, the youth art showcase that took place in Millennium Park in September. On the flyer was an image of two DJs who had performed at the festival, Walter and Cortez, a.k.a. DJ 1Solo and DJ Tez. Keesling continued, “That’s not to say that people shouldn’t imagine. But, for me, I have to – I can imagine it, but also when I imagine it I don’t necessarily feel it. But when I see their faces and when I work with our students, both inside and outside, and I see them growing and I see them becoming aware of their abilities, and I see them being able to take control of their lives and I see them being happy and getting paid and doing what they love? That’s what justice looks like.”

Keeling is the executive director of Free Write — an organization that teaches art, writing, and music production classes in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) — and Walter and Cortez are two of its alumni. Walter had been a DJ before entering the JTDC, but Free Write was Cortez’s first serious exposure to the craft. In the photo on YAS! Fest’s flyer, Walter looks down at the DJ mixer in front of him with headphones on and a hand poised to twist a knob or flick a fader. Cortez leans next to him, smiling.

Keesling co-founded Free Write with Daphne Whitington 18 years ago while finishing up a graduate degree in education at Northwestern. In its initial stages, it was a one-on-one tutoring program with a curriculum that emphasized reading for students in the lowest grade levels at the Nancy B. Jefferson School, the Chicago Public School that operates within the JTDC. Some students flew through the assigned books; but of the students who struggled to read at their grade level, Keesling recognized that they had literacy skills that the reading materials just weren’t accessing. Rather than continue teaching books that didn’t excite the students, the organization expanded its notion of literacy. Keesling turned to dictation and writing: students would tell him stories and he would write them down. Through reading the stories back, they could work on close reading and their fluency as storytellers in a vocabulary the students knew and used.

Free Write has continued to grow its programming through other similarly pragmatic decisions, as students’ needs arise. When they published an anthology of students’ poetry and prose, the Free Write teachers were asked, where are the pictures? Other teachers in the school started tapping Free Write’s shoulders when a student showed an interest in drawing, the next anthology included pictures, and eventually visual art was added to the curriculum. Free Write now has a staff of teaching artists who work with 50 students (roughly a quarter of the JTDC population) four days a week in 75-minute sessions. They offer classes in a variety of creative languages and technical skills: poetry, visual art, digital animation, music and audio production, DJing.

Outside the detention center, Free Write works to maintain a relationship with alumni who leave the JTDC. Their regular open mic event, Stomping Grounds Open Stage, is a partnership with the art-activism collectives Kuumba Lynx and Elephant Rebellion and takes place both in and outside of the detention center, cultivating a creative community across the JTDC walls. Three years ago, Free Write established Sound & Vision, a production company that provides audio equipment and technical support for music festivals and events. The skills required for this work are taught in the detention center, which gives students an opportunity for employment outside. Free Write alumni and staff participate in national conferences, academic panels, and public conversations about incarceration.

I met with Keesling at the Chicago Art Department, where Free Write has been a resident organization for the past three years, and we talked about how creative expression enables justice and what it takes to cultivate a free space within a locked facility. While still looking at the photo of Walter and Cortez, he continued, “So when I see joy, when I see success, and when I see freedom and mobility on the faces of the young people who are now young adults as they move out into the world, that’s what it looks like. That’s what justice looks like.”

In the following months, in addition to further reporting on Free Write Arts & Literacy, Sixty will publish a series that pairs poems written by youth participating in Free Write’s classes at JTDC with photographs by Chelsea Ross. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ryan Keesling, the executive director of Free Write Arts & Literacy, sits at a table in the Chicago Art Department where Free Write’s office is located. Keesling stares into the camera with his hands folded on the table. On the table beside him, there is a colorful Free Write anthology book. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

Sasha Tycko: On a personal note, what drew you to this work or continues to draw you to this work, 18 years out?

Ryan Keesling: Well, what drew me to it initially was how uninterested I was in being a public school teacher, and how clearly stifling it was to be just a teacher in a school system, regardless of what the system is — whether it’s CPS or private schools or anything, you know. I was looking at the prospect of being a teacher and just basically being told how to do things. Being overwhelmed with class size, being set up to fail, being discouraged from being creative, hitting glass ceilings and walls in all directions with ideas, and just being sort of stifled by the system.

So. This idea drew me to it because it was something I could build from the ground up, that addressed a very viable, concrete need, and that was a literacy-based intervention. And I’d be able to have relationships with people. The small group and the one-on-one work — that seemed like teaching to me, as opposed to just being dropped in a classroom and teaching to tests and whatever else the prospects were that I was seeing when I was finishing up grad school that really pissed me off.

ST: For Free Write’s classes, how does it work for people to participate? Do you have to recruit people, or are they generally enthusiastic to join?

RK: It’s non-compulsory, which sets it up for success in a place like a detention center and combination detention center/school, where it’s hyper-compulsory — all participation and all movement is mandated, right? So it’s not compulsory. Anyone can opt in and opt out … Nothing makes things move in that facility like the word of the kids. Everyone’s paying super close attention to what everyone else is doing in there, because it’s a hyper-compressed, hyper-restrictive environment, so everyone’s trying to see where the good stuff is.

Our programming speaks for itself and the young people that we work with are ambassadors for us and they will draw in new people who are interested, they will identify talented or struggling – or anybody who they feel like would benefit from the experience in our workshops. It’s very organic in that way. It’s not that we have to, you know, submit a list to the principal, or to the JTDC administration, and then they vet it. It’s very much word of mouth with our young people and a direct relationship with the day-to-day staff who do movement and are on the centers with our students. So it’s cool like that, and it’s light-hearted, and the fact that it’s an option for kids makes it even more appealing in a place where they are entirely, entirely shut off from choice, period.

ST: Art is really intimidating, so when new people come in, how do you or the other teaching artists make people feel comfortable being vulnerable or expressing themselves?

RK: They come in and they experience the space, first of all, and the space is a creative space. It feels that way when you walk in. It doesn’t feel the same as the other classrooms in the building, or even the hallway that you just came out of. Like you walk in and it’s got a different feel to it. And kind of like, how I said, too, they’re coming already having a knowledge of their peers’ experience with that, and they see a positive thing, and they want to get down with it. That sort of context is crucial to having someone come in and feel more comfortable at the very first day.

They can opt into different disciplines …We have really skilled teaching artists and people have been working in that environment for a really long time at this point, and they help to set the stage for that sort of experimentation and the vulnerability that’s happening around the table, but really it’s the young people themselves that create that environment. You know, the teaching artists can do whatever they think is right in order to create that, but if they haven’t built some trust with the young people who have been there for more and then somebody new comes in? That new person is not going to take the cue from the teaching artist, that new person is going to take the cue from their peers, and if it’s not feeling good then they’re not going to be forthcoming, or they’re going to be shy, or they’re not going to try something new. So, really, it’s about creating the environment and then letting the more established students sort of handle what it’s like to be open and vulnerable and collaborative and creative in that space.

Marshawn, a.k.a Lil Shawn, is a Free Write alumni, rapper, and employee of Free Write Sound & Vision. As Lil Shawn, he performed at 96Acres’s Radioactive event on September 16. Marshawn wears a yellow Radioactive t-shirt and speaks into a microphone. Behind him, an abstract image is projected onto the wall of the Cook County Jail. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

ST: What’s an example workshop structure?

RK: It would start with maybe some phone calls to make sure that the movement is going to happen. [laughs] So it always starts with a negotiation, or it occasionally starts with a negotiation with the staff, just to get the kids there, to make sure the right kids are on the list, and the right kids are coming down. That whole jail shit. It’s always that negotiation first. Which shows, number one, we’re there. Number two, we’re actively advocating for their movement to class, so that always makes a difference. And that also gives the staff that opportunity as well, to actively advocate for them to get to where they need to go. So that sort of adult support is the thing that gets them into the room, right? And that’s healthy to begin with, right?

We have a round table. It’s a group of seven, maximum, usually, for a couple reasons: for movement ratio — a safety and security issue — but also that’s a great class size for a workshop, right? So they’d sit around the table, they would do a check-in, so just a circular check-in, maybe with a prompt of some sort, maybe with a question, like “what’s one rose and one thorn.” You know, let’s talk about how you’re feeling. So everybody gets a chance to introduce themselves if they’re new or just reintroduce themselves if it’s important to the group and also check in about how they feel. They open their mouths and hear their voices at the table first.

So the next thing they would probably – well, it depends on the structure of the workshop and where this group is at with their projects, and where it falls in the curricular cycle, but they would often read something. Say they were in a poetry workshop. They would get a piece of writing. Everybody would read it together or take turns reading it or, in one way or another, experience it. The style of it is discussed — like the way it is written, the reason it was written.

Roger [Bonair-Agard] is the program director for creative writing, and his work, his poetry, is very much grounded in the very minute details that make up one’s movements through their lives. Right? So color, shapes, smells, things that people say, things that people act like, things that people look like — those things all give context to a person’s life, right? So he’s asking young people to look at their lives and think about what really was there, what really is here right now. To be able to access that, it takes some meditation, it takes some reflections, some encouragement to be able to get into the place where you’re like, “Okay, I see my block, I can smell my mother’s cooking, I can remember what it felt like in the sunshine, sitting on my front porch.” Those kinds of things, that make up a day in one’s life, right?

So that kind of experience will be encouraged and then writing will happen. And then, you know, sharing will happen. So there’s a community built around not only the shared writing — everybody at the table just going at it for five minutes without putting their pencil down — and then there’s the opportunity to share. It continues to create the artistic community and makes that space a vulnerable space but also a powerful space and a space not like anywhere else in that facility or really anywhere else that maybe they’ve been encouraged to participate in before.

ST: The tagline of Free Write is that its students are “authoring their own narrative.” Can you speak on that as it relates to the media representation of incarceration?

RK: Yeah. Well. [pauses] I mean, who’s better to tell their story than them?

ST: Right.

RK: You know? It’s funny how simple that is … Without their stories, there’s just other people talking about them. And those people are always just serving themselves, and, you know, distorting a narrative for the purpose of making our lives easier rather than actually listening to young people who have the experience and who are the experts because they have the experience.

So not only is it a means of changing public opinion and informing, you know, the broader discourse about what it means to lock kids up and the conditions that create that, it’s also a skill-building activity. They’re building communication skills in a way that will continue to allow them to capitalize on their experience in this scenario and be able to tell people, like, “You all think you know what this is, and you all think you know me, but you don’t. So I’m just going to go in on you because I have the perspective, I have the emotional engagement, I have the literacy skills, I have the artistic license and community, and I’m just going to tell you what this experience is, and whatever you think it is, you need to just put that down and listen to me.” So that’s the narration that we’re talking about—being the narrators of their own stories. You can’t let anybody else tell your story. And they’re hungry for the opportunity to be the ones who are in charge of their own stories.

ST: How explicitly or formally, do you talk about the system in the classroom?

RK: Explicitly. And formally. Yeah, I mean, the prison-industrial complex is a real conversation in the classroom. The conditions that give rise to that are real conversations. You know, there’s a trauma-informed way of talking about that. Because these kids are in jail. You know, they’re not distanced from this. You know, we can talk at this table about the prison-industrial complex and have all kinds of things to say about it, but you have to be careful with how you talk about prison. Because people are looking at big numbers. They’re looking at 45 years. It’s a different experience for that conversation when you’re actually looking at being in there for 45 years. So it’s a delicate balance … And there’s a lot of healing that happens when they see themselves as a part of a bigger context. There’s a lot of pain also, because they’re like, “Damn, I thought it was just this or that on the block, but really it’s this whole thing that’s been happening for hundreds of years, if not more, and I’m just a part of it right now and this is what it looks like.”

Cortez, a DJ and technician with Free Write Sound & Vision, makes an adjustment on the audio mixer in front of him while mixing sound for the FEAST festival on September 8. He sits outside under a blue tent. On the left side of the photograph stands a speaker with a Free Write Sound & Vision sticker on its grill. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

ST: How did the production company Sound & Vision get started?

RK: Sound & Vision started in response to the needs of a couple of our young folks who we re-encountered on the outside after we spent a lot of time with them inside. It also came about as a new sort of program that I was interested in doing, because those are my skills, as a technician and as a producer and as a DJ, and being involved for a long time in just event production and DIY kind of situations. I have a lot of skills that could result in money and employment and further skill-building in the arts industry. So I started to articulate that, but it was only after being prompted by young people who were like, “Hey, I’m out! What are we going to do?” Like, “Ohh. Alright, let’s figure it out.” So we started buying some equipment, reaching out to friends and colleagues in the field—you know, like other DJs, event producers, venues—and started to get work, started to get paid to show up with speakers and stack them up and, you know, make the event sound good, and bring the DJ equipment and, yeah, just all that backline tech end of things—that is often invisible in the arts industry, but is really what makes it work.

ST: I noticed that in the most recent anthology some of the poems had parts that were redacted. How does censorship happen at the detention center?

RK: We can’t publish anything without it going through the detention center. They have “gang specialists” [air quotes] who look at the stuff and look at any sort of signification and think about, like, “How is what this young person is saying going to affect another young person?” Because there’s real violence in play, there’s real “this person killed my friend, and I’m gonna kill them” kind of stuff. So those redacted poems in the anthology, one is called “Quiet on the Set,” and it was really about, like, staging a movie and this sort of stage directions leading into the first scene’s shot of this film or whatever. But “set” got to be interpreted as, like, “block,” and everything in it got to be interpreted as gangbanging. Which may or may not be true, because the coded language that they have access to is brilliant. And that whole lexicon is so rich and so vibrant and so in the moment. It can indicate violence and it can indicate heavy stuff.

But it’s also – They’re kids. They’re going to write about what they know. But it’s very coded and it’s very complex, and I feel like the way that it’s treated often doesn’t respect the complexity of it and is really just deaf to the complexity. So it’s heavy-handed. And I understand that, legally, they have to err on the side of caution in that respect, so it’s not that I don’t understand what they’re doing, it just often comes as heavy-handed. And those redacted pieces in that anthology, as an example, were super dope and we wanted to keep them and at least have it be experienced rhythmically or as bricks, you know, like in place of the words, and honor the poet for their work, but also acknowledge like, “This is something that we were told we can’t print. So here’s how we decided to treat it.”

Free Write has published seven anthologies of student’s work. This anthology from 2016 has a vibrant cover with geometric shapes. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

ST: What is it about this creative education, this creative space, about art generally, that enables the kind of work that you’re doing? In your experience, what is it about art that can enable justice and freedom?

RK: It’s going to be the stories of the young people and this experience that are going to change the way that the system functions and the relevance of its existence … I mean, that’s the power of art, is that it gives people multiple ways to express themselves, and everybody can access it at different points and combine skills to tell a story in a beautiful, engaging, interesting way. So I think that – I mean, it’s a hook programmatically, too, because, you know, they like it! They like it. It’s not science. It’s not social studies. They can come in and use these different tools. And art also has … they can make money doing art. And they are interested in that. They want ways that they can be legit with their ideas and build a life for themselves, outside of, like, things that will get them locked up. So not only is it powerful tools of expression and, you know, multi-disciplinary tools, but it’s also an opportunity for them to gain skills that they can use to go to the next [trails off] … go to school, do graphic design, be sound technicians, you know, be effective written communicators.

It has — for these students, in particular — they see both of those ways. They’re like, “This is fun. I like this. This is a great place to be. This community feels good. This art is hard sometimes, it’s exciting sometimes, it’s fun and it gets me going.” But also, “I can take this and I can do mixtape covers or I can design, I can do tattoos, or I can be an audio technician.” There are viable career options in it, which we know – like, our students are savvy and they see that immediately, and they’re like, “Oh shit, I know people are making money doing this, so I’m going to do this as well as enjoy myself doing so.”

Featured image: Ryan Keesling leans over the shoulder of Walter, a Free Write Sound and Vision technician, as they both look at audio mixer that sits on a table in front of them. They are outside, under a blue tent, where Sound and Vision is mixing sound for the FEAST festival that took place September 8. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

Starting from the proposition that art-making is world-making, Sasha Tycko combines community organizing and curatorial work with writing, music, and performance. Tycko is a founding editor of The Sick Muse zine and an administrator of the F12 Network, a DIY collective that addresses sexual violence in arts communities. IG: @t_cko. www.sashatycko.net. Photo by ColectivoMultipolar.

This is the third article in an ongoing series about Body Passages, a partnership between Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and The Chicago Poetry Center (the first and second are online). This series gives brief looks into a 10-month, interdisciplinary creative process between Body Passages poets and dancers, documenting and reflecting on aspects of that process as it happens.

In September, I spoke with writer Lani T. Montreal and dancer/choreographer Maxine Patronik about their collaborative process; their resulting piece, “Blood Memory,” about trauma and bodily memory; and their thoughts about artists’ responsibility when presenting work with sensitive themes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lani and Maxine’s final creation – along with those by other Body Passages groups – were performed at a culminating event at the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble Auditorium on October 12 and 13.

Marya Spont-Lemus: It was so cool to get to observe you today at work on “Blood Memory,” your piece-in-progress for Body Passages. So thank you! Before we get into discussing that collaborative piece and your process, I’d love to hear a bit from each of you about your own individual artistic practice, whatever you want to share.

Maxine Patronik: I consider myself a dancer. I’m classically trained in ballet and I’ve been getting into more contemporary dance since college and post-graduation. Now I’m interested mainly in contemporary dance. I have been freelancing and trying to perform as a dancer, but also choreographing and coming up with my own work – which can be kind of intimidating at times, finding my own artistic voice. A lot of my artistic and choreographic process is drawn from improvisation and I think it’s really important to have a practice of improvising and practicing that. A practice of improvisation helps me break my habits and try things that I wouldn’t have tried before. So that was part of what drew me to Body Passages, because it would allow me to choreograph and come up with something new, while also collaborating with and being inspired by other artists, especially artists of different mediums. I feel like, as dancers, we can get really isolated and just think about dance, so it’s good for me to draw inspiration from poetry and writing and other forms.

Marya Spont-Lemus: And you said you graduated from college pretty recently, right?

Maxine Patronik: Yeah, I graduated in May of 2017. I’m from here originally, so I moved back last summer, and I’ve spent the last year kind of trying to get into the Chicago dance scene and network and do as much as I can.

Image: This is a black-and-white photo of Maxine Patronik dancing in a bright dance studio that has a barre and mirrors. Maxine wears a light leotard with dark piping. Maxine poses in the foreground, on the right side of the frame, with her back and side to the camera. Her reflection, showing the front of her body, is visible in the mirror, on the left side of the frame. Maxine balances on her left foot, with her right leg raised and bent behind her and her torso twisted in that direction. Maxine’s left arm is bent across her upper chest and her right arm is raised, bent, above her head. Photo by Rob Kunkle/Good Lux Photography.

Marya Spont-Lemus: What about you, Lani?

Lani T. Montreal: Well, I’m a writer, but I write in different genres. I was a journalist in the Philippines before, so I did a lot of feature stories and articles, and then started writing plays when I moved to Canada in the early ‘90s. My first play was actually produced there. But I come from a family of writers. My mother was a writer and my sister as well. Poetry is something that I’ve been doing since I was young, but it’s only more recently that I’ve been learning more about it. I got my MFA from Roosevelt University, but not in poetry – actually, I thought poetry was the hardest class I had ever had to take! [laughs] A lot of my writing has been published in different places and magazines or journals, and this year is the first time that I’m having my poems published all in one book. So I’m excited about that!

I got involved with Chicago Danztheatre through my friend Silvita Diaz Brown – she’s also a dancer/choreographer – who has done work with them. Silvita had wanted some text with her dance, so we collaborated. It was the first time I did something like that, and we performed it here. Then Chicago Danztheatre had a playwright festival, and one of my pieces got in. It was a work in progress, called “Damaged Merchandise,” about mail-order bride Filipinos coming to the U.S. I was born and raised in the Philippines, so a lot of my work is around that experience, and the immigrant experience. And when Chicago Danztheatre announced that they were looking for writers – poets – for Body Passages, I applied and got in.

Image: Maxine Patronik (left) and Lani T. Montreal (right) at a rehearsal for their Body Passages piece at the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble Auditorium. The artists stand next to each other, looking down at a piece of paper in a folder in Lani’s hand. Lani points toward the center of the page as Maxine looks on, right hand to her face. Lani wears a red t-shirt and light jeans. Maxine wears a black tank-top with a maroon top underneath. Covered windows, a door, a bulletin board, and chairs are in the background. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: What has the process of developing a piece together looked like so far? The two of you have been working together since January, I believe?

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah… [all laugh]

Maxine Patronik: It’s been all year.

Lani T. Montreal: Oh my god, yeah.

Marya Spont-Lemus: [laughs] What has that process looked like? And how did you go about getting to know each other and each other’s work, or coming to an idea that you could build on together?

Maxine Patronik: There were actually three of us originally. We had to re-group, because we lost a member.

Lani T. Montreal: There were four, but we never even met one of them.

Maxine Patronik: Yeah. There were three of us for a while, but then that person had to drop out for personal reasons. So we took a little break and then came back and re-grouped. And at that point Lani and I changed the direction of the piece.

Lani T. Montreal: I wanted to work on the issue of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Maxine Patronik: And we had been talking about the #MeToo movement.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah. Even at the beginning of the process, I was talking about the #MeToo movement. But when there were three of us, we had some different interests, and we were trying to work through that because it’s also good to have diversity of voices and experiences within the piece. It was pretty interesting, too, because we all come from different generations.

Then my mother passed away in March, so I did take a break, and a lot of things came up when I was there. When I came back to Chicago, that’s when Maxine and I talked about what I wanted to focus on for the theme and if Maxine was okay with that. And it turns out that she had written this really good thesis on a similar topic.

Maxine Patronik: Like bodily memory –

Lani T. Montreal: Bodily memory. That’s why our piece is called “Blood Memory.”

Maxine Patronik: – and physical memory, and muscle memory, and how our body remembers things that our brain doesn’t always. So then Lani and I started working with that as our main theme.

Lani T. Montreal: We even pulled some of the text from Maxine’s thesis, from the research that she did. It really resonated with me, because when I was in Manila, I had learned more of my mother’s stories as well and I was just trying to understand how it affected me or what the impact had been on me, growing up. And I had my own experience, too, that I didn’t know my mother had actually found out about before she passed away. So that went into our script as well. That was how we came up with that theme.

Image: Maxine Patronik performs at a Body Passages event at Uncommon Ground. Maxine dances barefoot on a wooden stage, with “uncommonground” projected on the maroon curtain behind her. She leans forward, with her body bent at the hips, knees, and elbows. She wears a dark top and maroon leggings. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Wow. Thank you. And Maxine, what made you want to write your thesis on bodily memory?

Maxine Patronik: For my thesis, I had to come up with a dance piece and also write a paper talking about my process. The general theme of memory was really interesting to me and also, just being a dancer, how memory can be translated into the body. So it’s been cool to expand that inquiry. You know, I didn’t think I’d be using my thesis a year after graduation. [all laugh] But it’s been cool to bring it to a new place, relate it to a new experience.

Lani T. Montreal: It’s well-written! I learned a lot from reading her thesis, that made a lot of sense to me. And then I read more about inherited trauma, too. That story of the woman who was saying, “I want to die” – which you heard when we were rehearsing just now – came from additional research that I did, based on Maxine’s thesis. I also thought about childhood trauma, which you might forget about when you’re young, and how it might manifest later on. So I thought about how, in the beginning of our piece, we should start with or kind of create that womb then.

Marya Spont-Lemus: You said “create that wound” or “create that womb”?

Lani T. Montreal: Womb. Womb and wound, I guess, but womb – like when I was walking around telling that story and Maxine was still moving, almost like a heartbeat. And I also thought about: What are some of the stories that we grew up with, that may have some deeper meaning? You know, all of these legends and myths that were written to explain something, right? So that’s where the story of the sun and the moon came from – it was an actual legend from the Philippines. And the piece grew from there.

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal rehearse for their Body Passages piece at the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble Auditorium. Lani stands on-stage in the background, reading from an open folder. Maxine sits on one of the stage’s steps in the foreground, leaning back with fists and bent arms raised above her head and with her feet on the step below. The stairs are brown and curved, the proscenium arch is white and patterned, and the the stage walls and a large window covering are white. A long wooden altarpiece with crosses is positioned along the stage’s back wall. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Did you know each other before Body Passages?

Lani T. Montreal: No.

Marya Spont-Lemus: It’s so interesting, because I feel like, as artists, we may draw to different extents on our personal experiences or personal traumas for our own work. And it’s one thing to channel or manifest that into a creative form by oneself, which can already have its own challenges. And, to me, it seems like another thing entirely to externalize that experience further, to talk about it abstractly or even strategically with a collaborator, or to share enough of the background or details of it to be able to combine those experiences or stories in some way. I’m wondering – in general and especially since you didn’t know each other when you started – how did you figure out how to do that with each other or build that trust? Was that difficult?

Maxine Patronik: I think we just had a lot of conversations.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah, we talk a lot. Maxine is not so talkative, though. [all laugh]

Maxine Patronik: I would listen.

Lani T. Montreal: She’s a very good listener.

Maxine Patronik: We had that one meeting where we just talked about all of our similarities.

Marya Spont-Lemus: As an intentional exercise?

Lani T. Montreal: I think we were just sharing some of our memories that may have been traumatic. Maxine talked about that incident with peanut butter, because she didn’t know she was allergic. So that was a major trauma – she almost died!

Maxine Patronik: Yeah. We would meet about once a month at Lani’s place and just talk for a bit. It didn’t feel hard to build trust. I think because we were both artists, it felt like a natural connection.

Lani T. Montreal: And I think we’re both easy people to get along with. [all laugh] I think that we’re both quite positive. That’s why we want to put that positivity into the piece, by including people’s expression of joys, even though trauma is a very serious issue.

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal rehearse for their Body Passages piece at the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble Auditorium. In this black-and-white image, Maxine and Lani stand upright on the floor in front of the stage, roughly perpendicular to each other and both facing diagonally past the camera. In the foreground, Lani raises her arms in front of her chest, perpendicular to each other and with palms open, and leans on her back foot. In the background, Maxine lifts one arm straight ahead of her and holds the other by her abdomen. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: I know that “Blood Memory” is still in progress, and that the final piece will be unveiled in this space in mid-October, but what you can say now about what the piece is about, or what themes or questions it’s engaging with? How did you come to that manifestation of those root ideas around trauma and memory?

Lani T. Montreal: “Blood Memory” is about trauma and how the body remembers what we may have forgotten. And how do we overcome that trauma, or can it be overcome? So those are the questions that we want to explore in the piece. That’s why we talked about having those different voices of women – not just women, actually; there are men in that recording – of survivors of sexual trauma. I think that it’s important to find a community. It’s important to create that space where you can feel safe. So that’s why we’re including those voices in our piece and, overall, just trying to be very sensitive about the issue.

Maxine Patronik: Yeah. We hope the audience can relate and also take something away.

Lani T. Montreal: But not be traumatized.

Maxine Patronik: Reminded of their own experience, but feeling support.

Lani T. Montreal: Empowered to tell their own stories, and to work through it. Because we did talk about how to find ways to overcome the trauma. When I went back home to the Philippines, it brought up my experience of trauma and made me feel strongly about sharing. I actually I wrote an essay about it, which was published, but I didn’t put my real name on it. But I think some of that writing might go into the last part of our piece. We want our piece to be something empowering, that should empower people to share stories and also to find community in order to overcome.

Marya Spont-Lemus: What’s the structure or arc of your piece and what modes does it use? Do you both perform in it?

Lani T. Montreal: Well, now I do. Maxine just gave me some moves. [laughs]

Maxine Patronik: I think we decided to stick mostly with our individual mediums. I didn’t necessarily want to use my poetry, because it didn’t feel performance-ready, but Lani is doing some movement, which is great. Overall, we kind of tried to mesh Lani’s poetry and my dancing together. So in the first section, I’m kind of responding to her words, using her words as the music or rhythm or the story. In the second section, we come together more.

Lani T. Montreal: The third section is more poetic and also includes how you find joy through it all. That’s why we asked the devising workshop participants to share, “What are your sources of joy?” Because that’s how it is, that’s how you survive! It’s day-to-day. Even if you have gone through such a horrible experience, you need to be able to overcome it and you need to be able to live your life one day at a time. And that means you have to find joy in the little things, right? In the everyday. Otherwise it’s going to drive you crazy.

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal rehearse for their Body Passages piece at the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble Auditorium. In this black-and-white image, both artists stand dark in the middle of the floor, with the stage bright in the background. Maxine’s and Lani’s bodies face the camera, as the artists face each other. They strike a similar pose — feet spread shoulder-width apart, left arms stretching to their left sides, left wrists cocked, and right arms bent to their right sides. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: For the audio recordings that you’re using in the second section, did the same people provide testimonies about their traumatic experiences and about their joys?

Lani T. Montreal: No, it’s not. Originally, we were going to ask people we knew to record and share stories about their traumas, but some people are not that comfortable with that. A couple of my friends have shared their stories and those might go into the final recording, but for most we used audio from videos on the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline (RAINN) website, which has survivor stories that have been made public already. So we selected some and I asked my friend who’s a techie guy, “Can you help us mix this?” Because, you know, we’re just afraid if we leave the recording as is with people telling their stories of sexual trauma, then it might be too triggering?

Maxine Patronik: And the way that it is edited, it’s more interwoven, so you hear bits and pieces but it’s not necessarily one story that’s fully audible.

Lani T. Montreal: So it’s different stories, with strands that are woven together. I think it’s powerful that way, because then you’re showing that some of these stories are very similar. That’s what we wanted to show with that part of the piece.

A couple of friends of mine who are trauma counselors will be here for the performances, in case people were to feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Maxine Patronik: We just came up with that idea about a month ago.

Lani T. Montreal: And it’s tricky asking people to share their stories. Because these stories about trauma were already out there with an educative purpose, we felt like it was okay to use them. We will cite the stories as being from the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline website, of course, and then it’s also helpful for people to know that that organization exists as a service.

Image: Maxine Patronik rehearses on-stage at Chicago Danztheatre. Maxine appears mid-motion, nearly perpendicular to the stage floor, hair flying behind her head. Her body faces front toward the camera, supported by her hands, both flat on the floor, and the toe of her left shoe. Both knees are bent and her right foot and leg are suspended off the floor. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: I was going to ask about how the theme of trauma has impacted the ways that you’re thinking of presenting these ideas to an audience. Like with how you came to the idea of bringing a trauma counselor in, or if there was something specific you read that informed your approach, or if there were other artists you looked to? Just how you’re thinking about your presentation of work about trauma and also to what extent you think there’s artist responsibility in that?

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah, definitely. Well, that’s why we asked the trauma counselors. I’m also reaching out to a friend of mine who works with Resilience, formerly called Rape Victim Advocates. I feel that we have a lot of responsibility when we put our work out there.

Maxine Patronik: And I think we have the responsibility to be vulnerable in our presentation of it and in our sharing. Because if we’re closed off, and feeling strange about it, then the audience is going to feel that way too.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah!

Maxine Patronik: So I think it’s important that we, as artists, express as much as we can. Whatever happens.

Lani T. Montreal: And that’s also the reason I put my story out there, right? Because, you know, we’re talking from the experience of a survivor as well, and not just telling the story of someone else. That’s what we tried to do.

Marya Spont-Lemus: So, the piece that you’re creating together will be presented to the public as live performance. With this – or in your own writing or in other dance you’ve done – do you feel like the responsibility is different if the piece is happening in the space of live performance versus in a piece of writing on a page or something?

Lani T. Montreal: Oh…wow. I would think so. That’s interesting.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Or have you felt equally as concerned in the past?

Maxine Patronik: I typically just perform live, but I feel the same responsibility in any kind of performance, to just be as open as I can. No matter the topic.

Lani T. Montreal: As open, yeah. Because dance can be seen as being more abstract, right? Whereas when you’re speaking the lines, then it’s raw and can be too didactic.

Maxine Patronik: And it’s a bit different when you’re presenting your own work versus, for me, performing somebody else’s choreography. It feels like when I’m doing my own choreography I have a strong responsibility to be true to myself.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah, because you’re putting it out there. And that responsibility is that it won’t harm, right? You don’t want to cause any harm – but then again, you know, intentions are one thing and the impact is another. Because I’ve seen performances where I felt really moved but also very vulnerable. And sometimes it doesn’t feel so good. [laughs] So I understand that there would be that kind of effect. That’s why I said that we want to have someone at the show who’s a professional, who can help people deal with those kinds of responses should they arise during or after our performance.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Is that something that whomever’s introducing you will say at the beginning? Or how are you thinking of presenting that information, that someone is there?

Lani T. Montreal: Oh! We haven’t thought about that yet. [laughs] I think also just to announce that these are sensitive issues. I think Chicago Danztheatre did that before. They did a show on domestic abuse, and that was also very painful.

Maxine Patronik: Heavy.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah, heavy.

Marya Spont-Lemus: It can be tricky, too, because traumas are so multi-layered, and there are so many things that might trigger them. You know, on the one hand, it’s not possible to be aware of everything that might impact somebody – it could be something seemingly innocuous – but if one of your starting themes is “trauma” and addressing particular forms of it, then that seems especially like a situation in which thinking through those extra several steps – proactively, not just responsively – seems really important.

Lani T. Montreal: In the past they have announced the sensitive themes to the audience. And we can also make them aware that there is someone in the audience who can help. I think that’s important.

Image: Maxine Patronik rehearses on-stage at Chicago Danztheatre. Her body faces front. Maxine appears mid-motion, leaning her body far to her left, stretching her arms toward the floor and the ceiling, and looking up at the ceiling. She balances on her left foot, with her right foot pointed and off the floor. Both knees are slightly bent. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: I’m wondering how you think about how language and movement interact in your piece, or inform or contradict each other? What is that interplay between them, and between you, as you navigate those modes of language and movement together?

Maxine Patronik: I think it’s interesting to just hear the rhythm of how Lani reads some of her poems and her stories. I try to use that to keep a similar rhythm in my dance, to respond to her words with movement. It seems pretty simple, I guess, for me.

Lani T. Montreal: In the beginning, Maxine would go to my house and we would just talk about the piece. Then I would share my writing with Maxine via email. But I never really saw the whole thing until we started rehearsing here, because even when we showed it at Woman Made Gallery, I was reading my part and I didn’t know what Maxine was doing. [laughs]

Maxine Patronik: So the words definitely came first, and then the movement followed.

Lani T. Montreal: And when I’ve worked with another dancer, I’ve found that having the words first actually helped the dancer. [laughs] So it’s kind of organic that way, that the movement grew out of the written piece. When we started rehearsing here at Chicago Danztheatre, that’s when I first saw it all together, and I really liked the movement that Maxine came up with and what she choreographed for the piece.

Marya Spont-Lemus: And I forget how exactly you phrased it, Maxine, when you were rehearsing that first section earlier, but you said you wanted to respond to Lani’s words but not in such a way – that you wanted to depict them but not too literally? But rather echo them in some way. Then in the second section, when you’re both moving to the recorded and collaged voices, it was really interesting to get to see you both pull out verbal or visual motifs and repeat those together, not quite in unison but in the same set of patterns. I’ve only seen parts of those first two sections, but it was intriguing to see how those relationships shift – between the two of you as performers and between language and movement – at different points in the performance.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah. I really defer to Maxine when it comes to movement. [laughs]

Maxine Patronik: And I defer to Lani when it comes to words. I think we have a mutual respect for each other’s work.

Lani T. Montreal: I think so. The collaboration works great for us.

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal at a rehearsal at Chicago Danztheatre. The artists sit side-by-side in chairs, backs toward the camera. Lani holds a camera-phone between them as they watch its bright screen, which shows a recording of themselves performing in the same space. The auditorium’s floor and a chair are in the background. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus: How do you think this process – whether of working together, of creating this specific piece, of the larger experience of Body Passages – might impact your process moving forward?

Maxine Patronik: Well, this has been one of the longest processes I’ve done. It almost seemed a little too long for me. I think personally I prefer not a short process, but only a few months. Because it is nice to let things settle and kind of marinate, but I also feel like sometimes 10 months was too much time for us, where we were backtracking almost.

Marya Spont-Lemus: By “backtracking,” do you mean “second-guessing”? Or that you were changing so much as time was passing that you wanted to keep changing the piece?

Maxine Patronik: Yeah, I think just having too much time to think about it. And even almost forget it.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah, it’s like your body needs to remember!

Marya Spont-Lemus: Body memory!

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah! It’s the same thing for me. Because I’ve done collaborations before. I was with Mango Tribe – this Asian- and Pacific Islander-American group of women – that works together in a similar way, usually towards a performance that’s coming up in like three months, not in a year. [laughs] To sustain that kind of energy is tough. It can drag on, if it’s too long. I don’t know. Maybe if there were more of us? Maybe that was what they were thinking, that if there were more people in our group maybe we would need more time.

Maxine Patronik: Yeah, I think it would be different if it was a bigger group of us.

Lani T. Montreal: But if it is just two of us, maybe a compressed process would work better, like if we met every week instead of every month.

Marya Spont-Lemus: It seems like you both have had a lot of experience with collaboration and devising performance in different kinds of ways.

Lani T. Montreal: Yeah, that’s probably true. Other people might not have that experience and may need more time.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Are there ways that you think this experience might impact your work beyond October? Like ideas you’ve been engaging with as part of this process or methods you’ve been using, or like incorporating more movement or other ways of making into your own practice?

Maxine Patronik: In past processes I’ve used words, like poetry, as inspiration. I think this experience can push me to use other art forms as well, not just words, but visual art or more outside sources.

Lani T. Montreal: We haven’t really talked about it yet. Maybe we should expand our piece. [laughs] I don’t know. Maybe we can show it at certain times of the year. I could invite Maxine to Malcolm X College to perform – maybe for March, for Women’s Herstory Month, because we usually have something. That would be great. But I would love to work with Maxine again.

Marya Spont-Lemus: And assuming that, especially given the long process, this is not the only thing you’ve been working on, I’d love to close by hearing some of the other projects you have going on and if there’s anything you have coming up!

Lani T. Montreal: Well, I missed Maxine’s Links Hall performance because I was sick.

Maxine Patronik: [laughs] I’ve just been kind of freelancing. Dancing for things here and there throughout the city, in small dance festivals and shows. I’m also dancing with a small contemporary company, Trifecta Dance Collective, so I’ve been rehearsing with them a couple of times a week. We have shows in the coming months, so that’s exciting. But choreographically, there’s not really anything else I’ve been working on outside of “Blood Memory.” I think I definitely want to get into that more and just create more.

Image: The cover of Lani T. Montreal’s new book, “FANBOYS: Poems about Teaching and Learning.” The title appears at the top and the author’s name on the left, both in dark green serif font. The cover image is a detailed, colored-pencil drawing against a white background. A brown hand with a blue shadow of sorts holds the yellow-green stems of dozens of flowers (sampaguita or Philippine jasmine) that stretch and flow downward, like water or strands of hair, in turn framing elements of a colored-pencilled collage. Collage elements include fish (each purple, blue, and yellow), a black Chicago skyline against an orange sky, a long hallway with green lockers, light-skinned nuns wearing white, a leaning or possibly falling tower of looseleaf paper, and, large in the bottom left-hand corner, part of the face of a person with brown skin, looking out at the viewer and crying, eye fully open. Cover image art by Melanya Liwanag Aguila. Courtesy of Finishing Line Press.

Marya Spont-Lemus: And Lani, I know you have a book coming out. What is it called and what is it engaging with?

Lani T. Montreal: It’s called “FANBOYS: Poems about Teaching and Learning.” I teach English Comp and Creative Writing at Malcolm X. But the book is really broad and double-meaning – whatever you’ve learned in life. So that’s what it is. The things I’ve learned, and the things I’ve also taught people, I guess. [laughs] I have readings coming up here and there to promote the book. One just passed but I will have another reading with other poets on November 8th at The Dial Bookshop in the Fine Arts Building. I will keep you posted on other events.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Is it your first book?

Lani T. Montreal: It’s the first one that has everything together. Because, you know, the poems have been published here and there, but not in one space. So yeah, it’s exciting. I’m excited. It should be out second week of October.

Marya Spont-Lemus: Well, thank you both for taking the time to talk, and I’m excited to see your final piece at the Body Passages show in October!

Featured image: This is a black-and-white, full shot of Maxine Patronik (left) and Lani T. Montreal (right) posing upright on the floor in front of a stage. Lani wears a t-shirt and light jeans, lunges slightly, and faces away from the camera. Maxine wears a black tank-top and black pants. Maxine bends both knees and twists her torso toward Lani. Maxine’s arms are spread and bent and she looks toward Lani’s left hand, which is teaching toward the stage and back wall. Lani’s right hand reaches slightly back. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Marya Spont-Lemus (she/her/hers/Ms.) is a fiction writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator focused on teen creative, leadership, and professional development. She lives and works on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.

Sarah-Ji (she/her) is a movement photographer and abolitionist who documents freedom struggles in Chicago. She is also an active member of For the People Artists Collective, a squad of Black and artists of color who also organize and create work that “uplifts and projects struggle, resistance, liberation, and survival within and for marginalized communities and movements.” For nearly a decade she has created a visual archive of liberation struggles for Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, and intersex lives. She documents and sheds light on the everyday people of Chicago who show up and actively resist systemic, hyper-local and social oppression. Thus, her camera becomes a tool of liberation and a pathway toward envisioning a world without police and prisons, where struggle does not take precedence over love, justice, and community. Her photography illustrates the power of sustaining strong relationships as organizing artists while committing to the heavy lift of resistance and social activism.

This interview was shortened for length and clarity. 

Ireashia: Tell me a little about how you came to photography and what drew you to it.

Sarah-Ji: My dad was a news reporter when we lived in Korea, and so as part of his job he kind of became an amateur photographer. So we always had a camera. When we were moving from Seoul to Chicago, my dad bought an old Canon pocket camera that took 110 film. It was a rangefinder camera, really small. He bought it at a Duty-Free shop in Tokyo when we had a layover. That was the camera I started playing around with when I was a teenager, which was when I first started doing photography. I’m pretty much self-taught, so I learned by fiddling around. When I graduated from grad school, as a graduation present I bought myself a 35mm Nikon SLR. So that’s how I started doing photography. Basically started taking my camera with me everywhere, and kind of became the designated photographer, wherever I happened to be.

Ireashia: How does it nourish you, creatively? Do you ever feel bored by it, or are you always finding new ways or new things to discover with photography?

Sarah-Ji: I feel like photography was the first thing that I picked up where I felt like I could create something visually that I felt good about. And also, the thing that I love so much about photography is the way it enables me to preserve memories. And for me, memories are such a huge thing because moving to the U.S., my immigration was such a huge disruption, for me personally. I was six years old when we left. And I remember as a child just being afraid of losing my memories of Korea. Especially because there was also the language change as well. When I first came to the U.S., the policy back then in the schools was to encourage parents to speak only English in the home so we would pick English up faster…which is a really horrible policy, because then it discourages bilingualism or multilingualism. Actually, knowing more than one language is really beneficial for the way the brain works. So, unfortunately, my brother and I both lost our Korean when we were really young because what my school principal told my parents to do. So there’s always this angst of losing memories that are also tied to language. Photography became a kind of tool for me, so that going forward I can preserve my memories. This is a tool for me to preserve my memories.

Image: People lined up facing the camera, holding up black posters with the names of victims of torture by Chicago police inscribed in white. Behind them is a transparent banner with the words “Reparations NOW!” inscribed in orange. The photo was taken February 2015 at the Rally for Reparations organized by The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Project NIA, Amnesty International USA, and We Charge Genocide. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Ireashia: Yeah, that’s how I feel about it too. When I came to photography, it was a means to validate that I existed, and to validate bodies like mine, skin like mine, people like me exist in this world. And kind of like what you said about preserving – I was here at this time, on this day – tracking growth, in a way. I find that so significant and valuable about photography. Do you consider yourself an activist or a movement artist? How would you identify yourself?

Sarah-Ji: I do identify as a movement photographer because my work does primarily focus on social movements here in Chicago. That’s not how I started in photography, though. I kind of started getting more serious about my photography after I had my daughter 14 years ago. And so she became my model in terms of someone always around for me to take photos of – so she probably has one of the best-documented baby-hoods, or toddler-hoods, of any child. It also was a way for me to preserve memories that I had with her, because…you think that you’ll remember everything, especially when it’s your child – but you don’t. I was a mommy-blogger, basically. I had a photo blog where I would write about being a mom, I would post photos. And when she was around six, that’s when I first became politicized. Before then I wasn’t really political, and I happened to find out about a protest happening in Pilsen. It was an occupation of a field house at a school there, at Whittier Dual Language Academy. And the moms found out that CPS was about to demolish their field house, which they had been using as a community center for years. And so, they took over the field house.

Ireashia: I think I remember that…

Sarah-Ji: It was exactly 8 years ago, literally to the day, that it started. And I remember finding out about it on Facebook randomly, and I’m just like oh my gosh. When I heard that the police had surrounded it and they weren’t letting people allow food or water in I was like this is fucked up, what should I do. So I just randomly showed up with my camera. I’m this mom from the North side – no connection to the community, nothing at all, I have no idea about organizing, I just showed up with a camera. I was lucky the organizers didn’t just kick me out. And that was kind of where I got my baptism by fire and an introduction to organizing. That was the first struggle that I documented in Chicago. After that, I did a lot of education justice-related work, and that eventually led to meeting Mariame Kaba. It was through meeting Mariame and her mentorship that I was introduced to work that was being led by, mostly by young Black people in Chicago, which would eventually lead to the workaround and against police violence – what is essentially abolitionist work. Part of being a photographer, I see that as a tool in my organizing. Because, literally, it’s the one thing I know how to do and that I feel comfortable with, and the most at home in terms of how confident I feel doing it.

Image: A portrait of the artist Sarah-Ji standing in front of a brick wall wearing a patterned dress. She looks directly at the camera with a slight smile. Portrait captured by Ireashia Bennett.

Ireashia: We all have a role, you know? And I think that, even intuitively, you just kind of took to this role, right? You could’ve just scrolled past that story, that event, like whatever. But you said no, this needs to be documented. And that’s so important, especially for organizers and activists that may not always have money to pay to document these actions or document these events. The fact that you just took ownership of that role is so important. I remember seeing your work around 2015, mostly when We Charge Genocide became really known – and I was like wow, who is this person!? Obviously, you like your activism to intersect with your artistry. Can you tell me more about how you balance your activism and your art – or are they kind of the same thing to you?

Sarah-Ji: Right now, at this point, they’re very much intertwined, because my primary work is documenting freedom struggles in Chicago. It’s taken away time from the other photography I used to do. I used to do a lot of street photography, or even just documenting [my daughter]  Cadence’s life. I don’t do as much of that as I used to, and part of that is because so much of my photography energy is put into documenting the movement. And sometimes I’ll be just spent, and those are the times I just don’t want to have a camera. But what I feel is really important, I chose the name, the moniker Love and Struggle Photos, because I feel that those two are so intertwined in the work that I document. Because what I’ve learned from the organizing work here in Chicago is that love is so foundational. People are fighting for their lives, people are fighting for their children’s lives, and their parents’ lives, their grandparents lives…and love is so essential to that. So when I do document protests or any campaign, it’s really important for me to find those moments of love, where it captures that emotion that is interpreted or that is practiced as struggle. And that translates to how I document my own everyday life. It’s still important for me to document the people I love because this is the community that surrounds me and holds me and they’re the ones that make it possible for me to do the work that I do, I couldn’t do it without them. And it’s a reminder to me as to why I do this work as well, because my community are also organizers and they’re part of the same struggle here in Chicago.

Ireashia: What do you think the role is for photographers – in your opinion – who want to get involved in the movement or want to just do work?

Sarah-Ji: For me, I see the role as capturing people’s stories – but not in a photojournalist kind of way. It’s really important for me to have relationships with the people that I’m documenting, because I want to know what their story is that they want told. Especially when there are specific struggles, there’s a specific narrative. In any type of media strategy there are certain things that the people who are organizing will want to be told as part of the story. That’s important for me to know as a photographer who is in solidarity with people, that I’m not just going in without any knowledge about a campaign and just taking pictures…I don’t think that is effective. It’s important for photographers who want to be movement photographers to be in relationships with the communities they’re documenting. You have to be on their side. You have to be in the struggle with them. Telling the right narrative is an important role for photographers, and as much as possible, allowing people to tell their own stories. I don’t want to be the voice for people, I don’t want to be the eyes for people. Especially if the struggle doesn’t impact me personally, I can’t know what the whole story is, so that’s where the relationship building is really important.

Ireashia: I think about my origins as a journalist, and how after I graduated I was like, this is a lot of power, and I don’t feel comfortable with that. I think journalists, and people who call themselves storytellers, and who work specifically in marginalized communities – that power differential is really imbalanced. What is a more ethical way to go about it? What is a more mindful and intentional way of being an outsider, being someone who isn’t local to Chicago, but also having something personal at stake, having a connection to the struggle in some way…just, being more mindful, you know?

Sarah-Ji: Yeah, it’s really important to have accountability. That’s really important to me. When I document things for specific organizations, the ones that I’ve had long-term relationships with, they know they can always come to me. Especially if they have a certain visual that they’re trying to capture in a specific protest or action…they know that they can communicate that to me so that that’s what I’ll capture. There’s also dangers involved in photographing protests, because you can document something that’s an arrestable action, and you don’t want to endanger people. So being aware of what I put out there on the internet. Like if certain people have certain vulnerabilities where they can’t allow certain images to be shown, then I’m not going to put that out there.

Image: A person of color stands in front of a wall with shelves that have pamphlets with the words “CHIRAQ And Its Meaning(s)” by Project NIA. This person holds a dry-erase board with “Community Safety Is… Love in Action. Honoring, Listening, Growing, and Holding Each Other.” in the center. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Ireashia: I think that in this time where it feels like to show that you’re producing work – like quantity is always over quality these days. How do you deal with social media bullshit? When I say that I mean producing work that isn’t always timely but producing work that’s for you.

Sarah-Ji: I think the nature of the work with movement photography when things happen fast, it is important to get things out within a certain time-frame, because that’ll be needed by the organizations that are doing the work. It is stressful, and it does keep me from being able to do more long-term projects. I’ve only had a few. But the ones that I’ve done have been really meaningful for me.

I had a project with Mariame Kaba called “Community Safety Looks Like”, and it was a whiteboard project where we asked people to envision what would community safety look like to you? And they would write their answers, and we collected these photos and Mariame had a Tumblr of them. We put out a book of some of the photos from that. It’s an ongoing project. People have kind of taken that and done other things with it. You’ll see a lot of whiteboard photo projects – and for me, that specific project was really meaningful because it was part of having the community reimagine what safety looks like, which to me is a huge part of abolition. Photography, for me, is a tool towards abolition. For me, my end game is abolition. The thing that I know how to do is photography. So I’m going to use photography in whatever ways will contribute to creating the conditions that we’re going to need for abolition to really be possible.

Image: Photo of a group of people rallying in downtown Chicago. In the center of the image are three people of color holding up a sign which says: “Fund Schools Not Jails” in the center. On either side of the words are images of painted fists with broken shackles around the wrists. On the bottom right of the poster is “FTP Collective.” Photo was taken April 2016 at the Shut Down the Chi Rally. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Ireashia: I’ve been following the work of For the People Artists Collective for about a year. And I’m just really – not just impressed, but really inspired by how dope everyone seems to just love on each other, how genuine the love and the respect for one another as artists, as people, just seems to emanate from FTP. Can you share a little bit about how FTP started, and your involvement in it, and how has being a part of a collective like that uplifted and supported you?

Sarah-Ji: Yeah! So, FTP was co-founded by Monica Trinidad who’s been doing movement art not just in Chicago, but also nationally for national campaigns for a few years now. It started the winter of 2016, that January we first came together as a group. Monica is my best friend, she’s one of 3 best friends I have. When she started FTP I was like, okay, whatever, I wasn’t thinking about being a part of it, but Monica has been one of the few people who’s been challenging me to accept my identity as an artist. It was so hard for me to own that, and I think that’s true for a lot of people who are in FTP, because most of the people are self-taught. And so, for those of us who haven’t had a lot of formal training as artists, just claiming that identity of an artist is a huge deal, and to be able to support each other in that. The other thing about FTP is that we don’t identify solely as artists, we also identify as organizers. That’s an important part of being a part of FTP is that it has to be connected to the work that’s going on, the art that we create. For the People was inspired by something that Emory Douglas had actually said about how artists can’t just be in these ivory towers making their art, they have to be amongst the people and they have to make art amongst the people. There is a lot of history behind movement art, and I think in Chicago there is a really rich legacy of protest art and movement art. Some of that has really been within the academics sphere. When I first started organizing, the artists that I knew who were doing the work were mostly academics. It was really after We Charge Genocide that art-making became an important part of the protests that we were a part of, whether it was making banners or making puppets – any kind of visuals that were created, and it was coming from everyday people. So yeah, For the People Chi has been supporting a lot of the campaigns I’ve been going on – the first one they were really involved in was the Bye Anita campaign. It laid a good foundation because we took our cues from the organizers, and the organizers were primarily Black, queer, women and femmes in Chicago. And, from the beginning, that’s who we really kind of tried to center in the work that we do. We’re all people of color, first of all, as an organization, and most of us are queer. I think that impacts whose leadership we want to follow in terms of the organizing we want to do. The Bye Anita campaign was just thrilling, you know? Something was happening every day, and just to see that campaign be successful was really great for FTP to be a part of that.

Ireashia: Are you working on any projects or anything right now? If you want to share.

Sarah-Ji: I’ve been thinking a lot about my roots, you know? I’ve had a lot of family members pass away this year, and also just with things happening politically in Korea, on the Korean peninsula. Because I have roots in both North and South Korea, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my family history and grappling with the disconnection that I’ve felt just because I was raised so far away from my roots. Something that I would really like to do in the future is to go back to Korea and visit the places that have been important to my family history and do a place-based photo project. I don’t know how that would work…

Ireashia: You could get a Propeller Grant!

Sarah-Ji: [laughs] Yeah…but just in terms of exploring my identity of who I am, where do I come from…It’s so important to me to have those answers, to have those questions answered. And I’ve been in therapy this past year, and that’s one of the things I’ve been exploring with my therapist is where do I come from, and how have my experiences from childhood impacted who I am today. I’m trying to find what puzzle pieces I have to fit together to figure out my own healing, you know? And I feel like a lot of that has to do with feeling like I don’t have a place to belong. I just think specifically with my identity as a Korean woman; a lot of Koreans fled the city 20 years ago, most of them moved to the suburbs. So I don’t even get to see a lot of Korean people in the city anymore, and just a hunger for being with my people. But at the same time, knowing that a lot of that comes with discomfort because of the political differences I have with most of the Koreans that I know. The Koreans I grew up with were all raised in Evangelical Korean Churches and that came with its own baggage of politics. When I go visit my family and I try to talk to them about things like police violence, even just the harm Koreans have done to Black communities – that’s a really difficult topic for my family members to even listen to. But at the same time, I have this yearning to fully understand what it means to be Korean and to know where it is that I come from. If I could do a photo project to figure that out, that’d be great.

Image: A young person of color stands in front of a chain-link fence, looking directly at the camera. They are holding up a poster with an image that has the words “We Charge Genocide” superimposed in the center of the poster. The hashtag #chicopwatch is placed on the lower right corner of the poster. Photo taken October 22, 2014, at the Break Down the Wall of Silence Protest Against Police Brutality, organized by We Charge Genocide. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Ireashia: That would be really brilliant…I can already see it! I feel like for some reason there’s something in the air about feeling rooted somewhere, which comes from displacement and familial displacement. For me, it was really important for me to know where I came from first, so that I can feel secure within myself enough to enter different communities and not appropriate or not identify too much to the point where I’m blurring boundaries with my own identity. I totally see why it’s so important to you and why there’s a yearning. Plus, you can give that to your daughter, to your family, your chosen family, as a gift, I imagine. You said your work is very taxing emotionally, physically – how do you kind of balance being out in these streets, and just taking care of yourself first?

Sarah-Ji: Well, I mean honestly I don’t do a very good job of that…my therapist has been trying to help me with that. She’s really good at reminding me about taking care of all parts of myself. But Cadence, my daughter, is really good about forcing me to not do as much as I would. If it weren’t for Cadence, I would probably do twice as much as I do, and she reminds me of the importance of caring for her, you know? I don’t think she really thinks about me, but you know she reminds me it’s important to her that I make the time for her needs. When she was little, she would just follow me to protests, but she’s at the age where she does her own thing, so I can’t just like take her with me everywhere anymore. Also, the people I’m in a community with –  my chosen family, my friends, people who are closest to me – they’ll help me to recognize when I’m just doing too much and when I should just take a step back. In the past year, I’ve felt a little bit more comfortable with not having to be everywhere. Especially because I have a full-time job, and I think a lot of people don’t realize I have a full-time job, but I’ve also just been physically feeling the results of doing this work for 8 years, in terms of documenting movements on a regular basis here in Chicago. I’m tired a lot. My body just feels worn out. So out of physical necessity, I’ve been taking more time to myself. But honestly, I feel like happiest when I’m doing the work. That’s when I feel most energized. But I also have been recognizing my physical limitations because I have chronic pain, and I suffer from migraines… there are other things that force me to slow down. But I’m still learning to accept that as a good thing, the slowing down part.

Ireashia: It can be kind of hard, because I feel like you have been so visible, and your work has exonerated and uplifted and that feels really heavy, I can imagine. I’m glad that you’re figuring out your balance, your flow, because that’s important.

Sarah-Ji: And I’m really hoping that – I would like to see other photographers, especially young photographers, doing that work as well, and I would love to support them doing that work.

Ireashia: Like a mentor?

Sarah-Ji: Yeah, and just having somebody else show up would be great! [laughs]

Ireashia: [laughs] That’s real. How do you envision your impact as a movement photographer in terms of Chicago’s activist history?

Sarah-Ji: One of the reasons I do the work that I do and I put so much of myself into this work is because I think that a visual history of resistance is really important for the people who are in the struggle now to be able to see visually how their struggle is being played out and is being created, as well as for future generations. I know that when I look at photos from past resistance – the Civil Rights Movement, and even beyond – it has an impact. There’s something about photos that I think people can relate to on a really visceral level. And I’m kind of a completist, you know, so for me being consistent is really important. And I hope that’s what I can give back to Chicago, is a consistent history of resistance over a long period of time. Because what I know for sure is that resistance is always happening and has been happening for decades in this city. I would feel really good about my work if that’s what I can leave behind. And at the same time, photography for me is a tool for something that’s greater. For me, it always goes back to abolition. And I feel like so much of the work that is being done in Chicago is abolitionist in nature, even if the people may not see it that way or may not identify as abolitionists. When you’re creating conditions so that people’s needs are met? That’s abolitionist. Anything that will make police and prisons less necessary, to me, that’s abolitionist. I always say that my primary motivation in life is not so much the photography that I do, but it’s this vision for abolition. I use photography as a tool to also help other people to envision that future by seeing the resistance that’s happening now to create that future. Even just those whiteboard projects – seeing how other people view community safety can plant seeds in people’s imaginations, and that’s what I hope for.

Ireashia: I think you’re doing a great job. 8 years is pretty consistent.

Sarah-Ji: Thanks!

Ireashia: Those are all the questions that I have, do you have anything you would like to add or you would like to specifically talk to or speak to?

Sarah-Ji: All I would want to say is I’m so grateful to the people in Chicago, to the communities who have been resisting for so long, because I’ve learned so much from them. For me, I consider it a real honor to be able to document that resistance and those struggles and I have so much love for the people, and I see so much love, and they’ve given me so much love, as well. And I really appreciate that.

Ireashia: That emanates through all of your work.

Sarah-Ji: Thank you.

This article is published as part of Envisioning Justice, a 19-month initiative presented by Illinois Humanities that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact.

Featured Image: Portrait collage. Sarah-Ji looks directly at the camera with a slight smile on her face. She is wearing a white, salmon, orange, and patterned colored dress with her hands interlocked in front of her. In the background is a television glitch graphic with the painting titled “Faces (Faces a la Picasso)” created by the artist, scholar and activist Margaret T. Burroughs. The image is framed by a 35mm film strip. Photo and collage were created by Ireashia Bennett. All other images were sourced online.

Ireashia Monét (they/them) is a Chicago-based self-taught photographer, filmmaker, writer, and multimedia artist originally from PG County, MD.

“Beyond the Page” digs into the process and practice of writers and artists who work at the intersection of literary arts and other fields. This interview is the third of three with interdisciplinary artist Udita Upadhyaya about “nevernotmusic” — a solo exhibition of scores activated by curated, collaborative performances — and her process of developing these scores into a book (the first and second interviews are online). After the book’s release in September, I met with Udita to reflect on the book, the process of creating it (and personalizing each copy), and the connection between music and grief in her work.

Get a copy of the limited edition book by contacting Udita. Find @uditau on Twitter and Instagram. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marya Spont-Lemus: How are you feeling about Saturday’s book release event?

Udita Upadhyaya: I’m still processing, but I am feeling good. It was great to see the book in its final form. The book is really beautiful! I have not spent enough time with it yet, but it’s really beautiful. And the event was, too, and it felt very seasonal in this lovely way. It was very weird to be sweating when doing “nevernotmusic” things, because it was hot on Saturday, as opposed to the show at Roman Susan, which happened in the thick of winter. I feel like it was lovely to see the four activations of the same scores, six months apart. I’m especially thinking of Corey [Smith]’s for some reason. I really enjoyed his return to it because he was one of the 12 performers that had treated the score as a set of instructions in a very literal way. His last performance had started with, “The score that Udita wrote for me is ‘Unfold (into you)’, and da da da da da,” and it’s just so earnest and cute how he approached it, and I really like where he took it this time too.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic.” Three copies are fanned out on a light grey surface. Most of the front cover of the top copy is visible (showing a motif of thin, gold, parallel lines forming a large triangular and a small rhomboid shape), as is the book’s gold stitching. The cover reads “nevernotmusic” and “Udita Upadhyaya” in gold text, on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: This happened with a few of the performances at TriTriangle on Saturday, but Corey’s felt particularly marked by the presence of children. [laughs]

UU: Oh my gosh! I forgot about that. Yeah, there were no kids at Corey’s original performance.

MSL: I wondered how the presence of the child — sort of just walking up, and looking at him quizzically, and examining the cords — impacted others’ experience of the performance, and Corey’s of performing. At least from where I was sitting, it looked like Corey was smiling a bit or almost trying not to laugh at points, which I can imagine might have changed the way someone read what Corey was saying about love as compared to if he had been speaking and singing with a more somber expression. Anyway, there were several children on Saturday.

Image: Corey Smith performs in response to Udita Upadhyaya’s score “Dear Corey: Unfold (into you),” at the “nevernotmusic” book release at TriTriangle. Corey sits at a long table, with a microphone, laptop, looper, and a small stringed instrument atop it. Corey leans toward the microphone. On the floor in front of the performer is a small child sitting on their heels and looking up at Corey. Sheets of paper are on the table and on the floor. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

UU: The kids were definitely a very visible marker of how the book release was different than the show itself. Another was the space itself, which was also bare without the scores on the walls. I had a couple of people write to me before the event, “Is this kid-friendly?” and I was like, “Yeah, sure! Bring your kids!” It was pretty interesting to see, for example, Nora [Sharp] or Tannaz [Motevalli] perform around kids. When Nora said “fuck” I was just like, “Nooooooo!” [both laugh] But I guess I’m a little more precious about that word around kids than most other people.

I actually had a really lovely moment with another kid. Right after Tannaz’s performance, this kid — one of my friend Ilene’s twins — came up to me and was like, “Can you tell me what just happened? What was that scene about?” And I was just like, “Whoa, okay. What do you think it was about?” We sort of came around to how life can be difficult, and Tannaz was on the floor for a lot of it, but then she carried the chair with her teeth, and “What does the word ‘cradle’ mean?” I feel like that conversation was definitely one of my favorite moments, which would have not happened with an adult. When an adult experiences performance art that they don’t get, they’re just like, “I don’t get it. Bye.”

MSL: Or they hide it.

UU: Or they hide it, right. Versus a six- or seven-year-old who’s like, “Can you please tell me what just happened, because I don’t get it?” Like, I’ll try! It’s probably not what Tannaz was thinking, but I’ll try. [both laugh]

Image: Tannaz Motevalli performs in response to the score “Dear Tannaz: Cradle (youmeusthem).” Tannaz occupies the right side of the image — barefoot, wearing a long red and black dress, and pulling the top of her body through the inside of a wooden chairframe, which is flipped upside-down. Tannaz’s backside is reflected in a short, mirrored, rectangular column on the left side of the image. A handful of people are visible in the reflection and/or the background of the image, including a child and parent at center. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: What were some of the other surprising moments or favorite responses that you got to the evening?

UU: I feel like that was definitely the most fun, in response to the performances. For me, for obvious reasons, the evening was much more about the book, really, because the book is personalized for each recipient with a mini-score that is similar to the title of each of the scores in the book, or the original collection of 12. It was this mix of trying to think on my feet to come up with individual scores and then catching myself and being like, “Hey, closest friends, I cannot think about you right now. How about we meet when we’re scheduled to meet and I’ll write you a note then?” So it was sort of weird, for me, to have these little intimate moments within the chaos of the evening, to ask people, “What do you need now in your life? What’s going on?” and to think, “What should my mini-score for you be?”

A really delightful thing was what I was calling “speed-art-ing” — like speed-dating but speed-art-ing — because I had to be like, “What’s up? Tell me about you,” in order to write mini-scores for people I didn’t know as well. One was for Rebecca, who I know through Meekling Press, who I’ve met a couple of times but I don’t really know. I think the thing I wrote for her was, “Sigh (to find, to float, to forget you remember),” because she said something like, “I forget everything when I’m put on the spot.” And when I wrote that mini-score to her she was like, “Oh my god! How do you know that I have been sighing a lot?” It was this really sweet moment of connection and care in the middle of the chaos.

Similar moments happened with people I didn’t know at all. I feel like I talked about this in the second interview, and I have been thinking about this: While I want all the books to find homes that are loving and caring, I also feel like, in this case, it’s always surprising to me when somebody’s getting the book that doesn’t know me at all. So writing personalized notes for people I didn’t know and was “speed-art-ing” with was funny. It was weird because I would ask, “What’s on your mind?”, and then sometimes in my head I’d be like, “Well, now we’ve been interrupted three times and I don’t remember what’s on your mind.” It was a fun challenge to try to listen deeply, to try and write a score in the middle of a very full social event.

I also had a lovely moment with this one kid — like fresh-human; I’m trying not to say “freshman,” so “freshperson” from DePaul University. Heather McShane [from TriTriangle] teaches a class there for incoming freshpeople, which I had visited two days before the release to give an artist talk and talk about the book. And this kid raised his hand, “How can I buy the book?” So I said, “Come on Saturday!” I think he was the first person to buy one. Writing a score for him was pretty special and weird and sweet, because I was like, “You’re really fresh and hopeful and I like it!”

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). On a wooden tabletop, the book lies open to the centerfold, showing black paper, gold thread, and gold writing. The word “Dear” is legible in gold type, followed by gold handwriting: “Rebecca: Sigh (to find, to float, to forget you remember).” Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: Thinking about where the personalized mini-scores go, and moving to the book itself, I’d love to hear more about the letter that’s in the book–

UU: There’s actually 13. I’m kidding. [both laugh]

MSL: Yes, right. Every score’s a love letter! Then, at the centerfold, there’s your more general “welcome to ‘nevernotmusic’” letter, which is the one letter that’s not a score … until you personalize it and make it a score. We had talked before about how you were considering adding other features to the final version of the book, like where the “envelope” of the book makes you open to the centerfold, which then orients you to the project. But this element of having a “Dear [blank]” where you write a mini-score for each recipient of the book — I hadn’t heard you talk about that before. So I would just love to hear where that idea came from.

UU: Yeah. You cannot edit out what I’m about to say, even if that means writing, “You cannot edit out what I’m going to say.” I got that idea from my brilliant friend Marya Spont-Lemus. [both laugh]

MSL: Wait, really?

UU: Yeah! You know how I was struggling with what the edition should be and you said this thing about, “I really like that potentially you could know everyone that takes a book home with them.” And I was just like, “Well, watch me get to know–” [both laugh]

MSL: That was not a leading question. I actually had no idea that that conversation had anything to do with it. That’s really funny.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya at the book release for “nevernotmusic.” The artist leans over a table, looking down as she writes in gold pen inside a copy of her book. Next to Udita are two other copies, open to their centerfolds, where gold thread is visible. The artist wears a light-colored, textured sweater and black skirt. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

UU: Yeah, that’s why we didn’t talk about it yet, because it happened as I was looking over our conversation from the mock-up. And, I like writing scores! [both laugh] And I really like getting to know people, and I really like playing with words. I mean, it felt a little bit challenging in the chaos of the opening event, but since then — the release was a few days ago — I’ve been reaching out to the people that I know bought the book but didn’t get a personalized score to be like, “Hey, we gotta go get coffee because I need to write you that score! No pressure!”

But secretly I hate that that’s a blank until the score is there. Lauren [Zallo of Match Books] and I played with the idea of there being a line here so it would be a little more obvious — like “Dear [blank].” I mean, it really bothers me if there isn’t a personalized score. I’m not going to push for it too hard, because I don’t have, like, complete agency over who’s getting the books, but it is very important to me. And how I’ve been doing it is different. I finally gave myself permission to give whoever already has a score in the book the same score as before — like you just saw when SUCROSE dropped by. For them I’m just like, [laughs] “That’s your score! Or the title of your score. I’m not making up another one for you, please!” But it’s otherwise been kind of the same process as the original scores, just very shrunk into … like, if I don’t know the person, a 5-6-minute conversation. And really it sort of feels like writing back what they said.

MSL: Listening and reflecting back to them what you talked about.

UU: Yeah. And in those conversations — and we should have one, too, because I’ve struggled with yours — in those conversations there’s also a question of, “What do you need permission for? What is it that you’re not letting yourself do?” The reason I’ve struggled for yours is because I want to give you so much more than five words or whatever. [Marya laughs] Aww! No, but it’s true. When I’ve struggled, it’s been because I’ve known the person too well or something.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). The book lies open to the centerfold, showing black paper, gold thread, and gold type. Part of the lower page is visible, with the text beginning, “Welcome to nevernotmusic,” and including part of a description of the project of 12 scores and phrases like “The scores play with the wonder of being alive even …” and “The scores are written as witnesses ….” Behind the open centerfold is part of the front cover of another copy. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: How many scores, then, did you write at the event? Approximately.

UU: Hmm. I have it in my phone somewhere. At the event, there were a bunch of books that were bought, but no one remembers who bought them. [both laugh] It’s slowly revealing itself because people are posting about it on Instagram and I’m like, “You have a book? Okay.” But I think I wrote [counting] — not too many — about five at the event? I still have a few “IOUs” in terms of scores, because I’m delivering books this week for people that were not able to be at the release.

MSL: My other question before we move on to talking about the book as an object is, what happens with any remaining copies in the edition of 50? Do they also get scores? How does that happen, or how do you think about that?

UU: Ideally, I think every copy gets a score. I feel like I’ve been doing math in my head since I saw the books. [both laugh] I’m just trying to figure out, “How many do I want to hold onto?” and “Who are the people that said they cannot make it to the event but want one?” All of those little things. About 35 copies are accounted for at this point. Match Books is also going to the Chicago Art Book Fair, so some of those sales may happen there. And I do want the book to live in artist book collections. At those, the copy is going to say, “Dear One,” and then I’m going to write something about my relationship with that collection. For example, with the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC, I have a dear connection with the space, and I wrote to Kayla Anderson to literally just say, “Thank you, because you were a crucial part of me realizing that the book form is already present in my work, and I just haven’t leaned into it in quite readily yet.” The endearment for the copy that is now housed at Joan Flasch reads, “Dear One: SINK (into every fiber, every vowel … each history).” So I can imagine the score for various collections to be similarly addressed to another person that feels similarly moved in or attached to that space. I think it would be more complicated if I were reaching out to artist book collections outside of Chicago that I haven’t been to, which I also want to do!

I don’t really like when the book goes out without a little note here, at the “Dear [blank]” part. Because it’s exactly what just happened to you — you miss that that’s there when you’re looking for it, because in the format of the book that is the blankest page of them all. One of the people I didn’t know that got the book actually posted a really funny Instagram video about how their page was blank. [both laugh] I don’t like that! The “Dear” feels very lonely up there without a mini-score.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). The book lies open to the centerfold (in close-up), showing black paper, knotted gold thread (the book’s stitching), and gold type (reading “Dear”). Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: So we talked in late May about the first mock-up, and a week or so after that I got a glimpse of a slightly different mock-up. I see aspects of both in this, and a lot of the changes I see are things that you were talking about wanting to change. But then there are also exciting surprises, like the mini-scores.

One of the other biggest differences is these lovely gold motifs or traces that are behind the vellum — the vellum the 12 original scores are on. You had talked in our second interview about that page feeling kind of blank or wanting to do something there — like maybe having a gold line continue through the book — and while, to me, this feels different than how I internalized that idea, it feels related. I’m wondering, where do these traces come from, how do you imagine us engaging with them, or how do they reflect or inform the scores? Just however you think about them.

UU: Yeah. I feel like I should start with how I have been feeling very emotional about the book in a way that surprises me. I basically cried the whole morning of the book release. Not for any other reason than “This is over.” I’m so going to talk more about kids going away to college. [Marya laughs] But this actually felt like the gestational period was over and the baby was, like, born and done. I feel like I haven’t looked at the book much because — I don’t know if this is like imposter syndrome or dysphoria or something — I cannot. I just spent too much time making it, and it feels really emotional.

And I think those gold scores behind the vellum were sort of a goodbye. They are responses in gestural form. So this [points at gold gesture], for example, is literally this [points at part of original score]. They’re all from there. It was me revisiting the scores six months later and also letting myself say goodbye to the scores. Because I haven’t ever felt this — well, I guess I have felt it in performance-based works, that they happen for this period of time and then they stop happening. It sort of felt like that feeling of the last show, or the last run. I don’t know if it’s mourning, but I’m definitely feeling like, “Okay, now it exists in the world, and I need to just let it go do its thing. I have no control over it any more.”

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). Part of one page-spread is visible, with opaque black paper on one page (on which three thin gold lines touch to form large open triangles) and with whitish vellum on the other page (with lines, open triangles, and letters printed on the other side of the sheet of vellum, and slightly visible through it). In the background, beyond this copy, is part of the front cover of two other copies, with gold stitching and straight gold lines on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: Does it feel different to feel that way about a physical object than it does a performance?

UU: I think I feel that way about all my work. This is probably not the best practice, but I don’t open up work that has been packed up after a show for a long time. Because I’m done. I think part of it is me not engaging in the healthiest ways of healing or getting distance. The book is still very much my baby and I love it and I can’t wait for people to read it and want it, but I also still know it as well as I did in February, so I haven’t needed to hide inside of it yet. And I think it was on Sunday where I was just crying with joy because I was so proud of myself. [both laugh] It was a bit like, “Wow, you made this thing! It’s beautiful! Good for you!” You know.

MSL: So there have been multiple kinds of crying happening.

UU: There’s been a lot of crying. And you know this, but I did get really awful news about somebody really dear to me passing away, so there is a grieving that preceded the book release event.

MSL: Like a cumulative sort of set of emotions are impacting? …

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). Part of one page is visible, with a wavy, gold, gestural line (shaped somewhat like an elongated wave of water) descending across the black paper. In the background, beyond that page, is part of the front cover of two other copies, with gold stitching and straight gold lines on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

UU: Yeah. So somebody that was very important to me in my childhood passed away at the end of August, and September 2nd is the death anniversary of a really close childhood friend, September 5th is my grandmother’s birthday — in fact, we should talk about her for a second — and then September 8th was the release. And I literally, pun intended, had not had any release until the morning of the event where I was like, “And now I’m crying … about all of these things. This is happening. It’s finally happening.”

The reason I was saying that we should talk about my grandmother is because when I was looking at the two articles from before, I realized that we never actually talked about the title of this project. [Marya laughs] It has so much to do with my relationship with my grandmother, who was a musician — this is going to explain how I grieve — who died when I was about 12 or 13. After she died, I quit my music lessons, stopped really listening to music — it became this thing that I would only do to cry. I didn’t realize exactly what was happening, but if I was in the presence of live music, I would start crying. So I cannot be in a room of live music and connect to it. I have a lot of ways to dissociate it, which I use. But most often — especially if it’s Hindustani classical music or Carnatic classical music, which are the two from India — I will just sit there and cry. It’s ridiculous. Like, I will just cry for four hours. So I stopped going to musical things and really dreaded the, like, friend or date question of, “What kind of music do you listen to?” “Please don’t ask me that question. …” But I didn’t know what was happening, it was just something I sort of put aside.

And then a few years ago, I think my first year in Chicago, I was at a party and I was very drunk — which is why this happened, so I’m thankful for it. This person who was a pianist was asking something about playing tabla, which I used to do as a kid, and I answered him — because I was drunk — without that wall up of “Lalalalala, I don’t hear this question!” And I knew the answer. I still don’t remember what his question was and definitely not what the answer was, but drunk-me knew. Then he asked, “Oh, are you a musician?” and I was like, “No, I don’t even listen to music.” He was like, “That makes no sense.” And, again, because of the altered state, I ended up saying, “My grandmother is a musician,” and this person was like, “Oh, that makes sense. Every time you hear music you grieve her.” And it’s so funny, because I don’t remember what life was like, what I thought about my relationship with music, before making this connection, but there was a clear moment of things connecting, like the puzzle finally fits.

Since then, there has been more tenderness about this ambiguity about music but also more effort to step into it. But, I mean, I still have the muscle memory of that release, the same manifestation of grieving. On Friday — the night before the book release — I was supposed to go to Ragamala, which is this amazing thing that happens at the Chicago Cultural Center every September — a full night, 14 hours or so, of Indian classical music — and I just could not get myself to go. Because I knew there was grief already in my system at that point, and I would just sit there and mourn.

But after the conversation with that pianist, as I started looking at this more closely and started working with other people — Corey, Ethan [T. Parcell], Lindsey [Barlag Thornton] — who had music at the center of their practices in various ways, I realized that music was everywhere and I couldn’t run away from it. And I was finding melody and rhythm in everything. Because it’s not like I didn’t feel when there wasn’t music. But music worked differently for me. On Saturday when I was crying I basically went out and looked for, like, cheesy music to help me keep crying. [both laugh]

MSL: Like a valve sort of thing?

UU: Yeah. So the title, “nevernotmusic,” really came from my grandmother. I do think that the show and the book and everything about it is, in a way, an ode to her — you know, her memory, and me finally being able to gain an understanding of and track where grief lives in my body, and what my response is to that loss. I mean, it is also about other losses, but I can imagine an alternate life where, if she hadn’t died at that point, my practice would be almost entirely music-based, because I was doing vocal lessons and playing two instruments, and it was easier to quit because I was a teenager and I was a brat! But I feel like I wouldn’t have had this same reason to run away or even the same permission to run away from music had she been around. There would have been more pressure to continue — in a good way, now I can assume.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail), showing part of the score, “Dear Tannaz: Cradle (youmeusthem).” Part of one page-spread is visible, with opaque black paper on the upper page (where the score’s title appears in gold type) and with whitish vellum on the lower page (with lines, open triangles, and straight and curved lines of text in English and Hindi, printed in black ink). In the background, beyond this copy, is part of the front cover of two other copies, with gold stitching and straight gold lines on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: Before the interaction with that guy at the party, were you making scores or were you thinking of what you were making as scores? Or was that word also something you shied away from? I mean, because “performance scores” are a thing, but in a broader vernacular, when people talk about “scores” outside of sports —

UU: Oh yeah …

MSL: [laughs] — it seems more commonly to be about music.

UU: I think I was making scores without having the language for them. I have been thinking a lot over the last few days about this one specific studio visit I had with Amanda Graham, who I’m planning to actually write to about the book. She was a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who came to SAIC and sat with my work and said, “You’re writing scores!” And I was like, “Say more. …” [both laugh] I think it’s just about needing a community to see you, to hold you dear and reflect back what you’re working on and working through. I’ve had studio visits where Ernesto Pujol, one of my favorite people in the world and my mentor, was like, “You make work about grief!” And that is the most obvious thing ever — like, “What?! I should have known this!” — [laughs] but when he said it I felt like somebody had punched me. He’s very gentle, so not really. But I just sat there and started crying and was like, “Why would you say something so mean?” It didn’t make sense. Like how I didn’t know that what I was doing was scores, I didn’t really have the language for how art was a way of dealing with grief for me, until someone else gave it to me — or until someone else pulled me out from within my own score, or within the score of my practice.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya at the “nevernotmusic” book release at TriTriangle. The artist stands at the center of the image, gesturing with both arms while speaking. Hanging on the wall behind Udita and extending onto the floor is a blue, grey, brown, and black artwork by Jerry Bleem, which was crocheted as part of a performance in response to Udita’s score, “Dear Jerry and Nick: Hold (a hand a spine a heart a whole self).” Udita wears a light-colored, textured sweater and black skirt. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: When Amanda gave you the word “score,” how did it feel to have a word for that? If you remember. It sounds like being given the idea of grief had a visceral impact.

UU: That was horrible. I cried for a very long time. But in a good way. Everyone I told that story about grief to was just like, “What? This is so obvious. Why are you upset?” Which only added to it. Because it was like, “Everyone knows I’m making work about grief but me!” [both laugh] I think with “score” it wasn’t quite the same impact. I think it more became a discussion about score and notation, and I still use that language a lot. At the time I was talking a lot about wanting other people to perform what I was writing, or me wanting to not perform what I was writing, but also the scores needing to be embodied, to be performed. And “nevernotmusic” attends to a similar need of the writing requesting action, embodiment, performance. It does so maybe more directly since the scores are written for a specific person — with specific plans for performance. You know, the journey since that first score has resolved quite a bit. In “nevernotmusic,” it’s harder to call some of the scores “notation” because they are specifically to other people, but most of my other scores are score and notation. By which I mean, I  have secretly or not secretly performed the score myself and so writing it is a notation of a performance that has already happened — but, having the score written down, it is also a way for others to re-perform the same score. Like if — and I am toying with this idea — your mini-score is “Marya: Rest” [Marya laughs] that is also something that I would hope would be notation for you for a different time as well, right? Or for me, right? To just be like, “At some point, rest.”

Image: Detail of a crocheted piece by Jerry Bleem, which was created as part of a performance in response to Udita’s score, “Dear Jerry and Nick: Hold (a hand a spine a heart a whole self).” The piece is made of blue, grey, brown, and black plastic bags. The crocheted pattern appears like a series of connected crescents, with the white wall visible behind the artwork and through the gaps between the crescents (in turn, casting patterned shadows on the wall). Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: So how do you feel coming out of this extended project? Do you feel like you have any inklings yet about how this might impact your practice moving forward or how it has already impacted you? I know you mentioned you want this not to be the last time you work in a book form and that these scores are different than others you’ve made before.

UU: Yeah. I feel like I haven’t quite finished processing the project yet, because it has been just a few days. You know, it feels like it has existed since the time that my relationship with music and with my grandmother started. When I was making it, I didn’t realize how much the project had been gestating since like day zero. So I think that’s also where some of the sadness of this chapter of it being over comes from.

The same person, Ernesto Pujol, used to be like, “The work is ahead of you!” You know, like situating yourself in relationship to the work? Sometimes you as the person are ahead of it. You have agency and control, you are making the work. Other times you are fighting the work that wants to be born through you; you are struggling to make peace with the stories you are a vessel for. Some of my work was very difficult to make. I think it came at a very real cost. I felt like I was re-performing a lot of trauma and having a hard time. And, at the same time, that was the work that needed to be made, too, and my body couldn’t stop doing that till it was ready. Initially in response to the work that dealt more deeply and viscerally with trauma, I wanted to make work that was actually this — “nevernotmusic.” It started with me giving people what now I would call a “grounding kit” — with objects from all the senses and letting them use it — and then I would come back from that period and be like, “That didn’t feel like my work,” because it doesn’t talk about being angry and hurt and all of these important things. At that point Ernesto was like, “The work is ahead of you. You are here, and that’s the work you want to make over there.” I feel like with this project I’ve caught up to it, except I’m still a little bit behind because I’m like, “Whoa, I made that? Okay!” And this is probably where I need to gift myself a book, which I have not yet done and maybe will not do — like I need to let myself rejoice in the success of this or the kindness or the generosity of this.

All of that said, I am really, really excited about the book form. I am really, really excited about editions. I’m really excited about personalizing little things. I think I need this project to rest for a bit, and there’s other things that I’m working on that– It’s all related to each other, but it’s not the same. I think I kind of need a break from text. I think I’m more feeling a need for the large ink drawings that I’ve been working on to become more of an book object form. I actually have been thinking of them as not little books but boxes of little ink drawings. So I have all these ideas in my head. Most of them don’t have text, and I think part of it is that I’m texted out for a little bit. [laughs]

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail), showing part of the score, “Dear Ethan: (teach) love.” Part of one page-spread is visible, with opaque black paper on the upper page (where the score’s title appears in gold type) and with whitish vellum on the lower page (with gestural lines, triangles, and text in English and Hindi, printed in black ink). In the background, beyond this copy, is part of the front cover of two other copies, with gold stitching and straight gold lines on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: A quick clarifying question about the title “nevernotmusic”: I think in a previous interview, you sort of offhandedly said something like, “And Ethan’s the reason it’s called ‘nevernotmusic’ in a lot of ways.” Why is that?

UU: I remember saying that. Ethan and Corey are two of the most important collaborators in my life when it comes to the healing from music, in a way that’s different from Lindsey, who’s the person who was like, “Come! Let’s talk about music!” Ethan and Corey were like, “We will hold you through this,” as people whose primary practice is music — they both call themselves composers, at least, or “composer and performance artist” for Corey. Ethan and I also had very intimate conversations when prepping to write his score. I think he was talking about John Cage — or somebody who was performing a thing — and they sounded like they were singing, and Ethan said something about “never not singing” or “always singing, and never not singing.” And that became a thing, where at some point I was like, “Oh my god, Ethan, we are going to start doing ‘never not something’ for all of the scores.” I think I had “never not fighting” and “never not” something else. And eventually I was like, “This is ‘nevernotmusic’.” When I initially proposed the show, it was supposed to be called “Scores to Find, Scores to Follow,” which was fine for a proposal but I think all of us were just like, “Naaah. That’s not the name of this project.” So Ethan was definitely a part of arriving at this articulation of how music can nag us, follow us everywhere. I think all of my conversations about music have something to do with Ethan T. Parcell. [both laugh]

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). Three copies are in a loose pile, showing parts of the front cover and of the back cover (beginning with “nevernotmusic / a collection of scores / by Udita Upadhyaya” and listing the performers for whom the scores were originally written). Text and motifs are in gold on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: And, I mean, there’s the title, and there’s also the title the way that it’s written, which is that “nevernotmusic” does not have spaces between the words. There’s that thread of continuity, or something that doesn’t leave you, or something that doesn’t have broken space. I don’t know if that’s how you think of it, but that’s one way I was thinking about it. It’s a layer of meaning that’s more evident visually.

UU: Yeah. It really bugged me that, to create the event on Facebook, we had to do a capitalized “N” for “nevernotmusic.” I was just like, “I don’t like this at all!” The small letters with no spaces is definitely where the grief sits, you know? Depending on who you are in your relationship with music. For me, music and grief are so interchangeable. It’s not always a pleasant thing. I’m not happy that music doesn’t leave you. The scores have these feelings of “sigh,” “mumble,” “hum.” I think especially Lindsey’s score has all of these things where everything is music. Like the window is music. There’s this rhythm. Melody is in everything, rhythm is in everything. So there is definitely a feeling of gum stuck in your shoe, kind of, the feeling of grief — of its inconvenience, its, you know, stickiness. I think that that beautiful gold ink is not bright and shiny in quite the way it might seem. And, similarly, Ethan’s relationship with music is also really complicated. I mean, whose isn’t? But we sort of bonded around, “You made your life about this thing and I have spent my life running away from this thing.” It still has the same feeling of tenderness and rawness.

Image: Nora Sharp performs in response to the score “Dear Aron: (Destroy) Armor.” On the left side of the image, the performer stands with hands folded, looking up at the ceiling and singing. On the right side, part of Nora’s shadow is visible, cast on the wall. The artist wears a grey sleeveless shirt and black athletic pants with white stripes. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: What do you feel like you’ve learned through this process? Acknowledging that it’s not really “done” — I think you used the phrase “rest,” like “it’s resting.” Or is there anything else that you want to share, looking back on it?

UU: Yeah. The happy tears. I used to make fun of my mom when she cried at happy things when I was a kid — because I was a jerk — but I was just like, “Who cries when things are happy? What’s wrong with you?” But I did, on Sunday. I think that part of it was that when I was at SAIC I was in Mark Booth’s class called “Text/Sound/Transmission.” And I remember fighting him every step of the way because I was like, “I’m not going to make sound work, I don’t like sound. …” In my head I was like, “Why am I in this class?” [Marya laughs] But I think, even at the same time, I was in that class because I knew, someday — like I was prepping for “nevernotmusic.” I wrote Mark an email after the scores were finished, being like, “This show exists because of that class.” I was prepping for it then.

MSL: But just didn’t know really? …

UU: I think I knew. I think I knew. Because I do feel like I took and did talk about that class as, “I’m taking this to deal with my hesitation with music and sound-based work.” And, even at that point, the way I could access it was text, which in many ways is still the way I’m accessing it. [laughs] I think I knew, but it still catches me off-guard how quickly it happened. Because that was … the end of 2015? So, in some ways, it’s like, “Wow, I knew in 2015 that in early 2018 there would be ‘nevernotmusic’.” I just didn’t have the language for it yet, obviously.

So the happy tears are definitely from the feeling of succeeding in the management of making the thing that wants to be made, and making room for it to be made. Because if I had my way with it, I would still continue denying the grief and denying the music, and it’s sort of like music succeeding and healing succeeding over not.

MSL: I mean, that’s a thing to — I don’t want to say “come to peace with” in one’s practice, but … that it’s good to be reminded of in one’s practice — that your work may know things that you know before you’re conscious that you know them. Or some combination of, “I see a thing coming, but I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m working on it, but also it will be different” — that sort of tension.

Image: Regin Igloria performs in response to the score “Dear Regin: SOAK (in silence).” Regin lies on the floor of TriTriangle, lit by a spotlight. Regin is barefoot and wears a swim cap, goggles, and spandex shorts. A sandbag lies across Regin’s chest. The artist reaches his arms around the sandbag to grip an orange strap that hangs from the ceiling, as he pushes his hips off the floor. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

UU: Yeah. For me, learning has always been like, “I’m going to listen now, and let it happen when it happens.” I think that’s why I sort of subconsciously brought this book, “Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change.” Pema Chödrön is really important to me in my practice of meditation, and just in life and being a human. The kind of meditation she teaches is a huge reason why I’m able to be an artist and able to work with trauma and grief and hurt, and fight through certain things in the world and my life. She talks about abandoning hope, or being in the moment, in this way that is kind of the opposite of how I want to be, and also kind of the opposite of how I think you are. Like, “Don’t take notes.” I don’t think she says that exactly, but when I first read her I just was like, “If this is important enough, it will stay. If this is important enough, and I am present, and listening, it will cycle back through.”

It’s kind of similar to how my word-of-the-day thing happened. You know, I’m not writing that word in the moment — “hungry hands” will show up six months later. Like, now I feel like my hands are hungry, because I want to make fiber things, I want to make ink things, and I want to cut things. So I think there is a feeling of gestational time for a project — trusting that — and I think this “nevernotmusic” project has definitely been the biggest example of not interfering with that gestational time. With other projects, because they’re in different stages, I think I kind of keep feeling like, “I think I want to interfere with this. I want this to be this other thing that it’s not ready to be yet.” I want it to be in college, at 12! [both laugh]

MSL: That makes a lot of sense to me about your work. It’s also interesting to me because it echoes something that Min Jin Lee — whose novel, “Pachinko,” I was telling you about earlier — said in relation to writing. This summer I took a one-afternoon workshop with her about interviewing for fiction. Something she said about her own process — and I think, to some extent, as a recommendation to us — is that she doesn’t record those interviews or even take many notes, but that when she leaves, what she’s thinking about is what moved her. And she’s doing those interviews for a different purpose — they’re not “archival,” for instance — but I thought that was such a lovely way of framing the interaction: paying attention to what moves you in a conversation.

UU: Yeah. [pause] It’s hard, it’s surprising hard, even as somebody who has done it in the past. Sort of the immediate thing to do is to be like, “Am I really listening to Marya if I’m not writing down what she’s saying, or if I don’t remember the name of the book she mentioned a while ago?” You know, this sense of accountability or presence within the dimension of this moment of time. I mean, I get that it’s valid – I don’t want you telling me a thing and I’m just zoning out and planning what I want to do tomorrow, and I’m totally guilty of that sometimes. But there is a different kind of listening that requires a different kind of labor, that also opens up room to be able to do that labor. And that is something that I really am excited to continue and to do better and to do more of.

Image: Udita Upadhyaya’s book, “nevernotmusic” (detail). The top corner of one page is visible, with text that includes: “printed by Match Books in Chicago, IL, 2018 / edition of 50 / 4/50.” This writing appears in gold type except for “4,” which is handwritten in gold ink. In the background, beyond that page, is part of the front cover of two other copies, with gold stitching and straight gold lines on black paper. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

MSL: Before we wrap up, how can people get your book?

UU: For now I am just going to say contact me through my website.

MSL: Well, thank you for everything. It’s been so great to go through this process with you, and I feel like I kind of knew you at the start of it, and now you’re my friend! [laughs]

UU: Yaaay!

MSL: That’s a really lovely, unexpected result of an extended conversation about a beautiful, complicated work that feels — I’ll let you say that it’s “resting” now, but it also feels not over to me. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Featured image: Udita Upadhyaya at the book release for “nevernotmusic,” at TriTriangle. The artist leans over a table, looking down as she writes in gold pen inside a copy of her book. Next to Udita is another copy, open to its centerfold, where gold thread is visible. The artist wears a light-colored, textured sweater. Photo by Caleb Neubauer.

Marya Spont-Lemus (she/her/hers/Ms.) is a fiction writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator focused on teen creative, leadership, and professional development. She lives and works on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.

This essay exists as a record, a performance document and collaged concept map linking threads in an interstellar web charting the content of my lectures and presentations culled from over 25 years of study, teaching, sculpting, and performing, each coded element an entry point like portals to the vast arkestry of Afrofuturist future visioning. Highlights include references to performance ritual as the High Priestess of the Intergalactic Federation, Special Envoy to Mars, for the September 27, 2018 Decolonizing Mars/Becoming Interplanetary symposium convened by NASA/Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology Lucianne Walkowicz at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and content from performance-lecture-poetics for “Afro-Futurism and Time Travel” at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Art and Inquiry and from The Ramm Riff featuring Black Light Primal Nun ‘A’ at Red Bull Arts NY for No Guts, No Galaxy slide show series as part of programming for the exhibition Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder.

This is an experimental collage, ideas and poetics intertwined, a performance-lecture-poetic in multiple stanzas, a Time Travel Riff from the outposts of Afro-Futurist vision quests, threads of thought referenced and practices enacted since the dawn of time…This is a time travelers trip…

[Trajan Wright’s “The Daydreamer is Ready for Liftoff (Not Belonging)…The Journey…The Arrival”, composed for The Mars Project, “Afro-Futurism: Pathways to Black Liberation” course final, Fall 2013]

In the early 1900s, Rev. A. W. Nix was one of the first pastors recorded with a popular series of sermons that imaginatively implored and scared people into doing right.  Songs such as “The White Flyer to Heaven” referenced traveling a mystical spaceship with Jesus.

“Higher and higher! And higher! We’ll pass on to the Second Heaven, the starry big Heaven, and view the flying stars and dashing meteors and then pass on by Mars and Mercury, and Jupiter and Venus and Saturn and Uranus, and Neptune with her four glittering moons.”

All aboard with Jesus!

Mnemonics, mnemonic devices take us “back back / forth and forth” (shout out to Ms. Shirleen)

In a cosmic twist, I ventured forward to Washington DC and found myself thrust back in time at the Library of Congress for Decolonizing Mars/Becoming Interplanetary: What Living on Earth Can Teach Us About Living on Mars at the invitation of NASA/Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology Lucianne Walkowicz, appearing as the High Priestess of the Intergalactic Federation, Special Envoy to Mars, one of my liminal guides, this one based in part on a painting of Queen Califia, Black Amazon Warrior Queen of what is now California, named for the mythological queen and her land of Black women warriors and griffins, a man-less country.

Image: D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, High Priestess of the Intergalactic Federation, Special Envoy to Mars, performance for Decolonizing Mars/Becoming Interplanetary Symposium, Library of Congress, Washington DC, 2018. Photo credit: M. Cem Mengüç.

Image: Mural of Queen Califia and her Amazons by Maynard Dixon/Frank Von Sloun, Room of the Dons in Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco, California. Courtesy of the author.

Black women

Warriors

Dahomey Amazons

Image: Archival photo of Dahomey Amazons.

Dora Milaje

Image: Dora Milaje, Black Panther, 2018.

Histories revealed

Histories remixed

Narratives reframed

Sonic signatures imprinted into ancient marble

The histories of this site, the treaties signed and broken

Image: Exterior of Library of Congress building. Courtesy of the author.

Image: Interior of Library of Congress building. Courtesy of the author.

Jefferson’s papers upstairs

Thinking of Sally Hemmings

Settler colonialism

Violent white supremacy and misogyny, its dis-ease wrapped around and through and inside…

For Decolonizing Mars/Becoming Interplanetary, I created interactive vocal portals including the Name-Sound Exercise for audience introductions, referencing Octavia Butler’s Speech Sounds, to performatively disrupt people’s identifications, pushing them into a space of no-thing-ness, outside of the identities with which they have framed themselves, dislocating, discomforting, disassembling…And reassembling in new forms through use of singular name-sounds created in introduction to each other.

Name-sounds shift identities, posit discomfort as portal, contrasting comfort as in relative stasis, dynamic separation from states of comfort. What does this have to teach us? Also: an opportunity, something to welcome, testing out other possibilities, as in: who am I without my name? Who am I in sound form? What are my rhythms?

…Code…

…Memory…

…Disruptor…

…Lee “Scratch” Perry aka “I am the Upsetter.”…

Amiri Baraka, co-founder of the Black Arts Movement, in “Bopera Theory” writes:

“We must step outside the parameters of this society’s vision of just about everything. Often I seek to use, as one alternative, practices found in the oldest root of performance: ritual, but not in a frozen or atavistic way. We take the wholeness, the freshness, the penetrating emotionalism and spiritual revelation and renewal, the direct connection with what the ancients meant.”[1]

In the Library of Congress’ Kluge Hall, Martian flags unfurl digitally (featuring Califia’s griffins) and we sing the Mars Anthem chorus created by Kelsie Johnson for The Mars Project in my 2013 course “Afro-Futurism: Pathways to Black Liberation. Protesters outside chant against the fascist nomination being enacted that week. I offer invocations at the same moment as Dr. Ford’s testimony.

Image: Martian flag concept. Courtesy the author.

And today, as I head to the first full health screening I’ve had in almost a decade—the hierarchy and tragedy of health-insurance-less teaching force—I see Ericka Stalling’s comprehensive, illuminating, and necessary article on Black women and the dire, emergency state of our health care, how we are never believed, we “weather” i.e. age faster than any other group. Apparently, Black women get breast cancer at slower rates than other populations but die at 40% higher rates than any other demographic, all of this due primarily to racism, neglect, and disbelief by the medical establishment that we experience pain. Our thresholds are apparently much higher, vestiges of slavery propaganda.

#Weathering

Image: Photo of weathered tree.

Extreme aging due to the relentless battering by racist and misogynist forces

Time speeded up

“If I could turn back time/If I could find a way”

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Time shaping form

And now Evil has been confirmed yet again to the highest court in this land. White heteronormative patriarchal supremacy ensured for generations to come.  Attempted control of the divine feminine.

This is war.

Images: Ralph Ziman, Murarabungu Chigwagawag (“Rainbow Machineguns”, Shona) and Mabara Bara (“Bullets”, Shona) from the Ghosts series.

The How:

Gestures of relocation, establishing place, space:

We write ourselves into being.

Audre Lorde writes “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”:

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

She ushers us in to “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

The seed, cultivating those truths within

The seed…We are Wild Seed.

Image: Book cover of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed.

[Marcus Montgomery, “Wild Seed Sonic Book”, 2014.]

In Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker writes “Blessed are those who know.”

On knowing, say: “I have been here before.”

Audre Lorde opening portals into possibilities.

Image: Audre Lorde.

Ways out of my darkness for 30 years

Out of the darkness of neglect

Honor feeling as intelligence, disrupting the primacy of “mind”, the construction of Mind employed as a force for domination that denies what you Know, that which denies Indigenous knowledge systems.

Disrupt the Mind Machine

“I feel, therefore I can be free.”

Afro-Futurism is a shape-shifter’s art, in the dance of possibility, adopting new forms to address new needs, shifting through time-space, time and space as moldable materials for the Time Traveler.

In “Octavia Butler—Praise Song for a Prophetic Artist”, Andrea Hairston invokes Butler’s practice, stating, “We are Impossibility Specialists.”[2]

Ritually conjuring Black Futures

Octavia Butler’s future vision, manifest:

“So be it! See to it! So be it! See to it! So be it! See to it!” Ashé!

Images: Portrait of Octavia E. Butler, and a full view of Butler’s inspirational message to herself on the back of a notebook. Photos courtesy of the Estate of Octavia E. Butler.

This is rectification, a compassionate revisiting of what our ancestors faced, from the largest to seemingly minute gestures, all in service of freedom, life.

June Jordan reminds us that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Image: D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, The Ramm Riff feat. Black Light Primal Nun ‘A’, No Guts, No Galaxy, Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder, Red Bull Arts NY, 2018. Photo credit: Tonika Johnson.

Shifting, dazzling, camouflaging across galaxies

Image: Dazzle camouflage collage. Courtesy of the author.

New Black Poetics shifts space-time via relocation of frames of value.

Value

Value in Voice

Voice, the origin, speak into being, Badu’s “spell-ing”

Griots

Yoruba oríkì lifting the iwa, essential character, upward, into manifestation as the oba is installed

(Word to the brilliant and beloved Dr. Rowland Abiodun, “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase”)

One’s essential voice arises in response

ashé as je da pe answer create call

power to command, power to listen, power to respond

call and response [3]

As African art historian Babatunde Lawal writes, “Myth and ritual are never static.”[4]

Ritual is cross-time travel, pushing outside the boundaries and limitations of our socializations.

Past-present-future exist as one, subject to our navigation and manipulation.

The use of ritual to enter time-space shifts: it is perception or reality?  How do we perceive time passing in relation to how it actually passes. If the passing of time is a scientific construction created to help us understand the world and ourselves within it, does passing of time as it has been described in a Western context even really exist? Everyone around us is calculated (pun intended) to represent the passing of time; our social and relational selves are completely intertwined with frames of time, the language I’m using case in point. Almost every word somehow relates back to constructions of time, can be understood within the framework of time: passing as in passing by, movement from one location to another; calculate as in tally, add, subtract or otherwise engage mathematically to move from one result to another i.e. passage of time implied; frames as in film, moments captured, a grid or outline that assists in boxing, categorizing or otherwise making relational connections between ideas or objects; case as in to case the joint, scope out a physical location, a box; point as in starting point, from point A to B, what’s your point, make a point i.e. identify oneself or concept in a location, a point, to map.

If as has been suggested by Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism, what we conceive of as “the present” is only mere seconds at best then we are forever living within a moment of present that instantly becomes both future and past simultaneously.[5]

Time-space shifts begin with shifts in our perspective, our location in space….

In speaking of the work of sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Rodney McMillian states in conjunction with his work for the 2007 Studio Museum exhibition Philosophy of Time Travel:

“With innovations to modern microscope technology in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the exploration of the atomic world that followed, consciousness was shifted because people came to understand that matter was not as solid as they once through.  To consider that everything is actually vibrating at intensities, and that there’s the whole other world that is completely invisible to us and is operating on scales with different rules and unique dynamics was crazy.” Earlier in the roundtable, Matthew Sloly references the aphorism by Heraclitus from 535-475 BC “you can never step in the same river twice.”  “In that statement there is an implicit idea of time in its relation to the flow of time, and ever changing time…highlighting the unstable nature of the river.”[6]

“The Healing Drum” as Malidoma Patrice Somé has described

Equals a portal

Traveling the rhythm

Portal to other worlds and ways of being

Portal to healing for self, community, universe

We experience a shift, a wrinkle in time (word to Madeline L’Engle).

In Of Water and the Spirit, shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé recounts details from his initiation in Chapter 20, “Through the Light Hole”:

“It was my turn.  I heard the officiating elder order me to run…I could see the circle of light rushing closer and closer…About a meter away, I jumped high above the gateway and dived in…At first my body felt extremely cold, as if I had fallen into a freezer.  Then almost immediately, I felt myself descending rapidly…Slowly, like the dawn breaking, I began to see light.  At first it was like an aurora borealis, shot with areas of dark and ones of extreme luminescence—rays of such intensity they made me think of the cosmos in expansion or a cosmogony in progress…”[7]

In A History of Art in Africa, three stages in rites of passage are detailed: [8]

Separation

Transition

Incorporation

These rites are of space and time continuum where the so-called laws of nature as defined primarily in Western scientific understanding do not apply.

Malidoma Patrice Somé shares the rituals of Grandfather’s funeral (as a transition on the other end of life cycle), learning to see with Dagara wisdom in “Trying to See”, finally seeing the tree “In the Arms of the Green Lady”, and being buried alive in “Burials, Lessons, and Journeys”

Images: Malidoma Patrice Somé, and the cover of his book Of Water and the Spirit.

Ritual gestures marking transition from life into death, defeating death, the Death card

Butler’s “Trickster Teacher Chaos Clay”

Image: Slide referencing Lauren Oya Olamina in Parable of the Sower from Earthseed: Books of the Living. Design by the author.

Time-space / site / location

What precipitates, even catalyzes, a shift in time?

Sacred ritual spaces intersect the visible/invisible, sacred/secular

Image: Visible/Invisible slide. Design by the author.

Egungun masquerade: entering the liminal

Image: Egungun ancestral masquerade, Nigeria.

Visual-verbal nexus[9]

Homage to hidden histories, uncovering the foundations of culture

Oba Ariwajoye I’s veil protects you and the awesome elemental timeless power contained within.

He exists outside of time-space; he is of the world of ancestors, a lineage representation in the flesh, separated within liminal space by the veil.[10]

Image: Oba Ariwajoye I, Ruler of Ila-Orangun, Yoruba, Nigeria, 1977. Photo courtesy of “A History of Art in Africa.”

Benin Oba Akenzua II laden in coral for orisa Olokun, power of the seas, represented also on an ikengobo personal altar[11]

Image: Benin Oba Akenzua II (Ruled 1933-78) in Regalia, Benin City, Nigeria, 1960s. Photo courtesy A History of Art in Africa.

It is said that ”Great men move slowly.”[12]

Image: Termite mound.

Termite mound

Termites

Image: Tasty pan-fried flying ant snack.

DM me for the recipe; I’m preparing you for the apocalypse. (This is not a drill!)

Image: Slide from The Ramm Riff. Design by the author.

We are resourceful people, wan u Tiv.

Yam farmers of Benue State.

What we carry with us into the future, what we leave behind…

In my 2011 article “Are You Ready to Alter Your Destiny?: Chicago and Afro-Futurism, Part 2 of 2”, I describe Afro-Futurism as “hot, moist, black, nutrient-rich, deep in the bowels of memory and soul iterations…” Quoting Julian Jonker from “Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)”[13]: “The central fact in Black Science Fiction…is an acknowledgment that the Apocalypse already happened: that (in Public Enemy’s phrase) Armageddon been in effect.” I continue: “Afro-Futurism says: even “solid” matter is made of slow-moving molecules; Jesus walked on water and you can, too.”[14]

Traveling through time and space

Prescience

Prophetic

What we see

Learning to trust

The gut knows

Reading the signs

Reading the bones

Dogon cosmology of Sirius B Po Tolo

The journey to take root among the stars (Lauren Oya Olamina, Earthseed: Books of the Living)

Image: Book cover for Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

For real, to actually be there, taking root among the stars. This is not a dream.

Dr. Mae Jemison’s 100 Year Starship leads the way.

Image: Webpage for Dr. Mae Jemison’s 100 Year Starship initiative.

#thatshowitsdone

How to shape shift across the universe, deep space, deep sea, whale calls like Saturn’s rings…

Can you hear the singing?

“We’re living in the space age/We’re living in the space age/No matter who you are, no matter where you are.”

Image: June Tyson of the Sun Ra Solar Arkestra.

We are made of stars. If so, we are light years occurring simultaneously of the light that animates and makes us cellularly visible to be perceived. Dynamic beyond imagining.

Data on Star Trek says:

“It has happened, it will happen.”

Mutatis Mutandis “those things which must be changed having been changed”

A state of being in flux, simultaneously the need for change and the act of that change already having been manifest

Inhabiting future vision and its realization

“Afro-Futurism is an exploration and methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey.”[15]

Spiral life.

Time as composite, time as layers[16]

For her essay-reclamation project of Detroit Techno in “Blackness in Present Future Tense,” Wendy Walters writes:

“Detroit Techno artists manifest possibility by fusing history. The past, present, and future exist simultaneously as in a layered effect of a software graphics program…Detroit’s cultural history becomes a landscape of information and Detroit Techno is a composite resulting from a fusing of these influences…’Detroit Techno is aerial. It transmits along routes through space, is not grounded by the roots of any tree,’ notes Kodwo Eshun.”[17]

Mark Rockeymoore conceptualizes Afro-Futurism as a spiral rooted in the afro:

“Afrofuturism is not science fiction.  It is not a mechanical, technology driven vision of the future because an afro ain’t never been about anything constricting or orderly, in the hierarchical sense.  Rather, an afro is free-flowing, loving the wind.  Changing, shifting and drifting on the breez, bending this way, puffing out or just plain swaying gently from side to side, following the whimsical inclinations of the melanated person upon whose head it is perched.”[18]

Flow.

Remember that Star Trek episode when Worf was coming back from one of his battle events and he passed through a portal that caused him to live all possible life lines at once?

Infinite possibility…

Image: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room––The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.

And the Arkestra sings, “We travel the spaceways/From planet to planet.”

Ritual as the vessel and how?

1) Your Body as Vessel-Portal

In “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space,” Nettrice R. Gaskins illuminates the work of Sanford Biggers who “refers to Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman as an astronaut who traverses “the south to the north by navigating the stars.” Biggers constructs eighteenth and nineteenth century historical quilts as maps to new galaxies where passengers chart new destinations in search of freedom. The idea of Tubman as an astronaut is a good starting point for examining our relationship to the boundless dimensions of space in which people, objects, and events have relative position and direction. Tubman followed the North Star by night, making her way from the South, to and from Pennsylvania and Canada while guiding others to freedom. Passengers followed codes embedded in quilts hanging in front of the safe houses with symbols telling them where to go and when the next “train” would come.  These quilt-based maps may be viewed as cultural or vernacular space that emanate from the customs and rituals of a given community.”[19]

2) Spaceships

The Mothership

Image: The Mothership on display at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Photo credit: Elissa Tenny.

“Swing low sweet chariot stop and let me riiiiide! / If you wanna ride, help me sing.”

Your liberation is dependent upon your action

The Revolution will not be televised. Word to Gil Scott Heron.

3) Music

Sun Ra’s transrelequization: “Teleport the whole planet through music.”

Teleportation

In 2007, Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Rodney McMillian, and Matthew Sloly participated in a Philosophy of Time Travel Roundtable Discussion for their exhibition of the same title at the Studio Museum in Harlem, moderated by curator Christine Y. Kim.

Edgar Arceneaux stated:

“Sun Ra and the Parliaments. Particularly for the Afrofuturists, the blackness of outer space has a certain analogy to black identity. Ra’s desire to create a certain a new society on Saturn, and more importantly, it is also a space of infinite nothingness, that one can escape the boundedness of history. If you consider The Parliaments as well as Sun Ra, and the malleability of that group as a symbol, constantly shifting their approach to meet the needs of their work. It is the moments of synchronicity when it appears to be utter chaos, and once you’re connected to the melody, you’re still being taken off to space. You are hooked on one level, and totally blasted of into the next, and it’s all happening at the same time at different points in space.”[20]

“The music is different here.”

[Soundtrack created for Corpus Meum, the author’s sound installation-site activation at the Arts Club of Chicago, 2.28.2018]

Malidoma Patrice Somé on Dagara and the West’s visions of the future: “I decided to do a little experiment of my own with “reality” versus “imagination” when I was home visiting my village in 1986. I brought with me a little electronic generator, a television monitor, a VCR, and a “Star Trek” tape titled The Voyage Home…The events unfolding in a science fiction film, considered futuristic or fantastic in the West, were perceived by my elders as the current affairs in the day-to-day lives of some other group of people living in the world….They had no trouble understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly…My elders were comfortable with “Star Trek,” the West’s vision of its own future…the wonders that Westerners imagine being part of their future are very much a part of my elders’ present. The irony is that the West sees the indigenous world as primitive or archaic. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the West could learn to be as “archaic” as my elders are?”[21]

Time as inextricably linked to location

The liminal:

Performance art exposes this via interaction, manipulation of site, object, gesture. We enter the archives, spaces of manipulation, rejection and inclusion, reclamation, and rectification to reshape history by illuminating Dark Matter. In her Dark Matter anthology “Introduction: Looking for the Invisible,” Sheree Reneé Thomas posits with regard to early Black science fiction writers:

“Dark matter as a metaphor offers us an interesting way of examining blacks and science fiction.  The metaphor can be applied to a discussion of the individual writers as black artists in society and how that identity affects their work.  It can also be applied to a discussion of their influence and impact on the sf genre in general…They became dark matter, invisible to the naked eye; and yet their influence—their gravitational pull on the world around them—would become undeniable.”[22]

We can reshape the past, via anthology, illuminating what was there but unseen (by some), righting wrongs, changing the shape of the past we thought we knew. Perhaps this is a fleshing out to fullness of what it was beyond absence or fragments of narratives, jettisoning the linear for a spiral, nuanced offering. We travel back via the object in space, the creative product. Perhaps, as has been suggested, every home is a museum. We shape our own pasts through the object of the present-future, objects as mnemonics, constructing and reconstructing narratives through arrangement, installation, what is remembered, what is deliberately forgotten or invisibilized… Shifting the object shifts the referent’s location points in history and future.

This is why I engage holistic design as an Afro-Futurist act of sculpting space: this is the power to reframe, to shape narrative. Objects function as conduits to sculpt energy, conscious and intentional alchemic transformation. With In the Luscious Garden, we work to cultivate radical joy on a cellular level.

Shape-shifting through the liminal….

Image: Featuring Herbie Hancock’s 1973 Future Shock album cover.

John Akomfrah’s Data Thief

Trickster arts

Codes

Transmissions

Dots and dashes

“We travel the spaceways from planet to planet”

In “Afro-Futurism: A Statement of Intentions—Outside In, Inside Out,” Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, offers this definition of the Afro-Futurism zone, comparable to the Zoom Zone described by Amiri Baraka in “Bopera Theory”:

“The Afro-Futurism Zone is a place where the issues that have come to be defined as core aspects of African-American ethnicity and its unfolding in the Americas disappeared, replaced by a zone of electromagnetic interactions—simulations, coded exchanges of ideology…legacies of displacement translated into the binary space between the algorithms [of] electro-modernity. Urban culture, transitory flows of identity along the lines of flight demarcated by the streets, the lights, the sounds, the representations that hold it all together.”[23]

Image: Photo of Amiri Baraka with quote from “Bopera Theory” from Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora.

Detroit’s sonic architectures and Tyree Guyton’s speculative architectures of the Heidelberg Project. Shifts in scale, re-framing site, surrealist space, histories revisited, memories reconfigured, reclaimed.

Time/Space shifts in Detroit past-present-future[24]

Recovery projects belie projected narratives of Black abjection, uncovering hidden histories, including LGBTQIA histories, sites such as the home and printing press of Ruth Ellis, the oldest known living African-American lesbian circa 2000 (word to director, producer Yvonne Welbon and Sisters in Cinema); Ingrid LaFleur’s Afrotopia, cryptocurrencies reclaiming Black Futures; Earthseed Detroit; and other creative strategies, projects, and practitioners for social justice.

Uncovering our past is uncovering our future, revealing what has been known, honoring ancestral work.

As we uncover in present, we are on the precipice of the past, always stepping into future-state, each moment, each tick of the clock and its constructed time-space.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man becomes proto-hacker, harnessing power in the bowels of the city to power his Louis Armstrong records.[25]

Digital pathways

The In-Between

Surfing the interwebs, the nooks and the crannies, the hidden trap doors

Moten and Harney’s Undercommons

Image: Book cover of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons.

“Fugitivity”

Digital code in

Hair plaits.patterns.fractal villages.Matrix.sound waves.

Image: Hair plaiting to learn math, images courtesy Ron Eglash.

Ghosts in the machine

Afrofuturism 2.0’s “Hip Hop Holograms: Tupac Shakur, Technological Immortality, and Time Travel”[26]

Tupac is Alive and Here With Us!

Technologically mediated ritual performance in digital space[27]

The beat, the beat, the beat

“Up for the down stroke”

Process:

Ogun’s machete cuts through, traversing the chthonic realm as detailed in Wole Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage.”[28]

It is intentional, rooted ritual that takes us outside of space-time into the fourth stage, to construction-destruction principle, immerse in process, away from linearity of product, a central BAM tenet that shifted value away from a finalized result (one often sanctioned or praised by those exterior to community and immediate individuals involved with the work) and shifting value to the process, the moment, the action in relationship of self to community in dialogue/communion, away from achievement of mimetic reference but rather improvisational prowess and interactive experience, shifting us outside of staid, set notions of self in relation to other within the continuum

Astronomer and educator Brian Méndez of UC Berkeley in a discussion of time references Book XI of Confessions of St. Augustine writes, “St. Augustine proposed that time is measured in the mind. It is not an event itself that is measured but the impression that it leaves on the mind. The mind expects the future, which becomes the present, which the mind attends, and then becomes the past, which the mind remembers. The future and past do not exist, but in the mind there is expectation of the future and remembrance of the past. The present has no duration and still the mind’s attention persists. So it is not the future which is long but a long expectation of the future. Likewise, it is not the past that was long but a long remembrance of the past. St. Augustine ended his discussion of time with the conclusion that it is something measured in the mind, a human conception.”[29]

Sun Ra says “Consider time as officially ended.”

In W.E.B DuBois’ “The Comet” from 1920, time slows, almost stops, the storyline almost seems to offer an escape from racist reality that still clings post-disaster and speeds back up with discovery of other living humans, a flickering moment of possibility extinguished by reinstatement of racist structures.

Dark matter

Black holes

Death stars

Speed of light, speed of light, faster than the speed of light

African Cosmos illuminates ancient cosmologies, foundations of life on Earth and beyond.

Image: Book cover of African Cosmos: Stellar Arts.

Stevie Wonder sings “A star’s a seed, a seed’s a star a seed” for Po Tolo in Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.

Image: Album cover for Stevie Wonder, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.

Calvino’s Invisible Cities reconfigures the face of a city into a series of morphing tales.

Our ability to reshape past, present, future, to craft new narratives, harking to past and looking to future is the creative methodology of Afro-Futurism.

A methodology of liberation:

To open the archive, to curate and shepherd is to shape-shift self, object, histories

To illuminate in a way that re-tells the past and thus shifts its entire structure, the shape of information

Gatekeepers to the archive-portals: will you be a force for change or maintain the status quo?

How far does your future vision extend?

Black Quantum Futurism Community Futures Lab helps North Philly residents facing dislocation to write and build themselves into the future of history.

Sun Ra’s Outer Spaceways Incorporated

#Resistance101 (Word to Sam Greenlee, may he rest in peace.)

Who controls the future?

Image: Excerpt from Sun Ra Space Probe 1974 album re-issue.

We explore the notion of time as malleable, a construction, as able to be manipulated. What does it mean when we begin to understand our agency in relation to time? How can we see ourselves in a spiral continuum?  This is a methodology of reframing as an exercise that hones the muscles/the shape-shifting muscles/ability. Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother of Community Futures Lab create a space of agency to gather histories and disrupt dislocation efforts in North Philly. In the philosophical foundations for her time travel exercises Phillips describes as “event mapping,” “memories are not formed in regard to a specific date or time but rather embedded or weaved in and controllable in future memory. The present state depends on both the future and the past measurement in backward causation. You can make a date of your choosing a part of the memory, which means you can forecast or backcast events.”[30]

Image: Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa of Afrofuturist Affair, Community Futures Lab, and Black Quantum Futurism.

Retrain your imagination and understanding of your self in time-space, pushing outside of socialization to shift memories, core building-blocks of identity, manipulating the reference points, releasing the hold of past on present and future, future on past and present and beyond through a reconfiguration of our spatial relationship to memories so that a future event is now past, specifically a past we have shaped through our future visioning. It (now) exists as a creation of that future vision. This has powerful implications around liberation and within the realm of healing traumatic memories.

In Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice, Phillips describes Sasa and Zamani conceptions of time among the Swahili:

“Sasa time is roughly analogous to what Eurocentric thought calls the present, but much more nuanced including the immediate past, and the immediately impinging future (just around the corner reality). Zamani time wholly overlaps Sasa time, but unlike it, extends into the distant, if not eternal, past.  Again, it may be rendered in the West as the past, except it differs in that in overlapping Sasa time, Zamani time also includes the present and some small portion of that which is understood as future.  The third dimension of time is potential time which is actually much closer to what Euro-centrism calls the future.  Unlike in that latter intellectual construct though, it is speculative and its character and existence is prefigured and determined by the actions that individuals and collectives take within the working realms of Zamani and Sasa…Even the the eternal past is understood as immediately and presently accessible.”[31]

She references the work of D. Nikitah Imani regarding African conceptual time, who has posited that:

“Your activity is what determines how quickly or slowly time moves, not a mathematically pre-determined rate of time where, if you do not fit your activity within the rate, you either end up with a surplus or shortage of time. Time is not its own entity in the African consciousness; it is a component of events and an experience that can be created, produced, saved, or retrieved.”[32]

Image: Book cover of Rasheedah Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, Vol. I.

Dr. Mendez highlights that “In the language of the Nava[h]o there is no past, present, and future tense like those of many languages. Events are talked about with regard to their quality of happening rather than their temporal quality. Is it possible that time may not really exist, but is just an artifact of our biological and cultural evolution?” He quotes Albert Einstein just prior to his death: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”[33]

We begin to understand the “present” as a construction.

We exist within the liminal.

That ancestral space

Nommo

Image: Nommo slide. Design by the author.

Water

Moyo Okediji counsels “Water always finds its own level.”

Water as foundational building block

Moved by the tides

Drexciya revisited:

Remixed mythologies, pregnant African women, enslaved in Middle Passage, thrown/jumped into the Atlantic, their babies born in the watery depths, “aquatic afronautic beings rising up to deliver whitey a beatdown”[34] to rectify, rising up to reclaim, rising up for retribution.

Engage techniques to dislodge ourselves from the construction of the “present” moment.

We are of it; we have agency to shape it.

Fatimah Tuggar’s soft power confronts colonial constructions of the construction that is “Africa”, challenging notions of technology, the future, who has agency within it.[35]

Sonic interventions by Mendi + Keith Obadike

Sonic interjections, sonic mark-making, leaving my mark on the Library of Congress for Decolonizing Mars/Becoming Interplanetary

What is the effect?

How is destiny altered?

Imagine:

The Grand Canyon and a river flowing through it + time, a long time, a very very long time, that which is not immediately perceptible on a surface level

Time

Performance portals alter time-space, for performer and audience.

Archives, incantations, conjures

We can corporeally extricate ourselves from the bonds of set time-space conceptions via:

The Chant and the Gesture:

For Wan Chuku and the Mystical Yam Farm curated by Moyo Okediji in 2015, I painted virtually across space and time alongside video of Akire Mothers, shrine painters of southern Nigeria, in motion. Okediji was able to enter the shrine through a process of ritual re-gendering. His witnessing of their mystical work, the laden visual archive of the shrine, illuminated the invisible in a cross-temporal, cross-media virtual collaboration through gestural composition.

Image: D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Wan Chuku and the Mystical Yam Farm, 2015-16. Photo credit: Casey Pankey, OSUMA.

Portals and mnemonic devices:

Luba lukasa memory board

Cuneiform, lukasa, iphone: Humans love a handheld device.

Image: Composite showing human handheld devices. Design by the author.

Object as activated portal

Arkestra, mantra, sonic disruptions, sonic interventions

Harnessing the durational

Pushing thresholds of site and time:

Ana Mendieta and the ashé moment, a reclamation of lost identities, separation and reunification with the land of one’s birth, becoming one with earth, ashé incarnate[36]

Group body as activated portal: see Pauline Oliveros’ Experimental Dialogue artwork/exercise

(Thank you to musicologist Ryan Dohoney for sharing this at our Arts Club of Chicago panel.)

Sound interactivity deconstructs and reconstructs the sense of self.  Sonic gestures allow portals to step outside of the rigidity of place i.e. physical, mental, spiritual locators and sites to which we cling in order to formulate notions of selfhood.

Formulated to develop empathy, stripped of our identifiers, exercising atrophied muscles

First movements toward change

Alter-Destiny 888.  Last month 8.8.2018 was the 10th anniversary (addition of the “1”) of that work at Roger Smith Arts, 42nd and Lexington, crossroads, cutting in reference to Ogun in my Pan incarnation, dancing with interiority and exteriority on the corner, glass windows reflecting the smashing of dried clumps of clay, clay molded to fit the garment, drag along behind, the calcified bodies of fibroids, cysts, fetuses in stone, hair, smothered in earth…sculpting, singing, dragging, drying, smashing, singing, release.

Image: D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Alter-Destiny 888, The Lab for performance+installation, Roger Smith Arts, NY, 2008. Photo courtesy Panman Productions.

Ritual

Gesture

…Clay…Hair…Earth…

…Sculpt…Stroke…Smother…

…Clay…Hair…Earth…

…Sculpt…Stroke…Smother…

Align with ancestral force

Heal ancestral trauma

Epigenetics, inherited and lived trauma

Stories in the belly

DNA legacies: time travels though DNA, healing the past

Henrietta Lacks and her stolen cervical cells

Acknowledged victimhood before a quick rush to survival or forgiveness

Methodologies of ritual release

In “Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music,” Paul Carter Harrison concludes:

“Ancestral memory, then, is the essential foundation of the aesthetic objectives of African American inventions, both sacred and secular. The soul is our fundamental reality, the repository of the ancestral spirit that fuels the imaginings of the mind. It is the inner force of such ancestral spirit—memory referred to by Robert Farris Thompson as a flash of the spirit—that also guides the imagination.”[37]

Amiri Baraka’s “Revolutionary Theatre” manifesto: “What is called the Imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, becomes from the image, the initial circumscribed energy and use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.”[38]

[Soundtrack from Super Space Riff: An Ode to Mae Jemison and Octavia Butler in VIII Stanzas, premiered at Hyde Park Art Center, 2006. “Super Space Riff: DNA Opera feat. Rev. Kimberly Crutcher”]

The alter-destiny as time travel

Sun Ra appears to the youth of Planet Earth (aka a Youth Center in Oakland, California) and in response to their questions, he states:

“How do you know I exist?  I don’t.  You don’t exist.  If you did, you would have some status among the peoples of the world…You are myth.  I come to you as the myth… I am a presence sent to you by your ancestors, the alter-destiny.”

Alter-Destiny

Ashé, catalytic life force

Catalyze, to set in motion, to bring together, initiate a desired effect

Sun Ra: “Teleport the whole planet through music.”

“The beauty that is you, your instrument in this vast arkestry of life”

Image: Still from Sun Ra’s Space Is The Place.

Your voice

Cosmic, infinite dimensional, teleportation device

Sound waves that beckon and repel, the Word, voice, sound force as moldable energy

Sonic restitution

Sonic reclamation

Sonic healing

God is… 

Image: Still from Grace Jones’ “Corporate Cannibal” music video.

Lauren Oya Olamina in Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler:

Earthseed: Books of the Living, 2024

“All that you touch you change

All that you change changes you

The only lasting truth is change

God is change.”[39]

Grace Jones and the robots

Terminator traversing time

An army at the ready

Discipline

Ready for the revolution

“When the revolution! When the revolution comes!” The Last Poets giving it to us straight.

Ready.

Jae Jarrell’s Revolutionary Suit, 1969: time traveling, code-switching, shape-shifting from office to the revolution

Image: Jae Jarrell, Revolutionary Suit, 1969.

Left right…left right…left right… (Salute)

We the People.

Gil Scott Heron “Whitey on the Moon”:

“A rat done bit my sister Nell (with whitey on the moon)/Her face and arms began to swell (but whitey’s on the moon).”

Memories of childhood

Can time-space reconfiguration heal?

Moonlight (Word to Barry Jenkins)

Image: Still from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, 2017.

The shifting light blue-black light of the Moon

Glenn Ligon’s Blue Black

Chiron

Image: Planet Chiron.

Malcolm X had Chiron in Aries, childhood wounds around voice that lead through difficulty to greatest strengths in adulthood.

Chiron sits in Aries in 2018:

Chiron The Wounded Healer

What are your wounds?

How can we heal a wounded past-present-future?

Ori

Oríkì

Voice

Ori Inu, inner head, the knowledge contained within, true infinite self

 We call upon the ancestors, living and passed.

We call upon the trickster Eshu-Elegbara to guide our paths, allow us to face and rise above challenges, to learn and grow.

Open the crossroads [Clap! Clap!]

Bone Thugs N Harmony “Tha Crossroads” [Sing: “bada bum bum bum bum bum”]

Reading the cowries

16 the sacred number in Yoruba Ifa divination

Throw the cowries high, Mama, high, Mama, one for each year of life.

One ray of light as of this writing: The police officer who killed Laquan MacDonald was indicted on 16 counts.

Image: Slide of the number “16” by author.

Manslaughter

Capital M

The Just Us system

No justice no peace

Finally

50 years coming

Time travel back to 1968

Africobra, the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

Last year’s 50^th: the Detroit Riots

Next year’s 50^th: the Moon Landing

16 shots

16 counts

This is the truth.  This is the story.

We tell ourselves through our words.

We write ourselves into being.

I will never be silenced again…

Ashé.

Ancestors, living and passed, we hail you, we praise you.

This is a praise song, a journey through time and space.

Contemporary Global African art practices illuminate the interstices between here, there, now, then, reflecting multiple time frames simultaneously, identities re-presented, reconfigured, locations shifted. What you thought you knew…who you thought you were…

Where is from? Where is to?

Points of reference, perspective drawing vanishing points, point A to…

M

Memory

Time…slowed down…dusty roads and goats giving birth on the side of the road, a gaggle of kids giggling as we watch…heat rippling…time seems to stop…lazy snakes drip from mango trees and sun-kissed bees hum around cashew blossoms… palm fronds and banana bikes against a dazzling southern California sky…

What are your memories?

M

Mohau Modisakeng

Watery portals: shifting our experience of place and space, mnemonic devices, revisit pasts, consider dreams of future, where we are physically and energetically located

O

Otobong Nkanga

To Dig a Hole that Collapses Again

The dust of time does not erase

Bearing witness, carrying stone/mineral/earth, from locations of disruption to trace the path, disrupt its placement in new sites, Namibia to Berlin, reclamation of object, site, history, illuminating dark matter.

Holding Europe to account.

We see you.

Y

Yinka Shonibare

Martin Luther capsule, Philly music and adinkra astronaut space suits, sited in a church for Evoking Histories in Charleston, SC

Sacred future visioning

Z

Zak Ové

Ancient Benin meets the astronaut in Umbilical Progenitor

Take us back in time and forward to an afronautic future, a voyaging present.

Inhabit the liminal/the Al/the past-present-future.

Titus Kaphar cuts, reveals, reframes.

Magdalena Maria Campos-Pons inhabits multiple positionalities, otherworldly and yet full of Earth, Sky, Stars.

Image: Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Finding Balance, 2015. Photo by author at Gallery Wendi Norris, EXPO Chicago, 2018.

“Your body made of stars”

Mythic Being (Word to Adrian Piper) “I am what you most fear.”

Transcendental Mother

Our Mothers who paved the way, Our Mothers

Birds of the night.

Walking in the footsteps of

Yaa Asantewaa, QueenMother who rose up in battle

against the British

Image: Historic photo of QueenMother Yaa Asantewaa.

Legendary Dahomey Warriors and the Dora Milaje

Of Califia, it was written:

“Transgressing the boundaries of nature and her sex”

“Sitting unashamedly astride”[40]

Oya

Ogun

The machete

Mars

The Warrior

Blue Lady from The Fifth Element

Image: Mula, the Blue Lady from The Fifth Element, 1997.

Santa Marta Dominadora and Lilith Moon meet Yayoi Kusama in a Gothic Chapel

Image: Composite image designed by the author featuring Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Obsession installation and portrait.

Trailblazers, Badasses, and Prophets [Clap! Clap!]

We reveal ourselves in the past.

We celebrate ourselves in the present.

We write ourselves into the future.

Devil Girl from Mars: 11 year old Octavia Butler thinks: “I can do better than that.”

Image: Devil Girl from Mars film poster.

Reclaiming the Black presence: Harriet Tubman as shape-shifter Afro-Futurist time traveler in real time[41]

Reclaiming the Black presence: Hidden Figures: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson without whom none of us would be here in this room today

Reclaiming the Black presence: The Immortal Henrietta Lacks whose stolen cervical cells paved the way for every advance in science and medicine we know today

Reclaiming the Black presence: Nichelle Nichols aka Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura who paved the way for Black folk in NASA, space and beyond

Reclaiming the Black presence: Dr. Mae Jemison, first Black woman in space, and 100 Year Starship making a way for revolutionary, justice-centered visions of future planetary exploration

Image: Dr. Mae Jemison, official NASA portrait.

Reclaiming the Black presence: Dr. Margaret Burroughs visionary, artist, educator, advocate, roller skater, Chicago legend, and founder of the DuSable Museum of African-American History

Reclaiming the Black presence: Jae Jarrell and her Revolutionary Suit, tweed skirt and bandolier, ready for the office and the revolution

Reclaiming the Black presence: Nina Simone, putting the revolution to music

As Nina Simone invoked the audience: “My daughter has sacrificed her mother for you, for this music, for this Word.  I want all doors open for her.” [Clap Clap]

Image: Nina Simone.

We built this nation.

We built this world.

We built this planet.

We were there, we are here, we will always be.

Rectification [Clap! Clap!]

Reparation [Clap! Clap!]

Reclamation [Clap! Clap!]

I am what you most fear

I am what you most fear

I am what you most fear

Leap through time

To cut your neck

I am what you most fear

Reclamation!

Reparation!

Rectification!

In this time travel we engage, who will be left standing?

Time after time

Time after time

Time after time

Pele, goddess who devours the earth,

erupts in Hawaii

Indigenous peoples say “If I must move, I will move. Let her be.”

Ritual involves sacrifice

Nature’s primacy and what we learn about time from nature, how it assists us:

Malidoma’s divination

Osayin healing

Trees and their deep communication systems

The Seed

Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi:

Image: Wanuri Kahiu, stills from Pumzi.

“Take your dream suppressants.

Take your dream suppressants.

Take your dream suppressants.”

The Seed

Ecological connectedness

Interstellar webs

“Take root among the stars” (Word to Octavia Butler)

On Friday, November 2, 2018, you are invited to a gathering of Octavia Butler artists/scholars/practitioners for a panel discussion about Parable of the Sower in conjunction with my Fall 2018 Prof Prac studio-seminar course “To Take Root Among The Stars: The Legacy of Octavia Butler, Surviving the 21^st Century & Beyond” for which students are building survival go packs, mapping systems, urban foraging, and keeping travel journals for a December 12 exhibition. Join us for this  interdisciplinary conversation with Dr. Sami Schalk, A. Martine Whitehead, Huong Ngo, and Chelsea Frazier about Butler’s legacy and the guidance her works provide especially in these times.

Image: Poster for November 2, 2018 “Take Root Among The Stars” Panel at the School of the Art Institute.

Lauren Oya Olamina, Earthseed: Book of the Living

“God is Change.”[42]

Ritual of the kola nut

Image: Kola nut and text collage. Design by the author.

To seal our covenant with each other, in this altered time-space

Opening the portals to our future vision,

Let the chant, the sacred drum of our words, ignite, illuminate, conjure.

Say it with me now:

“Trickster

Teacher

Chaos

Clay”[43]

Ashé!

D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem is an Afro-Futurist space sculptor, performance artist, and writer whose work has been featured at the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Chicago, Red Bull Arts NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and numerous other institutions. She is currently working on a series of book projects and is contributing an Afro-Futurist take on the 1969 Moon landing for the upcoming commemorative exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich. www.denenge.net  @DenengeTheFirst

[Photo Credit: RJ Eldridge]

Featured Image: D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, The Ramm Riff feat. Black Light Primal Nun ‘A’, No Guts, No Galaxy, Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder, Red Bull Arts NY, 2018. Photo credit: Tonika Johnson.

[1] Baraka, Amiri. “Bopera Theory.” In Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, and Victor Leo Walker III, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

[2] Hairston, Andrea. “Octavia Butler—Praise Song for a Prophetic Artist.”

[3] Abidoun, Rowland. “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Asé,” African Arts 27, no. 3 (1994): 68–103.

[4] Lawal, Babatunde. “The African Origins of African-American Art.” In Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, and Victor Leo Walker III, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

[5] Phillips, Rasheedah. Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, Vol. I.  Philadelphia: The Afrofuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences Books, 2015.

[6] Kim, Christine Y. Philosophy of Life: Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundourus, Rodney McMilliam, and Matthew Sloly. New York: The Studio Museum of Harlem, 2007. p. 53.

[7] Somé, Malidoma Patrice. Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. p. 241–242.

[8] Visona, Monica Blackmun, Robin Poynor, and Herbert M. Cole, eds. A History of Art in Africa. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. p. 413.

[9] Cole, Herbert M. “Akan Worlds.” In Monica Blackmun Visona, Robin Poynor, and Herbert M. Cole, eds., A History of Art in Africa. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. p. 197.

[10] Ibid, p. 239. Photo credit for figure 8-18: John Pemberton III, Amherst, MA.

[11] Ibid, p. 272,  274. Photo credit for figure 9-1 (B.M. # 1897.10.11.2) and 9-4 (R.E. Bradbury, courtesy of Mrs Ros Bradbury).

[12] Ibid, p. 200.

[13] Jonker, Julian. “Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub),” December 4, 2002.

[14] Akpem, D. Denenge. “Are You Ready to Alter Your Destiny?: Chicago and Afro-Futurism, Part II”, Chicago Art Magazine, July 6, 2011.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Walters, Wendy. “Blackness in Present Future Tense: Broadside Press, Motown Records, and Detroit Techno.” In Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds., New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2006. p. 128.

[17] Ibid, p. 128.

[18] Rockeymoore, Mark. “What is Afrofuturism?,” February, 27, 2002.

[19] Gaskins, Nettrice. “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space.” In Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. p. 27.

[20] Kim, Philosophy of Life, p. 62.

[21] Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, p. 8–9.

[22] Thomas, Sheree Reneé. “Introduction: Looking for the Invisible.” In Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

[23] Baraka, “Bopera Theory,” p. 378.

[24] Walters, “Blackness in Present Future Tense,” p. 128.

[25] Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future,” Socialism and Democracy  20, no. 3 (2006): p. 41–60.

[26] McLeod, Ken. “Hip Hop Holograms: Tupac Shakur, Technological Immortality, and Time Travel” from Afrofuturism 2.0, eds. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.

[27] Gipson, Grace D. “Afrofuturism’s Musical Princess Janelle Monáe: Psychedelic Soul Message Music Infused with a Sci-Fi Twist.” In Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.

[28] Soyinka, Wole. “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy.” In Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, and Victor Leo Walker III, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. p. 140–152.

[29] Méndez, Bryan J.  “Time Travel: There’s No Time Like Yesterday.”

[30] Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism, p. 26.

[31] Ibid, p. 41.

[32] Ibid, p. 24.

[33] Méndez, “Time Travel.”

[34] Walters, “Blackness in Present Future Tense,” p. 130.

[35] Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text: Afrofuturism  20, no.2 (2002): p. 1–15.

[36] Jacobs, Mary Jane. “Ashé in the Art of Ana Mendieta.” In Arturo Lindsay, ed.,  Santeria Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

[37] Harrison, Paul Carter. “Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music.” In Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, and Victor Leo Walker III, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. p. 316–331.

[38] Jones, LeRoi/Baraka, Amiri.  “The Revolutionary Theatre.” Liberator, July 1965.

[39] Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books, 1993. p. 3.

[40] Weiss, Daniel H., and Lisa J. Mahoney, eds. France and the Holy Land: Frankish culture at the end of the Crusades. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004. p. 206.

[41] Gaskins, Nettrice. “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space.” In Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.

[42] Butler, Parable of the Sower.

[43] Ibid, p. 22.

“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet- whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” —Audre Lorde, from Poetry is Not a Luxury

I aim to write a series of poems centered on the real and imagined landscapes of Chicago. While poetry isn’t often thought of as news, poems, more than anything, describe the truth of the world around us. While truth can come out of diligent and factual reporting, it can also be revealed by a few honest words that intimately and imaginatively give language to the unseeable pain and joy present in Chicago. There is so much more to Chicago than the fact of it and its events, there are universes of feelings that come out of the landscape we live in that break the bounds of reality.

adolescence

growing up is best        black    lonely      i am almost twenty    i dont want to get on the L right now          met four people i don’t like in a row  they got  freckles  road trips to idaho a major in the sciences        1:21 am           i got some wine              and a                                  good view of complicated young ass   motherfuckers  from my window all slit eyes teeth        shit faced  ungrateful     9/11 was two days ago   they wouldn’t know          but i saw something on the TV                             long walk home                         air mattress says hello

broke fan says hello     how many times i say i be getting old     and alex still dont like
the pics       and hands      still empty              cept this laptop                        hemp oil
machete           ring of milk

Next poem…

Part 1| Part 2

“Intimate Justice” looks at the intersection of art and sex and how these actions intertwine to serve as a form of resistance, activism, and dialogue in the Chicago community. For this installment, we talked to Anna Showers-Cruser in her McKinley park studio about queer identity, relationships to experimentation, and Southern hospitality. 

S. Nicole Lane: I’m really excited to interview you because, obviously, I love your work. Where are you from?

Anna Showers Cruser: I’m from Richmond, Virginia, and my family’s from southwest Virginia and we hail from Appalachia also. And I went to MICA for undergrad in Baltimore and lived there for a while. And then went back to Richmond, kind of was interested in that small-town or Southern city kind of art scene there, but I definitely kind of wanted to go to a bigger city for grad school. I went to UChicago and that was a cool program because it’s small and interdisciplinary but, as you know, part of a larger institution. So that allowed me to do a lot of play and exploring in my practice, but is also incredibly rigorous to go there and you get a lot of opportunity for feedback from such a breadth of artists — like Pope.L, Catherine Sullivan, Jessica Stockholder — these people who have incredibly varying practices. It was so new to have so many different kinds of eyes on my work that two years felt very truncated.

It’s like that feeling when right when you’re about to get somewhere [snaps fingers] it goes farther away from you, you know? And then, I decided to stay here because I felt like I had just scratched the surface of knowing what it was to live in Chicago. And UChicago, and Hyde Park in general, can feel kind of isolated, so I moved to Pilsen and found a place here and have been working since then. I feel like mostly I’ve shown in Chicago, but I’m trying to change that.

SNL: And were you always interested in sculpture and 3D objects, or did you start out with a specific medium?

Image: A rectangular panel is covered with small rectangular purple, orange, pink, and teal brush marks. On the top right corner of the canvas, a piece of rope is hanging where a slightly bent object is hanging with similar pastel hues — teal and pink. Tiny black eyelashes are peeking through holes across the object. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

ASC: I was trained pretty traditionally in painting at MICA. At the time most of the professors that I was working with were pretty old-school with the way that they taught. I was doing more traditional oil painting and then I realized that I wasn’t as interested in painting the figure as I was in the bodies that I was seeing. And I have just always kind of been obsessed with bodies — both from the miniscule and microscopic, like psychology, and moving outward to how bodies move and interact in space, not just sex but also just moving around together like the way that bodies kind of, like there’s no escaping it. [laughs] There’s no escaping your own body, there’s no escaping having to interact with other bodies, and I was really interested in the way that models and figure stands and things are posed, but they’re still these living, breathing people.

I realized I zoomed in and then I was doing a lot of work based off of kind of biology and anatomy and intersexuality. Then I realized that the best way to talk about the physical body is to start using physical objects and physical form. Not that 2D can’t as well — and I’m now returning to 2D a lot more.

I’m kind of working in an intersection of craft. I had a lot of discussions in grad school about what “Sculpture” with a capital “S” would mean. [laughs] And coming from the South, there’s a whole discussion about tradition of craft-making and things like that, too.

SNL: Yeah. The work there is really traditional and very craft-based. I think that’s why I had to leave that area because it was just very traditional, which is great in its own sense but just being in that environment all of the time is really limiting.

ASC: Yeah. I think that what Chicago has allowed me to do is really lean into the idea of trans-disciplinary practice and the intersection of these different media because I think it’s pretty difficult to create work that just is one thing anymore? Especially with the advances in technology and when the dissemination of an image is so quick that not only do you have to think about one person interacting physically with your work but also what it means to then have that turn back into an image. And I think that what you’re speaking to is this kind of tradition of wanting things to be nameable, and wanting things to fit into a certain kind of static identity of what it is. So people will work forever at traditional ceramics or embroidery or weaving or whatever it is — which is incredible — but I definitely feel like that didn’t resonate as much with me. Yeah. So not that I don’t appreciate a good embroidered dog pillow. I can look at those all day. And I want to make one. I’ll fuck with some latch-hook. I’m considering how to incorporate more relics of what I grew up around and things that I think I’m accepting more.

Image: The artist is sitting in their studio on a cushioned chair. They are wearing a black dress with yellow florals on it. Their legs are crossed and they are looking down painting their nails. On the left side of the image is a shelf with various studio tools. The wall behind the artist is covered with small images, fabrics, and ephemera. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: What kind of relics?

ASC: I think for a long time I turned my back on or looked down on the fact that I grew up with a lot of stuff. My parents are social workers and part of just being their generation and really, you know, both working in these kind of fields where confidentiality is key, they just kind of still haven’t translated or put everything into the digital realm. So we just constantly had a lot of paperwork. And also, just based on their own histories, just happened to be people who hold onto things. And so it didn’t even occur to me, until well into I started making sculpture, that I’d already been living with these really interesting objects for so long.

I kind of tried to push that away, as much as I kind of pushed away that a “queer aesthetic” had to mean DIY or a lot of craft objects. I realized I was kind of embodying this own bias against accumulation of stuff and against the idea of something that looked too handmade. I  had this mini-epiphany where I looked around at my home, like my childhood home, after being away for a while and realized that there were so many things that I couldn’t get away from, that I had been sketching about and writing about and not even realizing it.

SNL: Yeah. Yeah. Kind of coming back to your individual pieces that I see here in front of me, I don’t think I knew that some of the pieces were so large.

ASC: I realize that for a long time, I shied away from making things that are larger, because I liked this idea that things were a little more intimate, and then I got into this idea about things being a family of forms. And I’m still really interested in that, that the objects that I make I definitely anthropomorphize. I feel like they have their own personalities and I want people to feel like they’re peers. Whether this is an object — a sculpture — that you would usually stay away from [laughs] in your own life or whether it’s something that’s really enticing. I liked amping up the scale a little bit in some of the works. You can kind of step back from it and still get up close and have some of these teeny tiny rewards for close looking.

SNL: Mmm hmm. And you use a lot of pastels and lighter tones in a lot of the pieces. You work with a lot of different materials and objects. Is this papier-mâché?

ASC: Yeah, I work a lot with silicone, a lot with synthetic and real hair, from — I think this is actually yak pelt, so this isn’t human hair, this is animal hair, ethically sourced [laughter] — along with synthetic and human hair. Something that’s in my lexicon, for sure, is the plaster gauze, and I came to that in kind of a funny way, that started when my partner at the time was looking for ways to affirm their gender identity. We kind of entered this process together of curating masculinity — finding, for example, a way to use testosterone cream that at the time was applied in a particular way, to the point that there became a ritual not only of the cream but also of binding. So binders and the cream became this kind of daily ritual of trust that I was engaged in — it physically and emotionally involving two people.

I became really interested in the process of binding one’s body and also, sometimes, the inherent necessity in harming yourself to be able to literally get through the day. And, over time, it really does, in some ways, take a toll on you to be binding things down super, super tightly. It resonates as an abstract idea, but differently when you see the marks and you see how difficult it is for someone to breathe. Over time, watching that material degrade, watching it accumulate sweat … the photographer Elle Perez has some beautiful work showing this.

And so I was experimenting, like “Okay, I need to take these binding materials and dip them in plaster,” and then I realized, that already exists! [laughs] Plaster cast gauze is already a sculptural and medical material, so it was just this really funny moment where it happens to be convenient but it’s an effective, cheaper, very readily available material to be able to act as a stronger paper mache. That’s a really long way of saying, yes, I use papier-mâché, but most often it’s plaster.

Image: A top-down view of an off-white cushioned chair. The artist’s piece is made of a silicone illustration is sitting on the chair. The illustrated person is giving a rim job. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: I usually ask artists how they view their work in this column as it pertains to politics. How do you feel like your work is resisting? Obviously a lot of your work touches on queerness and the body and sexuality and all of that.

ASC: I think “Intimate Justice” is a really incredible name for it, too. I think it’s true how some of those things (gender, sexuality, politics) do tend to get confused, or become interchangeable to people on the outside of those identities.

Until queer history and literature classes in undergrad, I hadn’t really understood that kind of pattern in hegemonic, patriarchal society of designating or confusing queer people with hypersexuality. I feel like queer people have been sexualized in so many ways. And I realize that “queer” is this term that encompasses a lot of identities. I think about how people who may consider themselves queer might not interact in a way that’s “out” to others. Anyway, I feel like especially now, especially in this climate — that some people are seen as radical for just living their lives or doing the mundane. At the same time, if you are a queer-identified maker and you want to celebrate sexuality, it is another task to do that and not to feel like you have to censor your own work. There’s so much censoring and violence being done still to queer people, not only here but all over the world — like, I am lucky enough to be in a position where I don’t have to self-censor a lot. I don’t have a family where I’m in danger of – I’m not in danger in terms of what my family thinks, I’m not in danger in terms of living in Chicago, and my ethnicity and femme identity allow me to pass in very privileged ways in different environments, so I feel like given that, it is important for me to not shy away from talking about these things in my work.

I think that my work has a really strong relationship to experimentation. It deals a lot with coding, and I’m interested in flagging (particularly femme-identified people’s adaptation of the gay cruising “hanky code” practice from the 1970s) and how you can communicate your sexuality, your interest, and also your gender. But my work definitely is interested in both hiding and revealing those codes. Sometimes it might seem really “innocent,” like in the use of pastel or saccharine tones, or the use of kind of colloquial or readily accessible materials where it feels…friendly! [laughs] Or really humorous.

SNL: Playful.

ASC: Right! Playful. And hopefully, at times, drawing people in and taking a stance that a sexual experience does not have to be something that’s really serious or something that’s threatening. Specifically, I have seen a persisting tendency to openly “accept” LGBTQ people but relegate queerness to this idea of, like, “it’s only nightlife!” or only really experimental sex that is outside of what a “healthy” dynamic would look like. I am really interested in BDSM and power dynamics and I’m interested in how that aligns, in a lot of ways, with Southern hospitality [laughter], and the power dynamics that are at play between both of those things. I find that inherent in both are covert and overt codes.

It’s kind of funny because I kind of have that awareness through other people seeing it, and not when I originally started making the series that I’m working on now. I started making them because I was interested in kind of the materiality of who I was living with, and who I cared about, and my own body, and I didn’t necessarily see those things as being hypersexual until through the lens of critique and through the a studio visit where someone asked “What’s with the sex stuff? I’ve seen it all before.”

“Those things over there look like drag queens’ fingernails and that over there looks like a cum rag and that over there …” and I know now that it was said with love, but it was just this quick, nameable thing for some people. And so I kind of wanted to kind of explore from there. “Okay, so what is overtly sexual about certain objects versus others, or about certain bodies versus others?” So yes, sometimes the work is more obvious. Like there’s a drawing of somebody who looks like me giving someone a rim job — you’re sitting on that right now. [both laugh]

Image: The artists desk and back studio wall where pieces of various sizes and mediums are hanging from the wall. The desk has a collection of objects sitting on the left hand side with drawings on paper in the middle. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: Yeah, and I definitely think, even this piece [a nearby sculpture], it’s sensual to me because there’s hair and there’s these strange things sticking out of it–

ASC: There’s macramé hair on the other side. I actually used Barbasol and Vaseline to macramé this hair which is all covered in dust now. This is called “Tuck and Roll.” So this kind of started — really kind of jump-started — a couple of series’ for me. And I was kind of embarrassed to show it because I felt like it was maybe too silly at the time, and making this felt like making a portrait of someone I knew or a portrait of myself in some ways, and so I felt a little – I was more tentative. And now I feel like I’m just oozing my mess all over the place. But I really liked it because it implies use but you can’t actually make it function, as like something that supports your body very well? And you don’t exactly know what use it’s implying.

Is it a sex – like one of those really expensive mounts or props, you know, for different sex positions? And then it also looks like a pommel horse. I really love combining textures. And anything kind of synesthetic chance — seeing something and knowing how it feels, or feeling something and hearing exactly how that would translate into sound. I definitely, like a lot of artists, have this kind of compulsion to touch. So it’s important to me to combine a lot of different textures.

SNL: What projects or series are you working on now?

ASC: So I’m still working with this idea of the Southern proper “HostX” gifts.

Image: A more detailed shot of the artists desk showing illustrations and sketches of pieces are drawn on paper in black ink. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: I remember you mentioning that to me one time when I ran into you at a show. And I was like, “That is an amazing idea. That’s so awesome.” [laughter]

ASC: I’m also still working on this series called “Femme Remedies,” and so that’s more geared towards some different elements. They’re usually going to be below an average-sized person when they approach them. And so they’re kind of scaled so that one person can interact with them at a time. And they are usually made up of a lot of different found objects and are kind of these visual recipes — these “Femme Remedies” — or prescriptions. So they’re about kind of like how you self-care when you’re in an environment where your body is so pathologized.

There’s this complicated relationship, because when are you experiencing mental health issues and body issues and all of these things because of the force of hegemonic culture and this kind of systematic erasure of certain bodies? And when are you actually dealing with this biological issue? And that’s something that I struggled with a lot, and still do. And my mom’s an LCSW, so she’s a social worker therapist. And my dad is in mental health advocacy as well, in Virginia. So I have a lot of conversations about this with them. And with my chosen family. But in a lot of ways it is about not only myself, but those closest to me, or people who I research and feel a kinship with—and about making a physical object that tries (and fails a lot, but tries) to embody the question, “how do I actually go about taking care of myself?” So I guess the “HostX Gifts” is about what it means to try and earnestly give care and offer things to other people, while “Femme Remedies” are about a kind of inward looking or an inward care.

Image: The artist is sitting on the steps of their studio building and they are looking up at the photographer who is looking down from a higher vantage point. There are 10 opaque window panes behind the artist. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

FEATURED IMAGE: Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. The artist is looking at the viewer with their body slightly turned. They are wearing a black outfit with yellow flowers. In the background are some of the artists colorful piece hanging on the wall. 

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

Even 125 years later, we can’t stop thinking about the World’s Columbian Exposition, an extravaganza so large and dense that we continue to unpack its flaws and glorify its vastness. In 1893, Chicago introduced the world to collections of dancers, photographs, paintings, magazines, and yes, even a map made entirely of pickles. The fair influenced how we view and how we curate exhibitions today. It was a spectacle and its history is a labyrinth of stories and mystery, and even a bit of horror.

The Newberry Library is looking at the visual aspects of the fair—exhibiting an extensive collection of ephemera and art—in Pictures From the Exposition: Visualizing the 1893 World’s Fair. The exhibition displays the way artwork influenced people from afar to visit Chicago, as well as those who were living the experience, and how these images served as a means of advertising as well as fine art.

Image: An illustrated print with light blue sky features the Ferris wheel at the World’s Fair. The wheel is surrounded by small buildings and almost-impossible-to-see people walking amongst the fair. The photograph has an aged tint to it. Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

What’s always been so undeniably interesting to me as a Hyde Parker, living on the edges of where the famous fair was once held, is how the naked eye cannot see what once was. The buildings at the World’s Fair dissolved and vanished after just six months. Living amongst the history of the festival is non-existent. We know it, we understand it, but we don’t physically see it. The ghosts that remain are the The Palace of Fine Arts which is now the Museum of Science and Industry as well as a permanent statue on E. Hayes Drive which can’t be missed from Lake Shore Drive. But the real remains lie in the souvenirs that were salvaged and are available to view on exhibition at the library.

According to Newberry’s Director of Exhibitions, Diane Dillon, “City boosters sought to position Chicago on the global stage as a cultured metropolis that had rebounded from the Great Fire of 1871.” Not only were the artworks and performances surrounding the fair notable, but the architecture and state exhibitions were among the draw for spectators.

Pictures from the Exposition highlights the experience of the visitor’s first hand by displaying ephemera  advertising the fair and promoting the so-called “utopian landscape,” of the city with big shoulders. Of course we know the fair was far from utopia, as was Chicago. Much is withheld from the history of the fair, as racism and sexism were rampant for the time and for the exhibitions on view across the neighborhood. Segregation and racial hierarchies plagued the fair’s events even though the exposition was meant to exemplify progress. Minorities were subjected to being performers, low-level jobs, and racist stereotypes. Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand Lee Barnett published a pamphlet called, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was passed out to visitors. The pamphlet is featured in a glass box in the library along with the history of the Midway Plaisance, where spectators went to “escape” the high-brow environment of the remainder of the fair. The plaisance was riddled with racist reenactments and “ethnographic-themed villages” that featured cultures from around the world. Frederick Douglass wrote that “the Dahomians are…here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.”

Image: A black and white photograph of a river during the fair. There are boats traveling down the river as well as a large building to the right and a large building farther off in the distance. Both buildings have domes wiht flags on top. Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

The Native Americans were propped up as theatrical entertainment as they played the role as “themselves” in their so-called natural environment. On their stolen land, Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon wrote, “I declare you, the pale faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in Chicago city, the wonder of the world.”

Despite this unforgivable controversy, America still  largely focuses on the success of the fair, the numbers that were drawn to the city, and the innovation it created. The White City, called so because of the illuminating lights and white stucco buildings, saw 27.5 million people pass through the South Side of Chicago. The neighborhoods of Woodlawn and Hyde Park boomed after the fair, where venues and rail systems sprung up in order to engage their audience.

Image: Two fans are laid open in a glass box in the exhibition. The viewer is looking at the fans at an angle so that the illustrations on the fans are entirely clear. The images are lightly painted with water scenes from the fair. The fans have a cream/white background and a brown handle. Courtesy of Newberry Library.

The ephemera in The Newberry’s exhibition includes souvenirs, postcards, hand-held fans, and larger paintings all displayed along tables and on the gallery’s walls. The exhibition opens with a large sculptural Ferris wheel that doubles as a postcard holder, both became increasingly popular after the fair. Walking into the gallery includes more delicate items. Paper envelopes especially capture my eye as they are printed with orange, purple, and green ink and feature barely visible scenes from the fair. Playing cards and postcards are other interesting artifacts which exemplify the span of advertising involved. Other objects include John W. Green’s chromolithograph fans which beautifully detailed the islands and waterways surrounding the fair.

Most of the photography of the fair is architectural photography. According to the library, the fair charged, “$2.00 to bring hand-held cameras on to the grounds.” A map cane is even featured as a souvenir created by the Columbian Novelty Company. The library explains that the items like the fans and canes probably weren’t used but were purchased as mementos. Moreover, people who could not attend the fair even purchased these items as they wanted to experience the excitement from afar. As for larger pieces of work, the grounds and all of the buildings were filled with large-scale artworks. The “Statue of Republic” chromolithograph by Francis D. Millet appears like a watercolor piece utilizing pastels and vague background imagery.

Image: A birds eye view of the Chicago World’s Fair is painted on a clove playing card. The illustration in the center of the card details the waterways full of boats, canals, and the surrounding buildings. Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

Spanning 600 acres, the spectators were able to live amongst new inventions like elevators and even the first electric chair. The zipper, Cracker Jacks, and the first voice recording were all exhibited at the fair. Moreover, on the Midway Plaisance stood the first Ferris wheel. Chicago, a city of summer festivals, had its first start with the 1893 fair. The history of city planning and consumerism ties into the Newberry’s $12.7 million nine-month renovation of the gallery. The library itself opened in 1887 and with its new look,  hopes to appear more appealing to non-scholarly visitors—as the library is free and open to the public (and somewhere I never visited until writing this article).

A friend of mine has a 1893 World’s Fair glass etched and inscribed with a date and the name of the fair, it’s definitely a family heirloom. They have it propped up in a shelf in their apartment—a prized possession passed down from a great-great-great someone. I have a replica of a map of the fair in my kitchen. It hangs above the microwave with thumb tacks pinned in the corners. It’s a signifier of my roommate and I being proud Hyde Parkers through and through. Souvenirs, though real or fake (like my map), were collected individually and kept as relics of identity, nostalgia, the past, and probably a lot of Chicago pride.

The Newberry Library is open Tuesday through Thursday from 9am-5pm and Saturday from 9am-1pm. Pictures From the Exposition is on view until December 31st.

FEATURED IMAGE: The image features outside of the entrance to the gallery. A large Ferris Wheel is displayed in a glass box that doubles as a postcard holder  in the right side of the frame. In the middle is the door into the gallery with text on the wall. Courtesy of The Newberry Library.

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

Darien R. Wendell (they/them, ey/em, d) is a transdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and organizer who uses art as a vehicle to interrogate and excavate Black queer histories, experiences, and moments. They harness their inquiry in pursuit of creating art, spaces and worlds for Black trans and gender non-conforming folks who seek refuge, community and connection. Their work expands over different media and expressions, including performance, sculpture, illustration, and zines. They are also part of several Chicago-based artists and organizing collectives–one of which is A Tribe Called Cunt, a “squad” co-created with Bonita Africana (Shanna Collins) that highlights the many contributions of Black trans and gender non-conforming rappers and cultural producers to hip-hop culture.   

It was an art teacher in high school who encouraged Darien to think critically about art as a tool and not just aesthetics. They had a culture jamming assignment that required them to look at an advertisement, research the company that produced it to understand the company’s practices, and then create a counterculture piece of art about it. The main point of the assignment was for the students to create art that was meaningful, conceptual and impactful. This assignment and the teacher’s care sparked Darien’s desire to use art to help people.

“I’ve always wanted to help people,” They say. “That was always at the heart of my desire to go into the sciences, to redistribute money and wealth to people I love and people who are in need, and to help people get some sense of justice in the world.”

This same spark was later strengthened while studying with a professor at Northwestern University who took them under his wing and showed Darien what it meant to be an artist who put people first–beyond the “bourgeois nonsense” within artistic and academic spaces. “I was never disillusioned with art as a commodity in capitalism, because he showed me that there were pathways to circumvent that,” Darien says. “[Pathways] that still allowed people to receive resources and access.”

One evening in September, Darien sips Ethiopian coffee and sets down their book as I arrive. Their energy seems to be slowly setting with the sun, yet their brown eyes remain joyful. An admirer of their work since 2015,  I sat down feeling excited to finally speak with them about their artistic practice and organizing work. I wanted to understand what inspires the concepts in their art and learn more about the level of care and grace in how they create their art and cultivate community.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

Ireashia Bennett: Do you think that Black queer artists have a responsibility to use art toward social practice or social change?

Darien R. Wendell: Absolutely not. So much is already hefted upon Black queer folk that I don’t think it’s something that can be asked or demanded of us. But I do think it’s something that organically arises out of that investigation, that inquiry into self, into the world around us, exploring creatively. It’s like it comes up because it’s our material existence. Our existence is political inherently because so much of this world is designed to eradicate, erase, or misrepresent us. So our work is history-keeping, our work is envisioning a future where we still exist, our work is finding joy when we’re supposed to feel shitty and awful and terrible and wrong. So that stuff becomes political because of the relationships that we have when we share that with each other. Politics, at the heart of it, is about people relating to one another, having conversations, communicating, finding common ground, and seeking to use the means of that conversation, to use the products of that conversation, what is generated from that connection, to organize communities, to organize a world that can serve us, can meet us where we’re at, and hold us for what we are. So Black queer artists’ work is political, but I don’t think anyone has a duty to move through the world seeking to make political art. I don’t necessarily seek to make political art. When I’m trying to come up with a project, an idea, I’m trying to figure out how can I carve out a piece of the world that’s safe for us, that nurtures us, that sees us? ‘Cause that’s the need, that’s the lack, right? That’s what scares me and mine, that fuckin’ dogs us, and it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m just tryna find options to live, survive and thrive.

Image: Candid photograph of Darien R. Wendell speaking into a microphone at the For The People Artists Collective Third Annual December Showcase on December 2nd, 2018. They are wearing a black shirt with white letters and a bomber jacket with yellow, red, blue, and green colors on the front. Behind them are people smiling and looking outside of the photo frame. Photo courtesy of Sarah-Ji of Love and Struggle Photos.

Ireashia Bennett: Yeah. I ask that because Chicago has a legacy of using art to forward social justice movements. And it continues now–it’s so hard to not find someone who isn’t trying to make sense of the world around us in some way and using art as a vehicle for that. It becomes important to think critically about art–what we consume and how we consume it. And I think that critical lens exists because of Chicago’s organizing community here and how intertwined art is with social justice.

Darien R. Wendell: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Like, I give props and credit to Chicago for, like, showing me so much of what I know right now, right? I could never say I’d be the person that I am today, that I’d know what I know, without having learned from folks who are from Chicago; without having listened and then witnessed to what the state, police, and prisons do to people in Chicago, specifically Black and brown folks. Learning about the history of redlining in Chicago completely shifted my relationship to space and place. My art has never been the same since then, because of how I understand how our world is designed — how laws are set up, how space is set up to cater to white people, and push out, segregate, destabilize, disenfranchise Black and brown folks. I’m so grateful to have been able to witness it [and] to be welcomed in these spaces that I’m not really from.  I feel very, very fortunate to be radicalized by the movements in Chicago instead of being led to despair. Despair will come, sadness will come, but Chicago has taught me that you can always learn something from it–you can always move forward from it. It’s not the end of the world when a tragedy occurs. It’s a moment to rest, and to care, and to strategize, and then to show up the next fuckin’ day and shut shit down.

Image: Photograph of eight members of For the People Artists Collective at their Third Annual December Showcase on December 2nd, 2018. They are all looking directly at the camera while posing around a black poster with white coloring that reads “Do Not Resist?”. Photo courtesy of Sarah-Ji of Love and Struggle Photos.

Ireashia Bennett: So can you tell me a little bit about the collectives you’re a part of and how you either co-created those collectives or became a part of those collectives? But also can I just affirm, like, the fuck? That’s amazing! What you all are doing is amazing.

Darien R. Wendell: Yeah, For The People Artists Collective, I expressed interest in being in it for a little bit, for the last year or so, and they reached out to me early in the year to ask if I would want to join. We met up and we talked about trans and gender non-conforming (TGNC) representation in the collective, and what that meant for me to join as a non-binary person. [And] what investment the collective had in our survival and our ability to exist in the city without being criminalized, targeted, or, like, killed, you know. Just last week two Black trans women were killed in the city of Chicago. This was really important for me to know that the collective was committed to not just the liberation of Black and brown people, but specifically, the liberation of all Black and brown people, and very very specifically the liberation of Black trans femmes and folks who, you know, are destroying the gender binary.  We’re building and strategizing and figuring out what we want to do next. You know, we’re supporting No Cop Academy and I’m excited to see what happens in the future. It’s very new. So I’m still figuring out where exactly I fit and want to build up and use my art practice in that space because we’re still getting to know each other, a lot of the folks and myself. The Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Collective (BTGNC)–squad squad–is a labor of love. It was a product of my anger and frustration.

Ireashia Bennett: A lot of good things come from that.

Darien R. Wendell: ‘Cause the Movement for Black Lives wasn’t checking for Black trans people. Chicago was doing a lot of shit in the Movement for Black Lives. Like you’ve got BYP, you got BLM, and they’ve done incredible fucking work to show up for Black folks who have been murdered by police, Black folks who have been murdered in their communities, Black folks who are disenfranchised, but they ain’t checking for trans people. They still ain’t checking for trans people, really, to be honest.  There was a March for Black Women for Say Her Name, and I think like three trans women had died in that month’s time in the same span of the women that they were celebrating, but they weren’t a part of the action whatsoever. They weren’t mentioned. They weren’t named. And when I brought this up, the defense was, “oh, we’re talking about Black women who have been killed by the police.” And I’m like, “that doesn’t work for me for a number of reasons.” Like, these Black trans women are killed by the state if we’re looking at it from the big fucking picture, one. And two, we have a huge fuckin’ problem with domestic violence, with intimate partner violence, with folks in our community not knowing how to treat each other right, and that leads to people dying. If we’re trying to hold our liberation, our future, our freedom, we need to be looking at the relationships between us. So BTGNC was born out of that moment in time. I was just so mad, and I was just reaching out to every trans person I knew in the city. I was like, “hey, y’all wanna talk? I just want to meet up and talk to other Black trans folks, and talk about Black Lives Matter and talk about how we livin’.” So I invited a bunch of people over to my house, and we got to talking real like, “we need a space for us that is a sanctuary where we can be our whole fuckin’ selves and focus on our healing, and focus on building relationships and building a place for Black trans and gender non-conforming people to exist and be held and be seen and be heard.” And that’s BTGNC, and that’s what we set out to do. Then TT Saffore was killed in Chicago, and we were like, we need to show up, we need to have an action for her. That’s sort of when we came into the public eye around being a collective. I have to give very very huge props to LaSaia [Wade], to Benji [Hart], to Xavier [Danae Maatra], to K Tajhi [Claybren], to all people who showed up and kept showing up because it’s never been fucking easy. Folks are working on other projects that are still rooted in what BTGNC is about, it’s just not under the name of BTGNC. That’s totally okay because we’re still invested in our liberation, our safety, our healing and forging the sanctuary by whatever means possible.

Photograph of Darien R. Wendell’s installation at For the People Artists Collective’s Third Annual December Showcase on December 2nd, 2018. Photo by Sarah-Ji of Love and Struggle Photos.

Ireashia Bennett: Yeah. How would you, in terms of the Black art scene, or the Black queer art scene in Chicago, how would you define it, if you could?

Darien R. Wendell: Fuck, I don’t know if I can. It’s so multifaceted. You got, I can’t even encapsulate it in the description if I tried. Because you got the music and dancing, everything from the stuff that AMFM is doing, the stuff with Party Noir. You got the healing stuff. You got Stillness Meditation for Femmes of Color. You got Haji Healing Salon. Like, there are so many different facets to it. And it’s all under this massive fuckin’ umbrella of arts, queerness, and Blackness. That’s one of my favorite fuckin’ things about Chicago is like, I can go any-fuckin-where and find some Black queer-ass art or Black queer-ass people who are artists. It’s really fucking hard to encapsulate because Blackness is so expansive. Right? Like we can talk about Black and Brown Punk Collective as being a pivotal part of the Black queer art scene in Chicago.

Image: Screenshot of A Tribe Called Cunt website.

Ireashia Bennett: Talk about it. A Tribe Called Cunt–how did that come about? I know that you and–

Darien R. Wendell: Shanna. We the two halves of A Tribe Called Cunt. That came about last year. I want to say the time spent between August and October. I knew Shanna from the Black punk scene, the DIY scene. So Black punks made a track called “Cunt,” speaking up to the legacy of punk being a Black queer art form that is pivotal for liberation. That’s the lens that we come from, that’s the lens that we approach the work. But we knew each other from Black and Brown Punk Show, like we’d always dance together whenever we saw each other at the function, and like I know she was really fucking cool people who were doing really important work across the African diaspora, and unearthing those histories around queer trans people in that context. I was like, “I have a lot of respect for how you do this work because it’s not academic, it’s hella approachable. You an unapologetic fuckin ho, you here for sex workers you here for like, all these values that I really really love, and don’t see uplifting nearly enough.” And like not just values, but practices, right? She’s living that fucking life. So I was like “hey, I got an idea that I want to run by you,” because I have been sitting on all this archival material from Power to the Femme, the project that I did in New York in 2015. What I [have is] cool, but it’s just the foundation to something bigger. There’s a whole ass history archive, a hip-hop history archive at Harvard, but it’s not checking for queer trans people. It’s not looking at it outside of the United States context. So [Shanna and I] got together and we want to build an archive, a platform, and a space to document folks who are trans, gender non-conforming and queer across the hip-hop diaspora, and not just from the millennium but across time. We’re saying unequivocally that queers run this shit, that the future of hip-hop relies on queer and trans people. That everything from voguing becoming a mainstream acceptable form of art that is celebrated and cherished, that comes from Black and brown trans folks who are poor from the hood, who are sex workers, who made these awe-inspiring, take-your-breath-away art forms, as a means of survival, as a means of celebrating themselves. We need to document that history because if we don’t, if we’re not the ones to do it, someone else is going to do it poorly or it’s not gonna happen at all. It’s going to get erased, and that’s already happened so much, right? Like how many white people still think Madonna came up with voguing? Like, no, honey. She didn’t come up with shit. She’s just stealing from Black folks. That’s her career. [laughs]

Ireashia Bennett: Read her!

Darien R. Wendell: So we set out with that, and we got really fucking fortunate with the POWER Project this past June to be able to put on a seven-day festival to really kick us off. People are really seeing how much queer and trans folks are contributing to hip-hop culture, one. And two, that hip hop’s not dead. And three, a lot of the shit that’s fly came from us and that there’s a lot of us who are hip-hop heads, who are rappers, who are breakers, who are graffiti artists, the whole fucking spectrum of hip-hop, right? Not just rap. That’s one tiny facet and we’re losing that to late-capitalism. So we’re trying to both love on the fullness of hip-hop culture, and also say queer and trans people did this shit. So I am really grateful to Felicia Holman for believing in the vision, and that we were able to put on that festival ’cause that meant that we could rep a lot of folks who don’t get enough attention in hip-hop.

Ireashia Bennett: Yeah, that sounds super exciting. So you were talking about the archives, and you’re like, “fuck the academic, traditional archive. We’re going to make our own archive.” What do you think the role of the archives, in general, are supposed to be in terms of documenting and preserving our history and preserving culture?

Darien R. Wendell: I think of our ancestors who have shown us the importance of archiving our history. Right now I’m thinking of Ida B. Wells and Zora Neale Hurston. We wouldn’t have the fullness of the documentation of African and Black folklore and folktales without the work of Zora. And she didn’t care. She used the academy to her benefit, right? She didn’t change the way people spoke. She told their stories from a place of authenticity. She understood the importance of oral histories, and that in order for them to be preserved across time in a white supremacist society that they would need to be documented in paper. We wouldn’t have a clearly defined history of the breadth of lynching without the work of Ida B. Wells and her journalism. So I look to people like that when I think about what archiving means, and why archiving is important to Black futurism, Afrofuturism, to sustaining ourselves right now.  So the work of archiving is just the work of loving Black people and caring that we existed in the past, we exist now, and we will continue to exist into the future. The meanings of the words and all of that will change, but if we can preserve pieces of it, we can tell some stories. If we can have images and something to share with one another, then we will continue. We will survive. We will still be.

This article is published as part of Envisioning Justice, a 19-month initiative presented by Illinois Humanities that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact.

Featured Image: Digital Collage Portrait of Darien R. Wendell with arms spread open. Behind their head is a golden half-circle. The background is a collage by Darien titled “Assata.” Source photograph by Jeremy Tomuta. Clothing by Rebirth Garments. Make-up by Pepa Lee-Llobell. Digital Collage by Ireashia Bennett.

Ireashia Monét (they/them) is a Chicago-based self-taught photographer, filmmaker, writer, and multimedia artist originally from PG County, MD.

As many contemporary artists, arts organizations, and other cultural laborers continue a decades-long trajectory of re-orienting their practices more deliberately towards and within the social world, forms and approaches have morphed through a collective re-imagining of the production, dissemination, and sociopolitical potential of art. These modes have sought to broaden access and participation in the arts, transform relationships between people, forge practices rooted just as much in ethics as in aesthetics, and other similar gestures toward aligning art with notions of social justice and reform. And yet amidst this grappling, a number of unresolved riddles remain regarding art’s place in daily life: What and who is art’s “community,” and what do we mean by “community”? What is art’s relationship to democracy? Can increased access to the arts also advance civic participation more broadly? What is the role of the artist in society? Can art and artists be catalysts for social change — and should they?

Such issues and questions reverberate through the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s current exhibition Participatory Arts: Crafting Social Change, which explores the influence that Addams and other social reformers have had on visual and performing arts in Chicago through historical and contemporary practices of bookbinding, ceramics, theatre and performance, and art therapy. The show is structured by pairing current practitioners alongside objects and artifacts from the Hull-House Museum archives and UIC Special Collections relating to important figures and moments in the settlement’s history. In addition to the exhibition, programming has featured a series of workshops led by the featured artists, as well as a symposium that explored the historical legacies, and current potentials, of art to incite social change.

Founded by Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, the Hull-House symbolized reformist ideals of the Progressive era (1890s-1920s), and was part of a nationwide movement of settlement houses which in many ways sprung up in response to the exploitations and social stratification of the Gilded Age. Operating under the notion that art and education are vital components of democracy and community life, these sites offered resources and creative outlets for new immigrants and poor and working-class neighbors in their local area.

Among them were classes taught by Sadie Ellis Garland Dreikurs that would be early seeds for the discipline of art therapy. Ellis, who grew up on the West Side of Chicago, started getting involved in art programs at Hull-House as a child and eventually became the director of community services there, which allowed her to combine her own skills in painting and printmaking with efforts in social reform. Ellis worked with youth and with psychiatric patients to establish creative expression as a source of self-acceptance and emotional strength. She also led therapeutic group painting workshops, guided by the belief that participatory, collective art-making could be a way to alleviate isolation, improve communication skills and sensitivity to others, and raise self-awareness.

Building on top of those foundations, some contemporary practitioners such as Leah Gipson have sought to push art therapy further in the direction of social justice, coinciding with a “cultural turn” that has emphasized new possibilities with community-driven art, teaching, and research. Gipson also seeks to re-imagine art therapy by uniting it more closely with freedom struggles led by people of color. A transdisciplinary artist and art therapist, her recent projects include The Rectory, an arts incubator in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago; and co-hosting DIVISIVE, a live show on Lumpen Radio which explores the intersections between politics and cultural work.

I recently spoke with Gipson about these and other projects, her views on public space and cultural space, her critical approach to psychology and art therapy, the influence of some key predecessors, art’s potential as an instigator of social change, and related topics. This is the final interview in a three-part series (see part one here and part two here) of dialogue with artists featured in Participatory Arts, on view at Hull-House until May 2019. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Greg Ruffing: Are you from Chicago, or if not, how did you end up here?

Leah Gipson: I’m from Florida originally, and I moved to Chicago in 2008. I went to the University of Central Florida in Orlando to earn my BFA from 2003 to 2007, and then I moved to Chicago for graduate school to study art therapy. I got to Chicago in what I refer to as “the year of Obama,” and it was a really interesting time. I can remember noticing the differences between being in a city like Chicago, versus Orlando where, you know, there was pretty much total disbelief that somebody like President Obama would get elected. And so moving to Chicago, this really blue city in the Midwest, was just a complete shift. The part of Florida where I’m from originally is also really different than Orlando. I’m from the panhandle, Panama City, where you can get to pretty much any major Southern city in about five hours — which some people think is a long time, but growing up, for us that was nothing. So, you know, Atlanta, New Orleans, Montgomery — the north Florida panhandle is really close to these places. So I’m from The South, and north Florida is still very Southern. My mother’s family is from Alabama, so we used to visit there a lot. So the differences when I moved to Chicago definitely influenced my thinking about what I might do and what I might study, for sure.

GR: And now that you’ve been here for about a decade, how has that influence taken shape, as far as how Chicago is influencing the work that you’ve been doing here?

LG: I’ve lived in a few different parts of the city: Boystown, Old Irving Park, and then just south of that neighborhood, to Austin on the West Side. And now I’m in Oak Park, but just across the street from Austin. I’ve worked on the West Side for most of the time that I’ve been in Chicago, and the West Side has really influenced my thinking, and the kinds of things I get into.

Most of what I’ve learned about the South and West sides has been from people who grew up here and have been here for a long time. Some people kind of talk about economics and the difference between Blacks on the South and West sides. And other times, what institutions have really shaped the neighborhoods, right? And how these neighborhoods have historically been shaped by development — I’ve really felt that impact in my experience. And I’ve been particularly interested in space: public space, vacancies, spaces that become more recognizable in terms of lack, and looking within the environments that we’re in to locate the resources. But something about that really highlights the wealth of cultural knowledge and the sort of things people do when they’re working with what they have — improvisation of neighborhood space and public space, and how people configure their lives, and how they deal with the challenges of being in this city, and the history of this city.

GR: Before you came to Chicago, did you have some kind of visual arts practice that has followed you up through grad school and into now? And how is that situated with your art therapy work?

LG: Late in my junior year in undergrad, I was on track to become a graphic designer — a sort of practical field, you know? I was really interested in painting and printmaking, but in my mind there was no way to do much with that. And as I was rounding the end of my undergrad career, I was in a painting critique — I had been working on a portrait series of African American women and women of color in my life. And I was doing these as a way to think about identity, and kind of focus on gender, race, sexuality — those things were important. And I had a classmate who had been doing these paintings that weren’t really figurative, they were kind of expressive, and she was planning to study art therapy. And for some reason, there was a connection for me in the way I was studying or trying to understand race and gender and sexuality using painting. So that’s actually how I found myself looking into art therapy, and I think I imagined there would be this kind of hybrid investigation of subjectivity and culture to meet with, and work with, other people. For me the most important part of these portraits was not necessarily what they ended up looking like, but it was in who I was working with. So that led me to art therapy, and since then, painting and printmaking barely survived that shift.

A lot of my [more recent] work has been staging events, facilitating events, those kinds of things — which I think coincides with a heightened moment for social practice. I think that made me sorta odd in art therapy, because a lot of people I studied with were thinking about emotions and a purely psychological approach to the art revealing some kind of internal psychological state, and I’m really wanting to look at the link between personal and political forces. And I’ve been trying to find conversation partners in other disciplines, so my work became more transdisciplinary.

GR: Yeah, and I’ve read and seen your practice kinda framed within this, like, “cultural turn,” right — ways in which practitioners like yourself are bringing in other research, and this community-engaged focus? Can you maybe say a little bit more about stepping outside of just the internal psychology and looking instead at these broader factors?

LG: My first internship in grad school was at Michael Reese Hospital, which was in the process of closing, and every day my supervisor would say “I don’t know if we’re going to be open tomorrow.” And there were mice in the building, and the psychiatric treatment facilities were the only parts of the hospital that were still seeing clients. Every other part of the hospital was shut down — in fact, during the time I was there, there was talk of a horror movie that was to be filmed on the campus of Michael Reese with all of its vacant tunnels and medical buildings. A lot of our clients came from group homes, or they were youth who were chronically running away or displaced in some way, or there were adults who were homeless who were able to use the medical facility in and out. So this was really my introduction to art therapy and the field, and it was infuriating for me. And my supervisor was struggling with his own role in all of this, and as a white man I think he had his own struggles about what he might be doing, and whether or not this place valued his knowledge or his work. I think he really struggled to articulate for me some of the really systemic social factors that plagued all of this, including his own role in it. So it was a really frustrating time for me to see this kind of dying institution in Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood. And I mean, sure, on an individual level the people who worked there cared for the clients. But on a social level, this was a wake-up call for me about what it was I was doing.

From there I got an internship with A Long Walk Home — I had been wanting to work more with women of color, and after my work at Michael Reese I wanted to focus more on inequalities, and was seeking a mentor who also had that focus. So I worked with an African-American woman who is an art therapist and a photographer, Scheherazade Tillet, and we actually ended up developing a youth program for A Long Walk Home. The program is called Girl/Friends Leadership Institute, and it began as a pilot program for girls of color to learn about Black feminism, the anti-rape movement, reproductive justice, and arts activism. We were primarily working with Black girls who lived on the West Side in the North Lawndale neighborhood, and that meant that everything had to change from a traditional approach to art therapy. The intervention had to be across systems, at every level.

When I talk about a “cultural turn” — and actually the scholar who has been using that term is Savneet Talwar — it has to do with locating a historical trajectory for art therapy that is tied to understanding that people are facing problems within a social world, and there’s no way to isolate those problems internally. You have to really understand the dynamics they face: what’s going on inside someone, and then the world outside that contributes to really shaping that. So when I found Cliff Joseph’s work in my professional career, it was another one of those infuriating moments of like, “why has this not been taught, why is this something I didn’t study in school?” I didn’t have more than a cursory interaction with it. Meanwhile, Cliff Joseph is 96 years old and lives in Chicago, and was here during the time I was in school — so why is it that I encountered his scholarship as sort of an afterthought or a side note? So a lot of my time has been recovering an archive, looking for an archive, trying to figure out what the profession could have been, and maybe could become, if we pay attention to those voices who are attuned to the social world.

GR: So with Joseph’s work, are there archives that already exist that you’ve been researching, or you’re interested in creating one?

LG: Yeah, there are some that I’ve been going through, one of which is a digital archive with the American Art Therapy Association. And that included documents from a woman named Lucille Venture, who was an African-American, and the first person to have what would be the equivalent of a Doctorate’s degree in art therapy. She did her dissertation in 1977. It was called “The Black Beat in Art Therapy Experiences”, and in that time period she’s linking the issues that her clients are facing with the social times. The archives include this correspondence between her and some officers in the American Art Therapy Association. She and several others, including Cliff Joseph, were trying to work within the association to build a committee they named the Third World Committee. These letters are actually about the officers in the association basically telling her “we can’t name it that.” And so it’s this back and forth of her working within the association, and also the association very overtly saying “we’re not interested in that.”

But there was a push from several Black art therapists that was in sync with the cultural times, and as I kept going, I kept stepping back and following these people that were part of this. So I discover all of this while I’m just looking through what’s available — and also basically what’s not [available].

The stuff that’s in the Hull-House show now is from the research I was doing for my chapter in Savneet Talwar’s edited book, Art Therapy for Social Justice: Radical Intersections. So I had mixed feelings. You’re excited to find this stuff [in the archives], but also disappointed and you want to know what happened that these voices were not able to become centered in the field. I’m also teaching a class right now called Black Rage: Interpreting Feeling in Anti-Slavery Imagery, and this is a really new and very different type of class for the art therapy department. As part of the class, we’re going to several archives at Stony Island Arts Bank, Newberry Library, and the Chicago History Museum. So I’ve been doing a lot of work that thinks about the archive, and I’d like to develop an art therapy archive that people could actually go to.

GR: With that kind of critical approach you’ve described, do you have a broader vision of what a more social justice oriented approach to art therapy might look like?

LG: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there was a point in time when my answer to that would be a lot simpler than it is right now. Or maybe it’s a very close point in time — maybe just a year ago. I don’t know if you know anything about [second lady] Karen Pence and her embrace of our field? That happened about a year ago. And our professional association [AATA] did not take the opportunity to sort of reject that embrace and to say “here’s why we reject that embrace”, or “here’s why we don’t need saving.” So that was a disappointment, and really made me question the field. So if Karen Pence, whose administration has been very volatile and connected to a number of practices that are very harmful to the people that art therapists tend to work with — what draws an administration like that to this field? This didn’t happen to art education, or to the arts more broadly — it happened to art therapy. And I like to think that those things happen because of how we’re operating.

So I just think there needs to be a radical reshaping and reconfiguration of the discipline, and we should really question the ideas in a mainstream sense. Because I think something like the Art Therapy and the Third World panel asked “who are we as a profession, who are we going to be?” And I think the field has answered that question very incorrectly, to the point where we’ve reached this moment in time, with this administration that’s been — you know, Mike Pence has been linked to conversion therapy and the privatization of the VA system, and all of these things. I mean, let’s just talk about the accessibility of health care, and where this administration has stood on that! Or the violence against refugees and immigrants — these are all people that art therapists work with. So my question is, “how does the field attract that kind of embrace?” It could be because of the ideas and how the field has positioned itself in the world. And that means that we really need to critically examine our professional identity — and hopefully we can do that in conversation with other disciplines.

For me it’s also this place of questioning knowledge, looking at what knowledge is considered the most important or foundational, not just in the profession but more broadly. Looking at literature, and how the field thinks about art. And who’s authoring the knowledge that we have and are using to define the field. So I’m also thinking about the voices that we won’t read or that there won’t be articles about — and the knowledge that’s there would be very much connected to the clients I first encountered at Michael Reese Hospital. You know, what are their stories and experiences of this profession? Using that knowledge to hopefully start something different or new. Maybe what we have goes away entirely, or moves into many new configurations.

Image: Leah Gipson (at left, in pink skirt) works with participants in an art therapy workshop at Hull-House in October. Photo courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum / Jesse Meredith.

GR: I wanna follow that trail a little bit — can you talk about one or two recent projects of yours that you feel like are maybe getting in that direction, or part of your efforts to look in that direction?

LG: To talk more about A Long Walk Home, I think one of its strengths — as an organization that was founded by two sisters, Scheherazade Tillet and Salamishah Tillet — is that it’s a transdisciplinary endeavor. You have Scheherazade who is an art therapist and photographer, and her sister Salamishah is a sexual assault survivor who is a writer, and professor of English and African-American studies. Then you have the host of other people over the past 20 years who have worked with them to build the organization — dancers, actors, musicians, educators, scholars, students, so many people who are approaching this problem of sexual and racial violence from their particular places of inquiry. So working from multiple disciplines is really at the core of how the organization centers the arts and also centers the experiences of Black women and girls, and Black women and girls’ survivorship. Historically, this has been a way that Black intellectuals and artists have developed their work, where they recognize that strictly defined disciplines have not actually been able to capture the complexities of Black life. There’s always been this thread of understanding that the cultural context really shapes how people experience mental illness or trauma or displacement — any of the things that you’ll commonly see in a traditional art therapy practice. So I think that it’s this idea of working across multiple disciplines that A Long Walk Home brings to art therapy — based on all the people who become involved in using their specific knowledge to do this work — that basically allows us to really think about where we situate the knowledge that is necessary to collaborate with people, to problem-solve and effect change in their own lives. I think those kinds of qualities more broadly are what I’ve seen in [A Long Walk Home], and more specifically, really focusing on how the arts alone are not what can make this change, right? You have to be involved in organizing and activism, and you have to be very aware that a kind of model where therapy is isolated from the social world is not effective in changing the circumstances that continue to make people vulnerable.

GR: You’ve also been part of a few projects on the West Side that have been trying to create something with underused lots, and make space where there’s these artistic activities but also these broader gestures toward community building, right?

LG: Yeah, and these kinds of projects are all kind of utopic, or they’re pointing to a kind of Black Eutopia where it’s about the idea, and it’s about the space, and it’s about the collaborations. These projects are imaginative. Black Eutopia is the brainchild of another artist, Rae Chardonnay. We collaborated for her first iteration of this project in 2014 as part of a series that I was doing to create micro-funds for West Side artists. What this first Black Eutopia, which was set in Carter’s Barber Shop in North Lawndale, really captures within my interests is a focus on cultural spaces that already exist in a way, and that have the kinds of knowledge that Black communities have been leveraging to deal with social inequalities, but also for self-determination. So [for example] working at a barber shop to illuminate some of the strengths of that cultural space is in the spirit of a lot of the things that I’m often thinking about, about how to work in a hyper-local way so that the knowledges that already exist can be prominent in our current solutions to whatever problem we’re looking at.

So what could it look like if art therapy could change the political reality in which it’s understood? It’s what art therapy could look like that I am using to fuel some of my current conversations and partnerships. How do we move beyond just imagining ideal spaces? How do we use our profession to reimagine the systems that we are part of, right? We have to be the ones to transform the systems that we benefit from.

Image: A takeaway postcard from Leah Gipson’s installation in the Participatory Arts exhibition at Hull-House. The postcard contains a partial radial design, with text that says “How has art helped you make change?” Courtesy of the artist.

GR: Yes! Totally. And I also want to give a few minutes to ask you about Sadie Ellis Garland Dreikurs, because in the Hull-House exhibition they’ve paired each of the contemporary practitioners with these historical figures and archives, so I’m curious if there’s any specific things from her work that have influenced you or how you’re approaching your practice?

LG: I think the questions I would have for someone like Sadie are similar to questions I have for myself: how do you make change while standing within a system that you embody and that has certain material and social privilege? The tendency is to want to think our way out of that problem, and I’m not looking for an answer that would help me to solve that dilemma, because there will always be this power differential for someone who gets to do the imagining or gets to shape the conversation. So is there a possibility to use shared spaces to disrupt a system for the elite or middle-class author or thinker or idea generator?  I think so, but I think it’s really challenging work, in my experience. Its long-term, very slow work.

Sadie and Cliff’s work also raise the issue of working directly with people in your context. How do you ask those difficult questions? The postcard print I have in the show has the text “How has art helped you make change?” I think it’s a simple, yet complicated question. What is the “change?” Who is the “you?” How does art “help?” Can art do anything? I’d quickly follow that with saying that art can’t do anything — we’re the ones who do things with art, or through art. Our goal isn’t to use art therapy in and of itself as the solution. It’s to reach a point where we’re actually addressing our problems as a society, and maybe using art is one way to do that. This is our work, you know, what is our labor for? This is hopefully about transforming the world that we’re in.

This article is presented in collaboration with Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy through more than 30 exhibitions, as well as hundreds of talks, tours and special events in 2018. www.ArtDesignChicago.org

Featured Image: Leah Gipson works with participants in an art therapy workshop at Hull-House in October, as part of the programming for the Participatory Arts exhibition. The room is packed with a large group of people gathered into a circle, with various drawings and works on paper scattered on the floor. Photo courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum / Jesse Meredith.

Greg Ruffing is an artist, writer, organizer, and curator working on topics around the production of space at different scales — from the macro level of sociopolitical structures and architecture in the built environment, down to an emphasis on community, collaboration, and exchange on the interpersonal level. He is the Photography Editor at Sixty Inches From Center.

This is the fourth and final article in a series about Body Passages, a partnership between Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and The Chicago Poetry Center (the first, second, and third pieces can be found here). These articles provide brief looks into a 10-month, interdisciplinary creative process between Body Passages poets and dancers, documenting and reflecting on aspects of that process as it happens. Launched in 2017, Body Passages is an artist residency and performance series curated and produced by Sara Maslanka (Artistic Director of Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble) and Natasha Mijares (Reading Series Curator of The Chicago Poetry Center; Natasha also writes for Sixty).

Trigger warning: The performance “Blood Memory,” discussed below, contains references to sexual assault, including in childhood.

During a culminating event featuring groups’ final performances, the Body Passages artists offered the audience sugar cereal, sparkling cider, and glowsticks; invited us to dance with them and record ourselves reading their poetic curations; and asked us to travel back in time with them to New Year’s Eve 1998. Especially appropriate given Body Passages’ collaborative focus and this year’s theme of “activation,” much of each group’s performance indeed brought the audience along “with them,” as every piece invited interactivity as part of the performance and/or as part of its development. After a 10-month process of working together in interdisciplinary groups of poets and dancers — and periodically sharing drafts of their work with the public — at this event eight Body Passages artists presented four final pieces: “The Mother,” “I Am,” “Blood Memory,” and “Wax.” These multifaceted works engaged topics such as abortion and reproductive rights, sexual assault, childhood trauma, parenthood, personhood, identity, joy, fulfillment, influences, and the voices within (and those who may be out to silence them).

Having witnessed excerpts myself and also having heard the artists discuss these pieces over the last several months, I entered the space on the show’s first of two evenings — Friday, October 12 — both knowing and not knowing what would occur. I enjoyed seeing expected developments in the works as well as utter surprises and complete twists in tone.

What follows here is a narrative rendering of the culminating event, including glimpses of my experience and of my interpretations of its performances, along with reflections on the threads between them and the larger Body Passages program.

Image: The interactive display related to Lani T. Montreal and Maxine Patronik’s performance “Blood Memory,” at the Chicago Danztheatre Auditorium as part of the Body Passages culminating event. In the foreground, a table is covered with blue-and-white elephant-print cloth, a tri-fold posterboard, and various papers, including a large one that reads “SUPPORT BELIEVE ♡ SURVIVORS” and shows a drawing of a tree with colorful post-it note leaves. In the background, two rows of chairs and the front of the stage are visible, forming three sides of the square performance area, where one person is standing. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Upon entering the venue — the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble auditorium, on the second floor of Ebenezer Lutheran Church — there appeared to be two shows in one, each informing the other. The long rectangular room was divided roughly in half, with an interactive installation area near the entrance (communicated by a “U” of tables) and a thrust-style performance space farther back (formed by a single row of chairs on three sides to create — with the stairs to the stage — a sizable square). Although the centerpiece of the event was the performances that were to take place in the rear space (during what I’ll call the second “act”), guests were encouraged to circulate toward the front for the first 15-20 minutes (act one), participating in activities at installations that had been created by the same artists.

These installations referred, in varying degrees, to the performances to come in act two. One group’s station offered guests single-serving cereal boxes, each stickered on one side with a black-and-white photograph of a group member (Carly Broutman, Jeanette “Jae” Green, or Michelle Shafer, co-creators of the forthcoming performance “Wax”) and, on the other, with a poem, quote, or lyrics. (“Like Breakfast of Champions,” Michelle said after the show. “Women to look up to. You can be a dancer, you can be a songwriter, you can be an amazing poet.”) While athletes and other celebrities often grace such covers, it struck me as refreshing, even renegade, to put artists — and their work — on cereal boxes. A second table, related to the performance “I Am” (by “Maggie Robinson, Allison Sokolowski, and YOU”), invited guests to “Paint your nails and add some color to your life!” (with supplied materials) and/or “Grab a slip of rainbow paper and answer one of our primary questions: Who are you? Where have you been? Where are you going?” (priming the audience for the performance to follow). A third display — connected to Lani T. Montreal and Maxine Patronik’s “Blood Memory” — offered information from RAINN about sexual violence and publicized the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline (800.656.HOPE). Alongside sat a copy of Maxine’s undergraduate thesis paper, “Scattered Swirls: Understanding a Fragmented Past Through Embodied Knowing,” and a poster-size drawing of a tree, with leaves that guests could fill in to demand “SUPPORT BELIEVE ♡ SURVIVORS.” With these interactive installations, the mode of participation was not necessarily passive, but low-pressure, with guests receiving something or taking a small action but not having to share or generate something new.

Image: The interactive installation related to Carly Broutman, Jeanette “Jae” Green, and Michelle Shafer’s performance “Wax.” This is a close-up image of a table with a black tablecloth, on which several single-serving cereal boxes sit, each stickered on one side with a black-and-white photograph of a group member. Visible in the background are the back of one boxes, including lyrics for “Cocooned,” and a red bucket. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

“The Mother”

Also taking place in the front space during act one was “The Mother,” an interactive poetry gallery created by David Nekimken, now functioning as his own group. David’s installation stretched along a wall where three tall, black screens each designated a kind of step. A sign prompted, “Read/Speak/Move,” and a facilitator invited guests to begin their involvement in David’s piece by reading seven writings suspended on one of the screens: Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Mother,” five “Golden Shovel” poems David wrote in response to Brooks’ poem, and “Secret of ‘67,” non-fiction prose from an anonymous individual. (In brief: Per Don Share, Golden Shovel is a poetic form created by Terrance Hayes “in homage to” Gwendolyn Brooks, wherein “the last words of each line…are, in order, words from a line or lines taken often, but not invariably, from a Brooks poem.”) On a nearby table lay copies of each of these and of three additional poems: Katie Heim’s “If My Vagina Was a Gun,” Abby Minor’s “Your Country and Everyone In It,” and Leyla Josephine’s “I Think She Was A She.” While and after reading the 10 offerings, participants were asked to consider “Which voice exemplifies personhood to you?” and then were invited to record themselves reading that piece on a provided tape recorder or video camera. (On this day, less than a week after Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, I picked Heim’s “If My Vagina Was a Gun.”) Finally, participants could accompany David, responding in movement to the 10 writings or to one of many prompts, each a short excerpt.

Image: David Nekimken’s “The Mother,” an interactive poetry gallery and performance. This long shot shows people reading poems and otherwise participating in the piece’s stations in the background. In the foreground, David dances in profile in a spotlight, in front of the largest screen. David wears sneakers, dark pants, and a light-colored button-up shirt. Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus.

Throughout the first act, David danced in a spotlight in front of the largest screen, spinning around and swinging his arms and, at other moments, shuffling back and forth to simply keep the movement going. I shuffled around the floor with him as we informally discussed his piece and process. I asked David why he had chosen his topic — abortion, and sometimes reproductive rights more generally — and he answered, “I didn’t; it chose me. It just happened.” Of reading Brooks’ poem and creating his Golden Shovel poems in formal and thematic response, he said, “I really got into being in the mother’s shoes — as if I were the mother [in the Brooks’ poem] who had had those abortions,” a creative process he likened to a “journey.” In “stepping into” the poem and creating multiple poems stemming from it, he was “getting different voices,” exploring perspectives that were and were not his own, as well as the pressures and challenges that someone considering an abortion might face. Although David was completing the Body Passages program without his original partners, he found that “this subject matter really activated a number of the other performers,” asserting that the ongoing discussion with other Body Passages groups online and in meetings functioned as his piece’s “collaboration.” While some performers had very “particular” points of view about his initial poetic responses, he chose not to “step back” from the project but rather work to recognize those.

So, in addition to Brooks’ poem (which, during a mini-critique I attended in July, someone described as a poem “that both sides of the abortion debate have used to argue their side”) and his Golden Shovel poems (which he characterized as generally “pro-choice but recognizing that it’s a difficult choice”), David then decided to include “Secret of ‘67” (a personal story about getting an abortion before it was legal to do so, emailed to him by the friend of another artist) as well as the three other, more overtly “pro-choice” poems (all recommended by Body Passages co-director Natasha Mijares, on David’s request). He credited this “give-and-take” with the other artists as bringing his project to its current point. David reflected that his being male may have impacted his colleagues’ earlier reactions, but that the larger takeaway was that he needed more voices; it was not that he couldn’t include his own voice in the conversation, but that it couldn’t be the only or main one. He also realized he could integrate his own personal experience by writing a poem about a father. To me, a central concern of David’s piece and approach seemed to be that of begetting — in one respect, about the very notion of “choice” and consequences (however proffered, enabled, or limited); in another, how one artist’s work can inform or inspire others’ thought, or literally shape another artist’s work.

Image: Maggie Robinson and Allison Sokolowski performing in “I Am.” In the foreground, Maggie kneels on the floor, holding up strands of red yarn, which is also strewn across the floor. In the background, Allison stands onstage in an arabesque, also holding up red yarn. Both performers are barefoot and wear white t-shirts and jeans. The stage is bathed in warm orange light and has a string of colorful paper suspended across it. Still from a video by John Borowski.

For the event’s second act, audience members moved to the area farther back by the stage in order to watch the performances “I Am,” “Blood Memory,” and “Wax,” which moved fluidly from one to the other, together occupying the better part of an hour.

“I Am”

Maggie Robinson and Allison Sokolowski began their performance “I Am” dancing onstage, then drifted to the floorspace closer to the audience, where they remained for most of the piece. To start, Maggie and Allison moved slowly and in unison, with slight differences as seemed appropriate given the content of the audio: collaged recordings of people they had interviewed, reflecting on what shapes one’s identity. This soundtrack was a highlight, with its interviewees — apparently of a range of ages and backgrounds — addressing various factors and intersections that impact who they are, including inherited traits, cultural influences, sexuality, gender, social constructs and conditions, personal choices, “everyone I’ve ever met,” and more. The interviewees also considered broader questions — in so doing, posing them to the audience, too. What does it mean to be a completely different person now than you were 10 or 20 years ago? Is identity always fluid? Is finding yourself more about comfort or discomfort? What are the ways our actions influence others — but also influence ourselves? As the soundtrack progressed, its focus narrowed from abstract musings to personal specifics. Interviewees shared what it means to be “authentically me” or “unapologetically myself,” then asserted aspects of those selves, from “I am quick to laugh” to “I am a hardass bitch.” Repeated throughout the soundtrack and the performers’ periodic live speech were the core questions from the installation up front (Who are you? Where have you been? Where are you going?), as well as other questions encouraging self-affirmation (What do you love about yourself?). The buoyant collage of sound functioned well, raising questions about what “identity” is, answering them partially and multiply and obliquely, thus — productively — refusing a single definition.

Image: Maggie Robinson and Allison Sokolowski performing in “I Am.” The dancers suspend themselves off the floor in variations of the same pose, as if pausing while sliding into a split. Allison reaches and looks up at the ceiling and Maggie reaches and looks toward the audience. Around them on the floor are strands of red yarn. The lighting is dim and cool, with purple highlights. Audience members are slightly visible in the foreground and background. Still from a video by John Borowski.

Amid this soundscape, the performers shifted between dancing in parallel (often holding each other or enabling each other’s movement) and responding differently to the same verbal cues (diverging instead of moving in unison). The performers shifted, too, between literalism and lyricism, and between more “theatrical” and “naturalistic” styles. At points, connections between the text and movement were overtly representational, with a word or stated idea seeming to serve as an analog for a movement phrase (e.g., shaking hands on “meet,” pointing while asking “where are you going?”). At other points, these connections were more felt (e.g., a contact-improv in which each performer’s taps suggested the other’s steps; a performer pushing their prone body across the floor, accumulating yarn while voices listed influential family members). Their choreography appeared mostly to comprise predetermined sequences, but also sets of rules, like moving in patterns to cover all the space.

Image: Allison Sokolowski performing in “I Am.” In this long shot of the performance area, Allison runs with arms spread as colorful pieces of paper fall through the air and onto the floor. A shadow of Maggie in a similar pose (off-camera) is slightly visible. The performance space is bathed in warm yellow-orange light. Still from a video by John Borowski.

Toward the end of “I Am,” Maggie and Allison returned to the stage proper, lingering as they ran their hands over what I had thought, from my distance, to be a suspended string of papel picado, but which a projection revealed to be post-its bearing handwritten notes (perhaps from an earlier iteration of their activity). Running toward the audience, they joyously threw sheets of colorful paper in the air like 8.5 x 11 confetti. As the performance concluded, it struck me that I had been waiting, unconsciously, for “I Am” to turn sour or cynical, but that never happened. I realized how rarely I experience an artwork that is so persistently optimistic while not eschewing real-world complexities — even, embracing them. Throughout, “I Am” felt both implicitly and explicitly inclusive. Before ending with a reiteration of the core questions, the soundtrack proclaimed, “You are enough.”

Of the performances in act two, “I Am” felt the most like an extension of its installation at the front of the room, with the table-top version priming for the performance, and the soundtrack prompting the audience to return to the former. While the “interactive” aspects of this group’s piece seemed largely to precede the culminating event (i.e., the interviews that became the soundtrack), this work most fully used the space, with Maggie and Allison traversing the entire performance area and gesturing frequently to audience members and the room we shared. In this way, and in its emphasis on self-reflection, “I Am” functioned nicely as an opening offering.

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal performing in “Blood Memory.” Lani sits on a stage step on the right side of the image, speaking to the audience. Maxine dances in the center of the stage, lunging to one side and swinging arms as she looks up. Both performers are barefoot and wear simple knee-length dresses, Lani’s red and Maxine’s olive green. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

“Blood Memory”

Up next was Lani T. Montreal and Maxine Patronik’s “Blood Memory” (profiled at greater depth here, while in progress). Even knowing much of its content and form in advance, I found their performance thoroughly engrossing, even exquisite.

The piece opened in darkness with the sound of a heartbeat. As lights came up, Lani circled the floor, singing in Ilonggo, then settled on a stage step to tell the story of her birth, as told to her by her mother. Maxine began to dance onstage, her movement expanding, speeding up, and covering more ground as Lani listed her own feats of bravery: climbing trees and mountains, watching horror movies, walking through a warzone for a story. “I traveled 8,000 miles away from home, alone, to find my niche in the world,” Lani continued, then turned. “But the one thing I could not get over is my fear of men.” Maxine’s pace and quality of movement matched this shift from confidence to pause. Through flashes of anecdote, Lani created layers of complication — feeling drawn to men though terrified of them, reading studies that show fear can be genetically bred into succeeding generations of mice, hearing a self-harming woman’s realization that her parents’ and grandparents’ guilt, pain, and regrets are “braided into her DNA.” Lani’s speech was direct yet elliptical, engaging a story from her childhood in the Philippines about the scars the sun gave the moon (“he threw burning sand in her face”) as a parallel vehicle for conveying the emotional weight of trauma, even reflecting on uses of storytelling and the promises and failures of language itself. “There are tales — and there are truths.” Lani spoke in veiled but unambiguous language about a little girl steeling herself against groping and unwanted hands, amid “much merrymaking” in her own home. “In the morning, she cried and writhed in pain and shame she could not put into words.”

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal performing in “Blood Memory.” Lani is in the right foreground of the image. She stands near the middle of the floor, speaking, with her forearms crossed and her hands touching her shoulders. In the back left, Maxine sits on a stage step, folding her torso over her quads and clenching her fists. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

Lights dimmed as an audio collage played — beginnings of stories of sexual assault. Layered and interwoven, the accounts quickly became cacophonous, likewise preventing specific details from being audible. Maxine stood farther forward, leading with movements that Lani echoed after a few beats. This movement phrase repeated, with one dancer’s cycle overlapping the other’s, before transitioning into a semi-improvised pattern of contraction-and-release. The performers came together and, as the voices faded, Maxine helped Lani back toward the stage. This moment — and its sudden stillness before the next storm — marked a significant transition. Employing a different mode of address, Lani belted out “One out of three women, one out of three…,” in a descending line, ending with an extended “One.” The language in this section was more overt, too: A 16-year-old who was “almost raped. Almost killed. Almost gave up. Almost.” Lani delivered the story of that girl, “lured to a motel room with the promise of an audition,” who then, in her fear, “kept the story within her.” It became more personal: “But it lingered in her blood and leaped through mine.” As Lani reflected on how fear breeds silence, Maxine paced behind her, offering delicate, supportive touches. Lani’s insistence on the power of speech is worth quoting at length: “What matters is that we struggle against the silence — with words. Cut through, slice deep. Make known our protest. Because the silence is thick. What matters is that we prepare for battle. The idea is to intimidate the quiet. Clear the spaces where silence lurks in ambush. And then fill them! With resistance, but also with moments of joy.”

The recorded audio returned, with Lani’s live voice now adding to a list of what brings each speaker joy — such as books, diving into cool waters, and binging on Netflix. Maxine shifted from gestures of exuberance and wonder to stand at Lani’s side, helping Lani raise her arm up, hand formed in a fist, as Lani said, “We’ll raise a metaphorical fist against a panel of white men in black suits to make sure we are all safe.” (While this could refer to numerous incidents as well as a general condition, the image that first came to my mind in that moment was of the previous week’s testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.) The piece concluded with the earlier “one out of three” musical phrase, sung by Lani, Maxine, and, by their invitation, the audience. Lani declared, “We’ll survive.”

Image: Maxine Patronik and Lani T. Montreal performing in “Blood Memory.” They stand by the stage, several feet apart. Lani faces the audience, speaking, with one palm held open. Facing Lani, Maxine’s face is in profile to the camera; she extends her limbs in an “x” shape, with her back slightly arched. The lighting is bright with a pink-purple tone. Still from a video by John Borowski.

Lani and Maxine were polished performers, each possessing artful stage presence and captivating conviction. In a performance that was, by design, pared down (simple dresses, barefoot, no props), its success was chiefly reliant on the speech of one performer (direct, poetic language) and the movement of the other (controlled, fluid dance). Individually, they struck me as artists in command of their instruments and forms, capable of expressing deep pain or self-assertion not just through words and gestures, but by seemingly projecting those emotions from some well within their bodies. Throughout, the performers maintained, in the distance between them, a productive tension that lent dynamism to those changing expressions and emotions, enabling the few moments in which they did physically touch to spark with extra charge. The rare moments of unison felt similarly potent. While it wasn’t made known which subjects of the third-person stories, if any, were also the first-person performers (who, at points, allowed ambiguity between “the girl/woman” and “I”), the integrity with which those subjects were portrayed made them feel both very personal and like a collective narrative — a tension also present in “Wax,” the final performance of the night.

Image: Carly Broutman, Jeanette “Jae” Green, and Michelle Shafer performing in “Wax.” All three stand on the floor in front of the stage, facing front, with Jae at center and closest to the camera. Jae smiles brightly at the audience and opens her arms wide. Behind her to one side, Carly watches with a slight smile, and farther back to the other side, Michelle adjusts a microphone, an electric guitar slung across her chest. Jae wears a long-sleeved black button-up, black suspenders, and black pants with a white stripe and partial slit up its sides, and Carly wears a knee-length black halter dress; both are barefoot. Michelle wears a bluish-purple dress and tights. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

“Wax”

Perhaps of all of the performances, to me the one that most defied summary was “Wax,” by Carly Broutman, Jeanette “Jae” Green, and Michelle Shafer. Also the longest piece, its performative mode flowed between poem, game, song, dance, and even party (with Jae’s own daughter cameoing as “garçon,” handing out non-alcoholic cider to audience members). As with the group’s single-phrase description of “Wax” in the event program (“An exploration of the feminine creative self and the society we build and nurture to support it”), the piece’s spoken narrative — delivered mostly by Jae — was simultaneously plainspoken and enigmatic, with every mark of presence drawing attention to an absence.

The piece began in silence, with Carly alone on stage, seated cross-legged then dancing low, before walking down to the floor where Jae and Michelle met her. The three women briefly competed, jostling for position closest to the audience, then playing rock-paper-scissors to determine who would share first. From there, each woman’s story claimed its portion of the performance: Jae’s then Michelle’s then Carly’s. (Characters referred to each other by the performers’ names so I’ll do the same — though, importantly, any autobiographical seeds here were likely interlaced with creative liberties and otherwise complicated.)

Image: Jae Green performing in “Wax.” Jae smiles brightly at the audience, her arms bent at the elbows with palms facing up. She stands in the middle of the floor, her shadow cast toward the stage in two directions. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

Moving closer to the audience, Jae offered “Smoke,” a poem about the birth of an artist by an artist — specifically, Jae and her father. With his image projected behind her, Jae remembered her own awe of him, the beauty he saw in the world and in her, and the moment when, at age 4, they both realized she, too, was an artist. She recounted the lit match in her father’s hand and “watching the air marble around me” as “my final eye” opened — with it, an awakening awareness of a special kind of sight for which she didn’t yet have words besides “Daddy, there are stories hiding inside of the smoke.” From here, Jae served as the narrator and emcee for “Wax,” providing context and voiceover for the subsequent scenes, in which Michelle played guitar and sang and Carly danced. Throughout, Jae’s voice was confident, smooth, and unrushed, even as her narration turned swiftly, allowing humor and gravity to collide and co-exist.

Image: Carly Broutman and Michelle Shafer performing in “Wax.” In the back corner, Michelle plays electric guitar and sings into a microphone on a stand. Carly is on the floor, body and feet angled toward Michelle, while leaning back on one elbow, reaching and looking past the camera. The audience is partially visible in the background and via cast shadows in the foreground. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

In introducing Michelle’s section, Jae welcomed the audience to a New Year’s Eve party on the cusp of 1999, which she contextualized as before Columbine and 9-11 and before people used Google, as well as when Michelle would drop her next album. Carly danced, exploring and twisting, as Michelle performed her song “10,000 Hail Marys” (which, in actuality, is from her 2016 album “Grey Area,” but Michelle noted post-show it “just happened to fit” here). The live song was resonant and moody, with quick chords and dirty fuzz accompanying Michelle’s vocals: “Too much passion onward fleeting.” At a pause in the lyrics, Jae described a man who met Michelle that night and later bragged to his friends, “She’s an artist.” This unnamed man was compelled by Michelle even as he was confounded. “Dating her is like reading a book with every seventh page torn away,” Jae told us. “Girls like her, they don’t marry guys like him! But they do.” And, with that, Michelle’s life changed. “Soon enough, she’s not painting — but his shirts are perfect white crisp cardboards. She’s not sculpting, but her mashed potatoes are a Platonic alchemy.” Michelle’s electric guitar angered and Carly lunged and spun. Jae detailed what the couple does and doesn’t enable in each other: Michelle finding she has given up her art to be a wife and a mother; the husband not minding infidelity as long as she plays her part at parties. “It’s enough that she married him” — until it isn’t. Jae transformed into the husband, challenging Carly, suddenly the wife, and threatening to take their children. Michelle’s lyrics chimed in: “10,000 Hail Marys keep those thoughts at bay.”

Image: This is a link to Michelle Shafer’s song “10,000 Hail Marys” (from the album “Grey Area”) on SoundCloud, with a black-and-white photograph of the musician in the background and a graphic running horizontally along the bottom of the image to show the track’s progress. In the photograph, Michelle stands in relative profile, looking toward the camera, though she is only visible from nose to hips. She wears a dark, shiny tank-top and light bottoms, and holds an acoustic guitar over her shoulder.

There was a subtle distance throughout Jae’s narration here, not saying “her friends,” but “the women that she calls her friends.” While never suggesting that nothing was gained, there was a sense of mourning — open, unapologetic — for what was lost or even taken. These “women she calls her friends” share scars from C-sections, plastic surgeries: “The thin lines that they have between love, life, and death. There will be no place to show, no place to point, the place where she once was. But sometimes, she remembers the dance.”

And, with an audience countdown, the New Year came and went.

Image: Carly Broutman and Jae Green performing in “Wax.” Carly lies on the floor curled up into a ball in the foreground, her back to the camera. In a far corner, Jae and three guests celebrate, smiling, yelling, holding beverages, and/or throwing arms in the air. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

After Jae served the whole piece as narrator, Carly’s voice was startling. Her spoken phrases were terse, labored, punctuating her movements as she pulled herself off the floor before falling again: “Stop. It’s over. Everything is over.… I can keep going, but the reminders of my body are honest. They tell me what I’ve done…. The marks stay. They do.” In the piece’s last, powerful stretch, Michelle strummed her sparer, acoustic “Fragile Answer” (written for “Wax”) as Carly whipped her weight around the space. Carly — the dancer employing the most overt athletics of the evening — used the stairs notably well, stretching her body upside-down between floor and stage, sliding over the steps to nestle Michelle and her guitar. “Wax” ended as it began, with Carly cross-legged in silence, but this time on the floor close to the audience.

Image: Carly Broutman, Jae Green, and Michelle Shafer performing in “Wax.” Carly stands in the center, arms spread wide, throwing her body back in an arch. In the background to one side, Jae speaks, holding a bottle; to the other side, Michelle looks on while playing electric guitar. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

Having so many shifting modes and moods and strong personalities onstage at one time risks fragmentation of the audience’s attention or orientation, but the “Wax” group gelled well, augmenting each other’s stories with surprises and contradictions, especially the contradictions between them. There were moments where it felt like the three women were performing in unison (even as they were, in fact, saying and doing different things) and moments where there was a productive schism between their actions: Carly’s movements neither literally illustrating Jae’s words or dancing “to” Michelle’s songs, Jae’s spoken words neither providing lyrics to Michelle’s melodies or narrativizing Carly’s gestures, and Michelle’s music not merely setting tone but infiltrating the scene and moving it along. And, impressively, all of that worked. I was very taken with this trio and how they coexisted onstage — as if there were elastic strings connecting the three players, granting each room to express while constraining them in the same triangulating orbit, such that who was pulling/following/supporting/holding the other two in equilibrium remained both invisible and dynamic throughout the piece. As I watched, I found myself looking for something present that was, at the same time, not in front of me, but that instead had to be intuited — often in these gaps.

Image: Carly Broutman and Michelle Shafer performing in “Wax.” This slightly closer shot shows Carly and Michelle sitting on the stage steps, turning to look at each other. Carly’s back is to the audience and, though her back is positioned straight-up, her legs are folded or extended onto higher stairs than where she is sitting. Michelle holds an acoustic guitar and sits more commonly, with one foot on a lower step and another on the floor. The lighting is dim and pink-purple. Still from a video by John Borowski.

This piece also marked the sharpest differences between the tone I expected to find in the final performance and what I actually experienced. From an excerpt I’d seen at a mini-critique, I thought it would be funny, even goofy or giggly in spirit. “Wax” was, in its way, all of those things, but it also reflected great pain, pride, self-assertion, and loss. It depicted how choices and chance encounters beget other consequences and decisions and risks — in this piece’s framing, especially when you’re a woman or an artist, and especially especially when you’re a woman and an artist. Afterward, I overheard several women go to Jae and Michelle to share how the romantic relationship shown in “Wax” resonated with their own lives, reminding them of men they knew who tried to “control creative women” or “blow out their light,” even as that creativity is what had drawn the men in (a situation that doesn’t have to be gendered as such but in this conversation was); I myself felt a similar resonance. Unstated but present in “Wax” — and in all of the evening’s performances — was an underlying concern with what it means to be in a physical body and to pass through time and place in that body.

Image: Carly Broutman, Jae Green, and Michelle Shafer performing in “Wax.” In the foreground, Carly steps forward, with one hand on her throat and her other arm stretched across the frame, her face looking that way, too. In the back corner, Jae speaks, palms up in a gesture, as Michelle plays electric guitar. The lighting is dim and cool (blue-purple). Still from a video by John Borowski.

Across these performances, I also had a powerful experience of the venue itself. Particularly in thrust set-up, the space facilitated fluidity in and between the performances, allowing for easy movement between stage, steps, performance floor, and audience, as well as for varied disciplinary and thematic usages. From that initial theme of “activation,” the four Body Passages groups had branched widely, ultimately exploring issues ranging from reproductive rights to cultural and gender diversity, to healing from sexual trauma, to what different individuals need to claim for themselves in order to be themselves. The collective framework seemed to be one of radical inclusivity, representing and celebrating an expanse of identities and values. As a person raised Catholic (despite my own differing beliefs), to me it felt continuously, delightfully striking to hear such inclusivity expressed while sitting in a “church” space — a setting I suddenly remembered in the pause between each performance, before being drawn back in, to each subsequent piece.

Image: The curtain call, showing all performers from the Body Passages culminating event. The performers stand in front of the stage, smiling and holding hands, arms up in the air. The lighting is pink-purple. Still from a video by John Borowski.

Something I’ve certainly valued about Body Passages as a program has been its openness; for instance, through its Chicago Cultural Center residency and various “in-progress” events. In my experience it’s relatively uncommon for members of the public to have such access to artists’ creative process, to be not only a fly on the wall but even a player in shared space as new work is being drafted and troubleshot. On this evening, it was especially satisfying to see works in their final form that I’d witnessed glimpses of in previous months, a pleasure akin to seeing something grow up. By that same token, it was disappointing how many other works with equally promising conceits didn’t make it to this phase (at least, not as part of Body Passages; several more people began the process than ended it, seemingly for all the reasons that that happens).

Similarly, throughout my experiences with the Body Passages groups, including at events and meetings not covered in this series’ writings, I admired the generosity at the root of their collaborative process as well as the intimacy and respect that appeared to have developed between the artists, even as they didn’t always agree with each other’s perspectives or tastes. While such conflicts seem endemic (often productively) to any partnership, it feels important to acknowledge that this program intentionally fosters such exchange by design — curating artists of different disciplines into groups, before facilitating them through the long-term process of co-development and experimentation outside of their purported comfort zones. As Natasha Mijares noted in an earlier article: “People benefit from being pushed by others in directions that you wouldn’t go [if] sitting by yourself in a room.” By the conclusion of the 10-month program, the eight remaining artists had challenged themselves to take on new skill-sets, taught each other aspects of their own gifts, and together questioned and responded to the contemporary world.

Indeed, the groups’ works addressed issues that, by the day of the show, felt especially timely to broader national conversations, by some combination of persistent relevance, prescience, and chance. “Blood Memory,” in particular, seemed to be living in that space between the stage and the world; as an experience, it felt both urgent and enduring, urgent in its endurance. But all of the works possessed this thickness — an insistence on reflecting, making experiences visible, and paying attention. In all, and perhaps consistent with Body Passages’ intentions, the most compelling moments for me were those in which language and movement not only complemented but also complicated each other, evidencing gaps rather than filling them — suggesting that the deeper you dig, or even the closer you grow, the more reveals itself to still be unknown.

Featured image: Maggie Robinson and Allison Sokolowski performing in “I Am” at the Chicago Danztheatre Auditorium, as part of the Body Passages culminating event. Maggie balances with one foot, knee, and hand on the floor, as Allison stands on Maggie’s lower back. The performers hold each other’s left hands and look at each other. Both are barefoot and wear white t-shirts and jeans. Behind them is a well-lit stage, with a string of colorful paper suspended across it. Still from a video by John Borowski.

Marya Spont-Lemus (she/her/hers/Ms.) is a fiction writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator focused on teen creative, leadership, and professional development. She lives and works on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.

 “Intimate Justice” looks at the intersection of art and sex and how these actions intertwine to serve as a form of resistance, activism, and dialogue in the Chicago community. For this installment, we talked to Oscar Chavez in Pilsen about internet trends, the body as a commodity, and tube tops. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

S. Nicole Lane: Where are you originally from and how did you get to Chicago?

Oscar Chavez: Born and raised in Chicago actually. I am from the South Side. So, I grew up in the South Side. I definitely don’t wanna stay in Chicago. But I think being a young artist in Chicago is amazing and there are so many benefits that you can work with.

Image: The artist is in their studio wearing pink and purple gloves. They are wearing a white shirt with text that says “Clement Greenberg would hate me” and looking down at a table. In the background there is a painting on an easel with a pink figure wearing crocs. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL : How has Pilsen community contributed to your practice?

OC: I mean, I just moved here so I am still exploring. I moved a block from Textile Discount Outlet which has really been turning me up. I am there every morning and have been sewing so much. So that’s been a huge effect on me for sure. I am excited because I keep running into people on the train, on the street, just everywhere, it’s very nice.

SNL: Getting more into your work, I noticed at least from your website, that a lot of your work references social media and the internet. Can you talk about that a little more?

OC:  I was born in 1994, I didn’t grow up in a house with the internet so that shapes everything that I see and everything that I do. I think the way I view images, the way I share images, the way I make culture connections to people and all of that is because of the internet and the way I communicate through there. Right now I am still building my language around it. The MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) show about the internet was really interesting to me — very much a conversation that I am not having — so I thought “Oh, I would really get this show.” It was art about the internet, which was helpful for me to realize my art is actually from the internet, not about it. Using these visual tools and sharing tools that feel regular to us and using those really in traditional ways is important.

SNL: I also notice that some of your work is pretty humorous. I think there was a painting of a hand…

OC: The YouTube hand?

SNL: Yes! Oh my god, I loved that.

Image: The artist is sitting cross legged on a chair draped in a blue fabric. To the right of the image is a large fake zebra which has various fabrics draped over it — pink, leopard, lime green. On the wall behind the artist are gloves hanging from a red fabric. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. 

OC: This is one of my favorites also. The title is just “That Thing YouTubers Do When They Want To Focus on a Product So They Put Their Hand Behind It” which for me is a language of our time. That’s this language that for me — I am really interested in archiving through oil on canvas, which is the traditional way of breaking something down and putting it into a historical canon. Because this is extremely ephemeral, the things we are used to seeing online only last for about a year or two, right? Cameras have gotten so advanced that people don’t have to do that anymore, they can focus by themselves and what does that mean to have this language that people understand? But it’s gone now. And for me it’s really important to put these things down and build this language for ourselves because it is something that we already recognize. Obviously you already have seen this before, we know it, and it doesn’t have a name. We can recognize it and it’s apart of our culture. So for me putting it on oil on canvas is hilarious, because it’s this is like the oldest and most traditional way of doing this and it has to exist in this canon with these other words.

Image: Oscar Chavez, “That Thing Youtubers Do When They Want To Focus on a Product So They Put Their Hand Behind It,” 2017. 20″ x 20″, Oil on canvas. The painting features a rural scene with brown and green colors. There is a sky on the upper half of the painting. In the middle of the painting is a depiction of a YouTube channel. The screen has a hand with a makeup brush pressed against the persons hand. Image courtesy of the artist.

SNL : Does your performance practice incorporate humor at all?

OC: Yeah, I would definitely think so. My performance practice is very colorful. I think it’s a way of having fun with kinda power structures rather than simply being pissed off about them. This piece, “Racial Ambiguous Curly Haired Influencer,” has basic performing as an influencer, and exploring those power structures. There are things that shape the way people are helping to be viewed as a commodity online for brands and for me of course it was like the colors were fun and the images are silly and in the end I am interested in viewing these power structures, really putting myself in there.

SNL: Thinking about power dynamics within the internet. I was looking at your work and it’s not overtly sexual, but I do feel like it does reference the internet, which has been linked to what I feel is sensuality and sexuality.

Image: The photo is taken looking down at two sandals that have been transformed into large platform shoes. They are a cream color. The rest of the photo is slightly out of focus but features fabrics and clothing. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

OC: Again, I think it’s relatively inherent. I think a lot of times the bodies in my work are referencing how I understand how to see a body through images and a lot of that is through sex.  Even then I have been moving into using my body much more, and I have been thinking about the way we see bodies of gay men online and the way of all the muscle veins are showing and their ass all the time and that’s how you have to exist in the world.

Look at this painting I just started, this pose is silly, but very much like, “How do we see our bodies and which way do we position ourselves online?” to really understand what it means to be a gay male online. So again, I feel like it’s referencing how the internet has made it very visible to the way we use our bodies for sexual ways for our own personal beings. I think that’s really interesting.

SNL: The pieces with figures don’t have a face usually.

OC: It was super unconscious during the beginning, as time goes on it’s more of my language of bodies as objects. That idea was always very interesting to me. The idea of our bodies being used, if you strip the faces there will be different ways to position and move them around. I think now I am really exploring the ways that our bodies are very much economy and commodities in the way the internet shapes us in ways we can make money. Yeah, they are bodies, but they are not portraits, they are not self-portraits, they are just using it as a tool and in that it’s a bit masochistic and fun, to be me and my friends posing with these crazy ways and using them, contouring them, using them as objects the same way I would use anything else.

Image: The artist is wearing a fur collar and staring directly into the camera. They have an ear piece on the left side with many colors and have on green and blue floral gloves that have long pink acrylic nails on them. The artist is wearing glasses. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. 

SNL: Your work is also very vibrant and color is obviously important to the presentation of it. Can you talk a little more about color and why you choose the certain palettes?

OC: I think my palette has been strictly pink, blue, green for a while. I blame it on the Powerpuff Girls because that was the first video game I bought when I was growing up. I think that is something that I always grav to. The other day I was buying fabric and I would want this, this, and this and I got home and threw it on the floor and it was pink, blue, and green. I was like of course that’s what happens. I think it’s just definitely a part of the way I want to present things. I like works to be very confrontational and visible. I grew up in Chicago, which in my opinion, has a very quiet and minimal way of viewing work. I mean a lot of people don’t like my work because it’s kinda tacky and out there, and they want tiny family photos in a blank room.

SNL: Moving over to these amazing gloves, can you talk about them?

OC: It’s gotten much more apparent since I moved here because I can’t stop sewing. Wearable pieces started for me as an extension of performance. It was very much me reacting to luxury brands around the kind of time of the presidential inauguration. They were making this protest clothing at a time when we were all in the streets actually protesting. These shirts like 500 dollars with protest slang on it, and I was like “What is the real power in this at all? Is there really any?” Can clothing be a protest in itself?

I am constantly performing myself in different ways so for me it becomes an aspect of drag — wake up and get dressed for the day, might as well put on a glove on, throw an earring on, throw a wig on and walk out for the day. It’s all kinda the same, and it helps me build that visual language. One thing that is kinda obvious is that everything kinda blends in all of my practices.  Again, I think it goes back to self-autonomy, if I can do it I am gonna do it.

Image: The artist is wearing a red velvet tube top that reads, “i am a luxury” in gems. They are leaning against a blue wall outside and gazing up, looking up at the sunlight. They have on glasses, and their hands are behind their back. Photo by Edmund Thiel. 

SNL: Do you sell any of these wearable pieces?

OC: No. I really have a weird relationship to money. A lot of my friends hate me for it. I don’t. I gave people gloves for trade agreements. I have had people reach out, I am not super into it. One time this store reached out about carrying them, it was in Brooklyn, and the thought of some kind of rich Brooklyn kid wearing my gloves and not knowing I made them would really freak me out. Knowing that they are so special to me and they are very chosen on who gets to wear them and who doesn’t it is still me trying to figure out the relationship with selling them. Which is funny because it is something that could sell, but I am not really sure how I feel about that or what that means.

I really have a weird and simple relationship to capitalism and the sense that I don’t want to deal with it, but that’s way too simple. For how I live in a bubble and I am 24 and I don’t really have to think about the market because I work part time jobs supporting myself. I know I have to succumb to it at some point and to make things and have fun. Basically what I was trying to do is what if Jenny Holzer did tube tops. And tube tops are funny because they are kinda like scrunchies in a sense that like they are popular now. I was born in the 90’s but I don’t remember it, I didn’t really live through it, so let me be nostalgic and wear them. Which is really funny so I am using these tools, like the tube tops and gloves and kinda things we understand and putting a lot of writing on top of it.

SNL: How often do you come to your studio?

OC: I come every single day. When I was at the Chicago Artist Coalition, I was there almost every day. Now that I have a home studio its every single day which is great. I am definitely one of those people who don’t have couches and stuff in their studios, I don’t want to sit down when I am in my studio. I want to get work done. If I want to sit down and chill, I’m leaving.

Image: The artist is looking out of their studio window while the photographer is on the street. The artist is waving with one hand and holding up a long sheet with text on it that reads “In 2018, adults are inept. I dont trust anyone above the age of 25.” The building is blue and their are two garage doors on the lower portion of the photograph. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. 

SNL: Closing questions: Any upcoming shows or anything new you are working on that you want to talk about? What you want to share or plug?

OC:  I think this year I am really focuses on conceptualizing the work and making the work that I am really proud of by myself. Then really writing and talking about my work a lot more. I think something like this or print magazine is something new for me and is actually exciting to think about. One of my friends has been challenging me to do a fashion show and that’s really funny and something I am kinda into. Like have one of my friends wear something and take the train, running around in the streets in a cool outfit. Like it kinda aligns up with my out it in the streets. Just rethinking my practice and to fit in all my works, which is exciting because I don’t have new works.

Featured Image: The artist is wearing a fur collar and white coat. They have on on glove with pink nails. There is a mirror in the background where the viewer can slightly see the reflection of the artists face and hands. The other hand does not have a glove and is holding up various jeweled objects. Image credit: Ryan Edmund Thiel. 

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. She is also the office manager at the Chicago Reader. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

I was three years old when Kranky, the ambient music label, was founded in Chicago. In my late teens and early twenties, Kranky was vital to my auditory taste. The label, primarily focusing on ambient, electronic, or psychedelic music, introduced me to Deerhunter, Stars of Lid, Justin Walter, and The Dead Texan. My youth was spent through a spiral of gazing up towards my ceiling, or driving down dark North Carolina roads while listening to Labradford’s album, Prazision. So it’s only natural that Kranky would celebrate their 25th Anniversary at the Rockefeller Chapel in Hyde Park with a line up that brings you closer to god, or stillness, or clarity, or whatever brings you solace in a stained-glass building on wooden benches.

Ambient Church is a nomadic event that traveled to Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and New York, with various different performers in each location. In Chicago, we were welcomed by Matt Jencik, Justin Walter, Pan•American, and Steve Hauschildt.

It’s a 25 minute walk from my apartment to the Rockefeller Chapel, a hub for me in terms of hallowed experiences—in 2016, I saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor, for two years I participated in yoga and meditation classes which took place on the altar, and I saw Olivia Block perform with her organ. I didn’t think I would be spending my Saturday evening solo at a church—and the crowd of people wrapped around the block probably didn’t think so either. And Rockefeller Chapel is quite the holy space. Organs, stained glass, timeworn and hulking doors all add to the ambiance of the event. I seat myself in the middle of the room, rows of people ahead of me are crouched over, leaning on one another’s shoulders, couples are intertwined. I have my notebook open. Although it’s so large, it is a very intimate space.

Image: The viewer’s perspective is looking up towards the Rockefeller Chapel. The lights from the stained glass are shining and the sky is dark. Courtesy of Ambient Church.

Looking behind me at the organ, I see a projector that will eventually create a light show on the stained glass behind the altar. For now, Matt Jencik opens up the show in dim lights and his body, small and minute from where I sit, is illuminated by white light. He begins with a low droning that creates a glacial sensation throughout the space. Kranky is just gearing us up—the light show doesn’t begin until Justin Walter, a Michigan native, comes on to the altar. Utilizing electronics and an EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument), Walter and I drift through hazy shifts within the sacred space. The light show is nothing short of mesmerizing. The visuals are curated by Eric Epstein and lighting is designed by Vincent Naples. The focal point begins at the sun-floral shape in the stained glass behind the pulpit and altar. Heads arched up, viewers watch as the light cascades down from this shape in a smoke-like fashion. Traveling, like a dancer, along the stained glass, the light creates a hypnotizing and meditative pattern. It’s difficult to explain through words because they just aren’t enough.

Image: The altar of the church has a dark-blue halo around the stained glass. The actual altar has a small figure on the stage looking down. There are orange and yellow lights shining behind them. Courtesy of Ambient Church.

sa·cred

/ˈsākrəd/

adjective

1. connected with God (or the gods) or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration.

A sacred space contains rituals or practices that differentiate itself from other spaces. The Rockefeller Chapel has always stood out as a community space, a real example of what it means to bring various backgrounds of people together—whether for a religious service, a meditation circle, or experimental music.

Ambient Church’s founder, Brian Sweeny, explains his favor of churches to the Chicago Reader:  “They’re in every city, and they’re frequently not occupied. Every evening these places are open—sometimes hundreds in one city. You have this underserved genre world, and the possibilities from this amazing resource. Those things can meet up.” And listening to ambient music for almost four hours isn’t for everyone. It’s a niche music taste. It can be demanding and tedious. It shouldn’t take work to listen to ambient music, but some people claim that it is. Which is why Ambient Church is such an admirable event. It combines features that may incite and excite viewers who don’t normally listen to ambient music. The audiovisual component to Ambient Church is strong and incredibly beautiful as the lights beat like a heartbeat and respond to the music and sounds.

Between each set was an intermission—which is very necessary for ambient shows at this length. I mostly listened to other conversations around me, the two young girls sitting one aisle ahead of me fell asleep, the couple next to me embraced.

Pan•American (Mark Nelson) enters the stage with our first set of vocals and a stringed instrument. The echoes of Nelson’s guitar were romantic, and surfaced feelings of nostalgia and longing for somewhere warmer, somewhere that wasn’t what was outside of the chapels doors. With simple and haunting vocals, the lights continued to dance, though they lessened in impact.

Churches encourage silence and, somehow, all of these acts honor that while simultaneously filling the space with noise. Utilizing synths, electronics, guitars, and visuals, the event is harmonious with what a sacred space should incorporate. The silence surrounding Pan American’s performance is crucial. It’s almost as if Mark Nelson is whispering into your ear, the microphone capturing every swallow and breath.

Image: Silhouettes of people from the crowd are sitting at the pews. There is a purple circular light shining on the stained glass. To the left, the windows and stained glass have a yellow light. There is a green stream of light on the right side of the image. Photo by S. Nicole Lane.

Closing the evening is Steve Hauschildt, a resident Chicagoan. It’s very Midwestern in the church tonight—I don’t feel religious per se, but I do feel grateful, as those thing sometimes feel eerily similar. Hauschildt reminds me of the years I’ve spent in Chicago, and how this chapel, and this sanctuary city has introduced me to experimental music in a much more broad approach. Steve is accompanied by Michael Vallera and the two take the remainder of the crowd towards an hour before midnight. Ambient Church teaches you mindfulness. I snap out of moments of thought—gazing around the room, wondering what everyone else is thinking. Are they thinking about tomorrow, too? We are all nestled in between our jackets and scarves, heads arched towards the light, and congregating in a space whose doors are always open.

Ambient Church recently closed out in New York on December 15th where Forma, Christina Vantzou, Earthen Sea, and Saloli will performed at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church.

FEATURED IMAGE: The altar and stage area is lit up with various hues of colors: red, green, purple, pink and yellow. There is light coming from the outside on two areas of the left and two areas of the right in the chapel. The photographer is looking out on the church from a high angle at the back of the room. Courtesy of Ambient Church.

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. She is also the Office Manager for the Chicago Reader. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

The Chicago Archives + Artists Project (CA+AP) is an initiative that highlights Chicago archives and special collections that give space to voices on the margins of history. Led by Chicago-based writers and artists, the project explores archives across the city via online features, a series of public programs and new commissioned artwork by Chicago artists. For 2018, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation has funded a series of pilot projects pairing three artists with three archives around the city: Media Burn + Ivan LOZANO, the Leather Archives & Museum + Aay Preston-Myint, and the Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection + H. Melt. This series of articles profiles these featured archives and artists over the course of their collaboration, exploring the vital role of the archive in preserving and interpreting the stories of our city as well as the ways in which they can be a resource for creatives in the community. 

In the Leather Archives exhibition, Aay Preston-Myint exhibited their work Dirt/Work, which illustrates the archival process of leather culture. The artist writes, “Archives are one of many ways in which we focus our gaze and ascribe taste and class to material culture. Our community is simultaneously removed from and a product of retrograde and orthodox notions of what it means to be fit, to belong, to be beautiful, to be part of history. Dirt/Work is an attempt to start working through this frustrating paradox.”

What follows is an interview conducted via email between the artist and S. Nicole Lane. 

Image: Two small hand towels are shown stretched out on a grey table. The left hand towel has a nude figure tying their shoe with a military hat on. The right hand towel has a yellow triangle in the center with the words, “MAKE A MESS! CAT MEN DO! CATALAN VIDEO.” Both hand towels are mainly off-white. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

S. Nicole Lane: Your interdisciplinary work looks at queerness, memory and the future. Can you discuss how these topics weave into and influence your visual work?

Aay Presont-Myint: I think I used to use my work to equate futurity, or the unknown, with queerness….but I suppose what I’ve become more interested in is being queer in the now; in these temporary utopian moments that are unsustainable given our current political conditions, but provide a template or a model, a space in which to consider belonging and kinship among queer people. Perhaps more accurately I’m interested in moments out of time, whether they are memories of the past or desires for the future—flash points of recognition, questioning, community and clarity that are here for a moment and then gone again. I’m interested in seizing those moments and making them still, or expanding them and picking them apart. Formally speaking, I’ve gravitated more towards symbolism and abstraction as a place to explore and contemplate queer identity, and often use the architecture and infrastructure of nightlife as visual inspiration: shadowy spaces, flashing lights, mirrored walls, smoky air, drapes, platforms, etc. When initially approaching the Leather Archives, I was interested in the symbols, visual codes and material interpretation of queerness and sexuality expressed in the banners and club colors of different leather and fetish groups. I also love a good visual joke and, of course, art and design coming from a community dealing in “taboo” activities is full of them.

SNL: How is archiving essential to your practice?

APM: Working at the Leather Archives has been a healthy reminder of how material culture, vernacular design and DIY publishing are essential parts of any movement or subculture. As someone who works in print and publishing starting out in a scrappy basement print shop (I still work in these sometimes) and becoming an artist who designs and prints “museum quality” work (these scary quotes are very large), this project in a way was a full-circle reminder of how and why I was initially attracted to these means of production.

Through my own career as an arts organizer, a queer community organizer, and through my work at the Leather Archives & Museum, I’ve realized both the difficulty and necessity of archiving for artist communities and marginal communities. We need these repositories of images, materials and history for our inspiration, to find role models, to not make the same mistakes, to not think you’re alone, and even more importantly, to not think you’re original – you’re a part of a thread, a lineage.

Image: Aay Preston-Myint is standing behind the archival table looking down at various materials from the archive, including books and photos. Boxes of archival materials sit on shelves behind the artist. They are wearing a leather jacket and purple gloves. One hand rests on their glasses. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: What have been the challenges, constraints and/or benefits and surprises of working with archives in the Leather Archives Museum?

APM: Some of the fundamental challenges facing the Leather Archives are that they’re underfunded and understaffed, just like most other cultural organizations. They’re working on this steadily, and I was never lost or without help (the knowledge and generosity of their archivist Mel Leverich was indispensable)—but I want them to have all the money and, like, ten more people on staff so that everything can get preserved and catalogued. However, unlike a lot of other collections where the preservation and bureaucracy are so complex that no one can access or learn from them, I had a lot of trust and freedom to roam. Couple that with my short attention span, and I would get distracted and fall down rabbit holes. That’s how I arrived at the material I used for this project; I just got distracted by a box labeled “towels” (thinking, why are towels collected?), saw some IML stuff in there, then got lost in all of these photographs from IML that were just sitting on a shelf. Then, I started looking at all these old zine layouts filed next to the photographs. It has forced me to perform a lot of close reading, to think about conceptual links and gaps and question certain hierarchies of objects and materials.

As I continued to explore the Leather Archives, this idea of identity and abstraction that I mentioned earlier shifted shape. I began to think about how the archive is not just a curious collection of stuff that happens to have a fetish theme, but is also an expression or articulation of concepts like the gaze, value, labor and community. It is who is seen, or what is seen; how certain performances of gender are valued, how labor is gendered. Who feels included or represented by the concept of “community.” Both the owners of the objects and the culture at large leave their imprint on the objects, imbue them with meaning and soul. These objects survive to embody or speak to these “moments out of time.” However, as someone who has an investment in the leather and fetish communities but also stands at an intersection of various other identities that aren’t always included or represented in those scenes, I started to think about what was missing or unspoken, not just what was presented at face value. What does “leather” look like outside of the template of white, male, conventionally attractive, muscular, and dressed in costly gear? I started scanning the archive looking for hints of difference or divisions in perspective, gaps in narrative, missing information, double meanings. It’s actually been a secret desire of mine to be a curator or exhibition director at a place like the Leather Archives & Museum, so in a lot of ways my project is an enactment of that.

Image: A hand towel lies on a grey table with photographs scattered around it. The hand towel is off-white and has a drawing of a figure being fisted by an arm coming from the right side. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: You collaborate often and work with organizations on various projects like Chances Dances. Can you talk about how collaboration is important to your practice and how it differs from your individual practice?

APM: While the output of my collaborations and my solo work are visibly different, the content of my studio practice is derived from the political and social concerns of my communities (whether that is queer nightlife, independent publishing, artist-run spaces or places where these things overlap). I decided not to think about them as separate practices, but rather different strategies toward a common set of goals. A lot of the questions I try to ask as an artist moving through the world (not to mention as a professor and an arts administrator) are the same questions that are put forward in queer communities and artist-run spaces. Negotiating a place for your identity, redefining your value in a system that doesn’t value you, reinscribing the context in which (art) history wants to keep you out of convenience, hostility or fear. Whatever form the action, product or work takes, whatever the specific narrative of the piece is, when you zoom out, that’s what I’m about. Working collaboratively on so many things has helped me rethink how ownership, process, and product are valued and deployed in the art world.

Image: The viewer is from a lower angle looking up at the artist who is standing outside of the LA&M. Their gaze is looking off into the distance and they are leaning against a railing. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: What are you working on right now? Anything you would like to share (upcoming shows, events, projects)?

APM: I’m just trying to figure it out. Though I still have work and collaborations that keep me tied to Chicago (such as the Chicago Art Book Fair), I moved to San Francisco in the middle of this project (another important location for leather/fetish history, but that’s a whole other story). It’s been a challenge—this is a pretty hostile place for artists, especially artists of color—but it’s definitely helped me remember what it’s like to work without a studio, or without much control over your means of production. Flashback to my art school days when the library or the print studio closed, that was it for the day. And then having to figure out how to scale a larger project down to portable pieces. It’s different for sure, but I’ve always been good at fitting my practice into the container I’m given. I’ve been trying to get a foothold in different communities here, like among arts organizers, in nightlife, in independent publishing. Despite the doomsday urgency of living in a place like the Bay Area, people have been enthusiastic and generous with what little they have, though sometimes the elusively chill stereotype does prevail. I do have a solo show lined up in Oakland in September, as well as a lead on one in Chicago in between now and then, so if nothing else I have deadlines. Outside of the archive project, my current work has mostly taken the form of large-scale wall drawings made on-site. I’d like to continue that work, but I am thinking about how to translate that into more portable formats that I’m versed in, like printed fabric, works on paper, or maybe even ceramics so that I’m not reliant on a large studio space— and can maybe, ya’know, actually sell and make money off of them for a change.

The Chicago Archives + Artists Project (CA+AP) is part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with presenting partner The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. The project is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. 

Featured Image: The artist is wearing purple gloves and is touching various photographs on a table. We do not see the artist’s face, but we see books, boxes, and images from the archives.

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S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. She is also the Office Manager for the Chicago Reader. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

“Intimate Justice” looks at the intersection of art and sex and how these actions intertwine to serve as a form of resistance, activism, and dialogue in the Chicago community. For this installment, we talked to Hyegyeong Choi in the summer over the phone about friends with benefits, violence in sex, and to formality in painting. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

S. Nicole Lane: You’re new to New York, but can you maybe talk about the city and the community there and if it differs any way from what you experienced?

Hyegyeong Choi: Sure. I had such a strong community in Chicago from grad school at SAIC in Chicago. It was like a family environment. I know or see a lot of people whenever I go to openings. When I moved to New York, I only knew a few people here. My best friend, Seth Stolbun, who is also my collector said “It’s the same thing. You will know everyone since it’s a small world like you had in Chicago.” I had a private residency program at The Stolbun Collection, and I had a solo show in the apartment [called “Invasion of Privacy”] that I was living at for almost half of a year. It was all coming from love, support, and belief. Basically, I’m just so lucky to have people like Seth and Margaret Carrigan who wrote the amazing essay for the show. The gallerists from South of Tracks Project in Chicago moved to New York by the time I moved here. He co-curated a group show with Kristen Smoragiewicz in Bushwick and they wanted to include my work. Through that show, I got to meet lots of artists. It is different living here for sure because I don’t run into my friends all the time like I did in Chicago. But it’s also fun to meet new people and make friends!

Image: “Booty Booby Call” features a very colorful, very neon painting. It is a landscape with various shapes with many colors including neon green, pink, red, purple and teal all around the composition. A colorful bright pink figure with breasts is facing away from the viewer on the left hand side. The breasts are thrown over the shoulders and resting on the back. There are sunflowers and trees surrounding the figure and dotted throughout the landscape. Image courtesy of the artist.

SNL : I first saw one of your paintings at Heaven Gallery. It was a figure that was taking a photo with a smartphone. I love it. I was like, “Who is this? I need to interview this person!”

HC : Haha thank you so much! It was really fun to make this painting because this guy was the most american-american I have ever met, but also the person in that image is friends with benefits. But I only say that to my close friends because I had another friend with benefits at that time [laughter]. I would only see this guy when I visited Chicago. So I was using the idea for this painting because he used that picture for his dating profile on Bumble. I thought it was ridiculous how, yes, I kinda like that he is showing off his muscles [laughter]. He’s like the whitest person I’ve ever met and he buys guns. He’s a Trump supporter so I don’t see him anymore.

Image: Detail of “Nudle Party in NYC Subway to G Choi Ave.” Greens, yellows, pinks, blues and purples make up this detail of a much larger painting. A figure is holding up an iPhone to take a selfie. Courtesy of the artist. 

HC: I would never be in a relationship with him, but I appreciate who he is and what we’ve been sharing together because he was like, “I’m so proud of what you do, I always show your paintings to people. You’re like one of the most talented person I know.” He would give me a lot of compliments. He also has the same attitude that I have about painting and how I make paintings. I decided to make that painting inspired by him. And I know what I do every night, I masturbate to a lot of different guys pictures. It’s a secret activity. So I wanted to take a picture of this action and then paint it. It’s like laughing at myself for doing it but also revealing what some girls doing the same thing as guys who jerk off to magazines or pornos.

Image: “She Bad” is a painting consisting of mostly vibrant blue shades hangs in portrait orientation. There is an abstract body with bulbous shapes and a phallic shape at the bottom. Image courtesy of the artist.

SNL : So obviously sex and sexuality is a really huge theme in your work.

HC : Yes it is. I talk about body image, gluttony, sexuality, gender, and identity in my work. I have wide variety of paintings in different narratives in terms of how many jokes I put in the painting. That one [discussing before] is funnier. The funny side. Some other paintings that I have talk about emotional, painful moments that I go through. Most things I talk about in my paintings are about sexual harassment. I like to talk about how much control each character has and how they bring the conversation through the painting. So before I was very focused on much more personal stuff. Now I’ve extended it to general ideas. I aim to share these emotions such as anxiety and overwhelmingness. I like to imply some images that can be interpreted in different perspectives from my viewers.

For example, there is a blue painting that I made for my solo show in New York. That painting has this weird head and there is a mouth with teeth. One of the boobs is bigger and upside down. It’s going towards the mouth. Right. Some people thought about breastfeeding or just sexual activities. But it’s about the torture that I get from men. The teeth are to bite as if saying “no.” Women figures are mostly oversized and more violent in order to talk about power dynamics as well as how I feel about my body. A guy will push the boob back to my mouth when I don’t want it. It’s forceful. It’s only about something that they want. There are a lot of specific things that I put into my paintings but executed in a way that can be read in viewer’s own perspective as well.

Image: This painting depicts a blue-grey dolphin standing on its tail fin surfing on a pink surfboard. The background is comprised of different hues of yellow, making the blue-green ocean and dolphin in the foreground stand out in contrast. Image courtesy of the artist.

SNL : That’s interesting because in comparison, your colors are often playful, implying sexual gratification instead of violence. Can we talk about your choice of color? It’s very vivid.

HC : When you see the colors it looks very celebratory, almost too vibrant, like something is wrong. It’s an intoxicating feeling. Yes, you want to eat candy (the colors are like candy) but it’s not good for you. I like to de-harmonize things. It’s like when you walk into a club, it’s super overwhelming at first. But, after a while, you start to feel like you’re alone, it’s so loud, and you actually start seeing things. That’s what I want my colors to do. When viewers spend more time with the paintings, they see something more specific and deeper in the context. It’s also very intuitive, too. I deal with conflict and complexity throughout the colors for example, I put down darker color to push the space back but the surface is glossy to make it seem like it’s coming forward. It looks odd and it’s about absurdity in a formal sense like things don’t make sense.

 FEATURED IMAGE: An abstract pink figure is seated in a neon-colored forrest of bulbous and phallic shapes that are painted in various neon colors. Courtesy of the artist.

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. She is also the Office Manager for the Chicago Reader. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

I must have stumbled upon Brian’s work when I first moved to Chicago — roughly five years ago — where I found my home in Hyde Park. It’s been years and I’m still here, still walking down 55th, taking a left, passing The Cove and finding a sunny spot at Promontory Point. After five years I have come to know familiar faces, people who I’ve never spoken to but I’ve seen every morning.

When I stopped into Open Produce, the local grocery store, this summer, a regular customer stopped me and said, “I didn’t see you at the lake this morning. I brought Bridget, but we must have missed you.” Bridget, his dog, is always swimming over to me during my morning dips. We usually talk for a few moments when I exit the water, but it’s nothing monumental. But there he is, every morning, and there I am, too, like clockwork waiting to see each other on our morning swim.

Since following him on social media years ago, I’ll scroll through my feed and I’ll stop, and smile, as I see another portrait of a character or figure that I’ve seen on 53rd or in Hyde Park Records or standing on the corner of 55th and S. Hyde Park Boulevard. Brian’s got ’em all. His collection of photographs is a catalog of people I see who I don’t know very well, but who I have come to love.

I decided I wanted to reach out to Brian and see his transition from moving to Hyde Park to his new (but old) home in Denver, Colorado.

Image: A photo of a young boy wearing blue jeans a blue long sleeve shirt is riding a horse down the street in Hyde Park. The horse is on the right side of the composition with only one eye being visible. The photographer and viewer are at the same height as the horse, looking up at the boy. The boy is wearing a hat and looking off into the distance to the left side of the frame. Photo by Brian Carroll.

S. Nicole Lane: When did you begin shooting portraits of people?

Brian Carroll: First off, thank you so much for this opportunity to speak about my work and myself. Well, I studied creative writing in college and, when I realized I was not very good at maintaining the intensive, disciplined act of writing stories, I refocused my attention to the study of literature; I suppose I thought that maybe I wasn’t great at writing stories because I didn’t really know how stories were made, how they should look? This contour of inquiry eventually culminated in a doctoral dissertation, which examined how portrait photography was used in postmodern American literature (abstract of an abstract: portrait photography was the chief conduit for building connections in a time when ethical association was seemingly bereft of an appropriate vehicle). So, while this is entirely banal, I do feel that storytelling is a key element of what makes us human. I’ve always owned a camera since high school (the mid-90s), but I really only focused on portraits the deeper I got into this academic line of discourse. This was the way I could make stories, and to tell those of others.

SNL: How do you approach someone in the street to take their photograph? Are you denied often? I studied photography but always had uncomfortable moments when I would want to shoot a portrait of someone, but was too afraid to ask. Can you explain this process?

BC: It is definitely not easy to make that initial appeal, but I’ve found that the vast majority of people truly want to have their picture taken. It’s a form of attention paid to them they might not normally experience, or were definitely not expecting in that moment. For the most part, people appreciate that kind of spontaneity in their day. And with this said, I can’t really recall being turned down. It’s happened for sure, but it is not memorable, which I think also reinforces how it’s not really a big deal to ask because what I remember most are the associative conversations, and the resulting images (these images really are secondary, no?), beginning from that first request. It’s not the people that were dubious and politely declined that I recollect whatsoever. Maybe it’s an interesting item of clothing that draws me in, or how their hair is fashioned, or the distinct color of their eyes. But it is necessary — mandatory — to explain one’s self, to be transparent at what the motivation is for the portrait collaboration; expressing this not only acknowledges their uniqueness, or justifies their specific stylistic choices, but allows for a moment of shared and equal communication. Of course, this only works if you are being genuine about it all — which if you’ve already made it this far in the creative process, means that you are.

Image: In the forefront of the image is a person holding an accordion while seated. He is staring off into the distance. There is food behind him and a table. In the far-off distance is the lake. Two people are in the background to the left of the seated person. One is holding a stringed instrument and wearing floral pants and sunglasses. Another figure is walking through the background of the shot and wearing a blue shirt and a hat. Photo by Brian Carroll.

Indeed, it is certainly easy to get wrapped up in your own head before “The Ask.” Issues of race, class, and gender (just to be all-encompassing here) can trip you up if you let them; and that’s not to say that they shouldn’t be in both the background and foreground of your mind. But the point is, there is always something — and, truly, many things — that we have in common with our subjects, and the goal is to show those, speak to them, and demonstrate them. We are all so different but so similar, all so proximal to one another, yet othered, and recognizing this liminality is crucial. It is difficult to express here. Often someone’s first question is “What’s the picture for?” Logistically speaking, having a “portfolio” album on your phone really helps — you can immediately pull it up and show people right there on the street what it is you’re going for. Having those thumbnails at hand builds a sort of instant ethos (you don’t need to explain you are a photographer, they see it), especially if you even let the person scroll themselves: hand them your phone, let them search with their forefinger. And I almost always shake hands with the person when we’re done, or briefly clasp their shoulder, or some similar physical gesture. Concluding with that basic human touch — I believe anyways — solidifies and finalizes the experience. Of course, there never really is finality, is there?

Image: A man wearing a US Mail Service uniform is wearing glasses and wearing a camo hat. He has his right arm reaching up towards his collar. His mouth is open as if in mid speech and he is looking to his left. The background has steps and green grass with trees. Photo by Brian Carroll.

SNL: Let’s talk about your time in Hyde Park. Can you discuss some of your favorite people that you met or that you’ve shot? I’ve always enjoyed looking at your images from my neighborhood because many of the subjects are people, or characters, that I know from walking down the street.

BC: Thank you. Yes, that was certainly one of the best things about living in Hyde Park: seeing the same people all the time. A true neighborhood! The security guard at the Treasure Island (RIP Treasure Island) parking lot, the hearing-impaired woman asking for change for milk, the all-season lake swimming club down at the Point, the motorized wheelchair guy with the three Chihuahuas. We lived across the street from this interesting building — definitely an older crowd and a lot of the residents that clearly had health issues (a fire truck or ambulance was there, no joke, about every other day). They hung outside a lot, folks in motorized wheelchairs, with canes, and the like. The informal caretaker of this place was a man named Al (he’s the one with the Bernie Mac shirt); he would be out there sweeping off the sidewalk every morning, saving parking spots for people, looking out for neighbor’s package deliveries. He loved seeing my young daughter and even though we might not cross the street to chat with him every day, we would at least wave at each other from across Harper and he would bellow a greeting, usually to my daughter, who he called “little piggy.”

Image: A man, Al, is standing on a sidewalk wearing a red shirt that says, “Who You Wit!” with a photo of Bernie Mac on it. He has glasses and a baseball cap on. His right arm is bent up towards his neck. He is looking straight ahead away from the camera. Photo by Brian Carroll.

Also in this building was a man named Kenneth whom I shot portraits and video of on at least three or four occasions. He was one of the people in a motorized wheelchair, and he had three Chihuahuas of varying sizes (and varying temperaments) that would follow him as he zoomed around the block. I learned he used to work for Motown Records back in the 60s and 70s, and he wanted me to shoot his birthday party, which was going to be Motown themed. But unfortunately, that never came to fruition. I do think about that a lot, what sort of amazing people I would have met there. The stories and the faces! I mentioned the Point earlier — that was always a good spot to run into some characters.

One time, I think it was on Labor Day, there was this Italian guy playing accordion and singing in this deep, old-world voice. I’d been riding my bike around the loop and could hear him from quite a ways back. Once I rolled up to his group, I stopped and listened for some time, getting pretty emotional just hearing this almost ancient language, that of course I didn’t understand, effortlessly weave around the lilt of his melodic accordion. I didn’t stop to take his portrait until he was finished playing, and even then, almost forgot to do so.

Image: On 53rd street people are walking in the background. A figure stands in the center smoking a cigar and wearing a White Sox hat.He also has a yellow stripped short sleeve shirt on and sunglasses. He is looking directly into the camera. Photo by Brian Carroll.

SNL: How long did you live in Chicago and what brought you to Hyde Park?

BC: I lived in Chicago for just over three years, all in Hyde Park. My wife was there to complete her residency in family medicine and I ended up working at the University of Chicago Press during that time.

SNL: You live in Colorado now. How is your visual practice different since moving there? What do you miss about Chicago, and what are some of the benefits of being an artist in Denver?

BC: I grew up here, went to elementary school, middle school, and high school here, and I moved away after I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 2004. Now I’m back after 15 years away — my parents still live here as does my sister and her family, they all stayed. But there are very few parts of Denver, if any, that are as walkable as Hyde Park, or Chicago as a whole.

Video: A man sits in a motorized wheelchair with three Chihuahuas. A younger adult and a child play with and pet the dogs. Video by Brian Carroll.

You could go weeks in Hyde Park without ever moving your car (street sweeping ticket avoidance aside), everything you needed was there: groceries, work, my daughter’s school. It was all in the neighborhood. My wife was the only one that had to commute with her car. But Denver just doesn’t have that, it’s very car-centric and this is something I didn’t quite realize being away for so long, especially in a place like Hyde Park. So, with less walking, of course, this naturally means less chance to meet and interact with people on the street, to talk with them, hear their stories, take their portraits. Thusly, I feel like I’m in a bit of an artistic slump these days.

Even more jarring is the fact that I still work for the University of Chicago Press, albeit in a remote capacity, so I’m strangely still tethered to Hyde Park, which is an odd sensation, it’s like this reminder of what once was? How does one translate the same “success” after being geographically displaced? Don’t get me wrong, we wanted to move back here, I love Denver dearly, but I suppose I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to duplicate that creative boon. Any maybe I should not attempt to do so. I just need to adapt and evolve and that is an exciting prospect I need to embrace more fully.

Featured Image: A man in a blue suit and green tie is standing directly outside of The Cove, a bar on 55th St. He has eyeglasses on and is looking into the camera. Photo by Brian Carroll.

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. She is also the Office Manager for the Chicago Reader. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt. 

Even if you haven’t met Jireh L. Drake (they/them) before, you may have heard their voice bouncing off the walls of a CTA platform–laughing, chanting or freestyling. Always enfolded within the city’s cacophonous soundscape. Always amongst people. Their spirit and energy can be felt even before they are seen.

Jireh is a Black trans artist, curator, organizer and non-binary baddie who uses mixed media to explore the interdependency of social structures, salient identities, and history. Through drawing, they illustrate the sensations of movement and texture that overlap to visually evoke the interconnectedness of power, race, people, ideas, and cultural-historical movements. In their work, everyday life, Black queer existence, and experiences are unearthed and unpacked. They are a founding member of For the People Artists Collective, a squad of Black and Artists of Color who also organize and create work that “uplifts and projects struggles, resistance, liberation, and survival within and for marginalized communities and movements.” Their work, it seems, is a reaction to a feeling, a moment, or a conversation. Because of this, it always feels timely and relevant to what some Black queer folks are feeling. Jireh’s sketch Reconfigured Anxious visualizes the feeling of internal chaos, confusion, and contradictions that I have felt–currently feel–living in this world as it is now. An electric fire beneath a concrete surface. It’s hard to stay still when everything is changing and moving at a rapid speed. It’s hard not to feel like you’re always behind.

In our conversation, we discuss what it means to be an artist within social justice movements, the influence of movement art, and the struggle of finding the sweet work/life balance.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

Portrait of Jireh L. Drake in front of a brick building taken at sunset in September 2018. They are wearing a white shirt, amber and wood necklaces, large, bronze gauge earrings and black glasses. They are smiling wide with eyes closed. Their hair is twisted to the left side of their face. Portrait captured by Ireashia Bennett.

Ireashia Bennett: Can you share a little bit about your artistic practice, like what inspires you to create, what media you use, and your overall creative process?

Jireh L. Drake: Oh my lord. I’m a mixed media, drawing and sculpting artist. I learned how to do metalworking and woodworking, and I found out that I really like working with the earth. So regardless of what medium I’m using, all of that takes a space. And since I don’t have that space, it’s like, well, how, what will I do now? Sadly, I haven’t done any sculptures since I’ve graduated. I think my process was entirely different when I was in school, because I went to school with a bunch of white folks, and, teachers, some of them liked to engage with my work. A lot of my work is talking about, well, what I think it’s talking about is unearthing trauma around Blackness and gender and sexuality. I like to [use] art as a container to hold those conversations. And it’s kind of, it’s often, I literally think of something, and then I’m like, I’mma talk to my friend about it. And then I’m just gonna start talking to a bunch of people about it, and then I’m gonna come back, and say, “This is my idea.” And then I’mma start. It’s like an, it’s an unearthing of trauma inside of myself, and then I’m like, “how is everyone else handling this?” And I think when I was in school, it was interesting because I was in such a white environment. And most of the students were not engaging in my work, and I feel like the beginning years of college, and I went to school for art, I thought I was a bad artist! And I’m like, but now looking back, I’m like, “No, I’m not a bad artist.” People just didn’t wanna engage in trying to unearth or trying to hold some emotion inside of them.

Ireashia Bennett: I’m really inspired and really captivated by your work Reconfigured Anxious, because as a socially anxious person, like, I’m always in that space, right? I love how you–I don’t even know what to call it. [You create] like a slowing down, a slow-motion effect, but in pencil. So I just wonder, what inspired you to create that work specifically? Were you going through a period of extreme anxiety, or is it a constant thing that you kind of deal with?

Jireh L. Drake: Oh my god. So Reconfigured Anxious, the last two years of college was when I started to create my best work. Before I went to Ghana two years ago, I was just having a conversation with my roommate about a human being in community that I thought was so cute. And my roommate was telling me about anxiety, and I was like, “what’s that?” And then they gave me an example, and I’m like, “I’ve been anxious my entire life, this is the word!” It was wild to me to have language for that. And then I went to Ghana and I had a bunch of panic attacks there because we were going to slave dungeons, and I was like, what the fuck. When I came back I went to this advanced drawing class which was a hybrid class, so I didn’t have to go there every day, and I was like, “this is lit.” Yet I was still having panic attacks. It was this really weird class where you had to go somewhere, draw something, and then you had a prompt, and you had to put them together. It was so vague so that it could really help you generate an idea. I wish I could remember what the prompt was. But I just know, whatever it was, I started working on this Reconfigured Anxious series, and one of them is “Productivity”, which I think is the one you’re mentioning, which is in slow motion, with, like, the three bodies. And then the other one is “The Burden”, and it’s these arms holding watermelons. A lot of my friends say they look like heads, and it’s my gangly arms just holding too many watermelons. [“The Burden”] is talking about generational trauma. And another one is “Housing Anxiety”, which is just like a torso, my torso, with an organ coming out of it. So one, I learned about anxiety, and then I launched into panic attacks. And I didn’t really have time to think about any of that, so I just decided to do that with this project. And I was just like, “how am I holding this anxiety?” I’m moving so fast in the world, and the world is telling me so many things and as a Black queer trans non-binary person just trying to exist, how all this anxiety that’s mine, and not mine, I’m holding.

Ireashia Bennett: Wow. You just pinpointed everything that I’ve been feeling this week. That’s beautiful. Yeah. Wow, that’s heavy. Have your panic attacks gotten better?

Jireh L. Drake: Yeah. I have, like, I had like ten of them in one year, so that was, that’s wild. [laughs] After I graduated they definitely have gotten better. I don’t have as many. I thought I wasn’t having any of them, but then when I sit down, I’m like, oh that was… a mini-panic attack. And I think that my panic attacks have been, when like a lot of things are colliding all at once, when things are just building up. I think some of that’s helpful as I try to use my art as a way to not let things build up. Like, well, if I’m gonna sculpt something, I really have to put intent and think through things if I want to communicate whatever idea I’m trying to communicate. I think I was making the most wildest, strongest art that I made in the last two years while I was having panic attacks. So what does that mean? I don’t want to believe in this narrative that artists need to be starving or broken or anxious or depressed to make good art.

Ireashia Bennett: Yeah.

Jireh L. Drake: But, yeah. Maybe I was having panic attacks because I was trying to work through those things and I had to stop because I had to go to school, I had to wake up, I had to go to work. I don’t know.

Jireh L. Drake, Reconfigured Anxious: “Productivity.” Graphite, 14×11 inches, Strathmore Mixed Media, January 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Ireashia Bennett: I remember you were really into spoken word. Is that still a thing, and if so, how does it feed you, nourish you, things like that?

Jireh L. Drake: Yeah, so I started doing spoken word, and I’ve just been doing it. I remember my sister used to do spoken word at this McDonald’s. I don’t know why we did spoken word at a McDonald’s [laughs]. And I was like, I wanna do that! And I just did it, did it through high school, one thing sometimes did it for talent shows. I think I’m just always looking for some container to hold my own emotions, and to then have conversations with other people about whatever it is, I guess.

Ireashia Bennett: I have to access that again. I feel like I need something to vocalize some shit. But, yeah, so I’mma ask you a “what came first, chicken or the egg” type question, so what came first, organizing or art? Like, I know you’re doing it, like, in tandem with each other, does your art inform your social justice or the other way around?

Jireh L. Drake: In high school I started to create art around and thinking about identity and body image. In college, I was like, Blackness. Gender. I got this job at the Center for Identity, Inclusion and Social Change, so I was literally trained around social justice and to [facilitate] social justice workshops and develop curriculum and whatnot. So then I was like, okay, all of the things that I was told about Blackness and how I was a “good” child when I was younger, all of that was anti-Black! It was coming from a Black person, so maybe it was internalized racism. I’m like, “what were y’all teaching me? Y’all were supposed to be, like, men and women of God! And y’all over here shaming people.” And just like, all those moments in high school, when the white kids would do this to me, that was racism. And so I guess, if one wants to say, I never really per se, “organized.” All my life I’ve been volunteering, but volunteering isn’t organizing, especially if you aren’t coming to it from a critical mindset as to, like, “this is not solving the problem. This is maybe meeting someone’s immediate need.” Or it may not even be meeting someone’s need, like, is that what they asked for? Is that what they said was their most immediate need? I don’t know. So, all my life I’ve been doing that, but that was because I had to, or my sister was doing it. But it wasn’t until college that I was just like, “this is messed up!” And I think it was my freshman year, during finals week, Trayvon Martin was killed. Trayvon Martin’s my age, and his birthday’s so close to mine, and the day… I don’t know if it’s the day he was killed, maybe it was his court case. Whatever it was, there was something that clicked in my brain, as to, I’m like, Trayvon Martin, literally, is me. People say that all the time, but I’m just like, whoa. And then I was like, “Something has to change.” Which sounds corny, but…

Jireh L. Drake, “Contextualizing Dehumanization: Lynching”. 3D Print, Steel, Astatine Paper, Cardstock, and Wood. 5x8x8. December 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Ireashia Bennett: But that’s a very significant moment of you understanding all this shit, that you kind of like have internalized, or have seen or experienced. But you’re also like, what could be? Or what can be? Like, this can change. I want to be a part of that change.

Jireh L. Drake: Mm-hmm.

Ireashia Bennett: That’s, I think that’s at the core of every activist, every organizer, really trying to see a different world, or create a different world, right?

Jireh L. Drake: Mm-hmm!

Ireashia Bennett: So I feel you on that. It’s corny, but it’s real. You’ve express that your art helps you unpack your salient identities, and how they operate with your privileged identities. Can you elaborate on what those identities are, and how your identities influence your work?

Jireh L. Drake: Yeah. So again, I identify as a queer Black trans non-binary baddie! And some of my privileged identities are definitely being American, able-bodied and skinny. And those are the ones that I think about a lot. I know that when I was making Reconfigured Anxious, I was like, I don’t know how I feel about making a series of, making images and all these people are skinny. But this is a portrait of me. I started to make fliers in school and I started doing it [while] at the Center for Identity, Inclusion and Social Change– before it was named CIP, Center for Intercultural Programming. I was doing workshops, and then I got a promotion, and I started to design the curriculum, and I also started to do the fliers. And I was just like, if I’m about to draw a Black person, they ’bout to be dark as fuck [laughs]. I was so tired of seeing light-skinned Black people, or Black folks, as media, that are my skin tone or lighter. I’m like, “nah. Fuck that.” And then, if I’m, there’s only about to be one skinny bitch in here. Like, I literally, I refuse to keep on drawing skinny, like, Eurocentric people of color. So I know like with my fliers and whatnot, I was like, nah, we ’bout to get some motherfucking representation in here! I started to just look at my friends, and I’m like, “I’m about to disrupt this shit.” Even with #nonbinarybaddie, I started that hashtag ’cause I didn’t see myself as a baddie, ’cause I was like, I’m so goofy, and just, I dunno. I’m, my face isn’t always done, but give it up to the girls who are literally out here killing the makeup game! And I was like, you’re a baddie, and I’m a baddie too. And then I was just like, wait. The only people who are baddies are skinny able-bodied people, fuck that! And so, I don’t know, I started this hashtag, #nonbinarybaddie, and I’m literally like, encouraging my TGNC friends who identify as non-binary folks, specifically fat folks, and just like a myriad of other identities to like, acknowledge, to proclaim that they’re a baddie.

Candid photo of Jireh L. Drake with a microphone in hand, at the For the People Artists Collective Third Annual December Showcase on December 2nd, 2018. They are wearing a black shirt with “Demilitarize” inscribed in white underneath layered button-up shirts. Photo courtesy of Sarah-Ji of Love and Struggle Photos.

Ireashia Bennett: Dope! I know that you’re one of the core members of For the People Artists Collective. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about, and are you a founding member? How does creating a collective, like, work for you? How does it inspire you or like, you know, make you feel like you belong?

Jireh L. Drake: Something that I think is hard for myself is that I don’t really see myself as a movement artist. I know that FTP, our tagline is we’re a radical collective of POC and Black artists. A lot of people would probably coin us as movement artists. People are like, “Jireh, you’re a movement artist, you’re making work about the movement,” but I don’t know. I constantly have questions as to where do I exist. I’m like, oh, I create sculptures, sculptures are often either public work or in a museum, and I’m like, I don’t want to be in a museum, so what does that mean? I’m not a fine artist. So I always have these weird…

Ireashia Bennett: How do people define movement artist? People who are directly, like, talking about the issues that are involved in movement work, or?

Jireh L. Drake: Yeah, that’s a good question. We literally just asked the collective this question now. And I think a broad understanding, maybe, of movement art is someone who is documenting and/or thinking and/or creating about the movement. But then I think of a poster that is disrupting traditional representations of Black and brown bodies, and it has words on it, it has like the hashtag or the phrase of the movement, and then about it. And it’s to create awareness. When I think of movement art, that is exactly what I think about. And I think that that work is beautiful, especially ’cause a lot it, a lot of the older work is like, screen printed, or printmaking, which piques my interest because I love tedious things from start to finish. And it’s like a group of people. Someone designed it, and then they’re churning out this poster and they’re plastering it on everything. Which I’m like, we’re still doing that, it’s just different. Someone’s probably doing it on the computer, it’s printed out on a printer, or maybe it’s just shared across social media. But that’s what I think of when I think of movement artists. And I’m like, is that me? [whispers] I don’t really know.

Ireashia Bennett: What do you think that FTP’s influence and impact will be on the movement?

Jireh L. Drake: Yeah! I know in the beginning we set out, our thought was, and I remember this conversation, was to hold and honor the belief that art– and this is why I’m in FTP, this exact phrase– that art is an integral part of the movement. That art is integral for liberation. And I know that we started out to, like, hold that. To hold that belief, and just be like, people in the movement can’t be doing artists dirty. They can’t hit up an artist at midnight and be like, “Hey, I need this thing tomorrow at 2pm.” It’s just like, no, respect our art, and know that our art is labor. It’s labor of love, and this is how we live, right? So that’s why FTP started. Cultural things are what’s going to shift people’s hearts and minds, which is an Institute of Culture Affairs (ICA) slogan, which is where I work. But it’s true. When people are walking past a march or a direct action, they’re looking for the visuals, and that’s how they’re interpreting it. Maybe they see that flier, but I’m like, that’s a visual, and you should make that visual strong, so people can really get what’s happening. We just did the Do Not Resist? 100 Years of Police Violence exhibition, right, which is wild. That was huge ’cause it was at three or four different venues happening across the city. We wanted to also disrupt the notion that art only happens in museums, and only in this part of town. We were like, “no, fuck that!” There was a core group of people working on that, and we just dropped our coloring book, which I’m really proud of. I was really pushing that project forward, along with some really lovely people, “Color Me Healing,” which is a project to help folks have conversations, adults and youth, about what’s happening in the movement, and another way to document ourselves. And so something we’re thinking about doing, that we’ve wanted to do, is just to really talk to people who are in the movement who are also artists, and just, how are we creating access, and how are we uplifting other artists. So FTP started out as this thing to be like, Chicago, what’s up. And now we’re like, okay, how are we supporting artists? How are we branching across the country together? We don’t really know where we’re landing, but we’re gonna figure it out. And we’re always in conversation. So it’s lovely to be in a collective, because I literally can hit anyone up and be like, “I have this problem,” or “I need to talk about this,” or “What do y’all think about this?” It’s dope just to have a group of people who are down to think critically about things.

Ireashia Bennett: So, last question: How do you regroup, how do you recenter, how do you kind of create that balance for yourself where you’re not overly giving to the world, but you’re balancing with how [and what] you give.

Jireh L. Drake: To be honest, I don’t really know. I try to meditate every day. I also try to think about, what are the multiple ways I’m moving trauma out of my body? That’s a quote of a good Pisces friend of mine, that’s just like, “how are you, what are the multiple ways you’re moving trauma out of your body every day?” A lot of that’s through art, right? But I don’t have time every day to do art. So whether that be journaling, yoga, meditation, or like, therapy. One thing that I started was rock climbing, which I think is super dope. My friend and I almost didn’t start rock climbing, just because it’s kind of expensive, and also it’s not made for Black people. But Black people have been climbing all their lives!

This article is published as part of Envisioning Justice, a 19-month initiative presented by Illinois Humanities that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact.

Featured Image: Portrait of Jireh L. Drake smiling widely. They are wearing a white shirt and adorned in wood and amber necklaces, large bronze gauge earrings. The background is a multi-colored textured background with their work “Reconfigured Anxious” layered and super-imposed on the image. Feature image was captured and created by Ireashia Bennett.

Ireashia Bennett is a Chicago-based self-taught photographer, filmmaker, writer, and multimedia artist originally from PG County, MD.

This project asked us to envision justice. It offered the arts as a lens. As I first began to wrap my mind around the Envisioning Justice initiative (“Bringing Chicago together to examine and reimagine the criminal justice system through a creative lens”), I entered a rabbit hole of unanswerable and annoyingly abstract questions, like, what is art? (Beauty? Truth? Life? Fantasy?) And, what is art for? (Self-expression? Transcendence? Joy? Education? Justice?) Can it really be for justice? And then, of course, what is justice? How does something as wishy-washy and abstract as art bear on something as heavy and real as incarceration?

In the two articles I published previously for the Envisioning Justice writing residency, I included responses to the prompt, “How do you envision justice?” from two artists who have been working within Illinois jails and prisons for years. Both responses were not cynical, but rather the opposite; they were tired of the question. It’s the work, not the envisioning of the work, that needs to get done, they seemed to say.

Here’s Sarah Ross, who is part of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project and a teaching artist at the Stateville Maximum Security Prison. Ross participated in a panel discussion at the Art Institute of Chicago that kicked off the Envisioning Justice initiative in April 2018, (joined by the Cook County Board President, the State’s Attorney, a Chief Judge, and a Chief Investment Strategist). When asked by the moderator how she might imagine a redesign of the system, Ross said, “I actually think we know what we need to do to change the system, but we don’t have the political will yet to do it.”

And, here’s Ryan Keesling, who, as co-founder of Free Write Arts & Literacy, has been teaching young people in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center for over 18 years: “I don’t know, I think people try too hard to think about what [justice] will look like…I can imagine it, but also when I imagine it I don’t necessarily feel it. But when I see their faces and when I work with our students, both inside and outside, and I see them growing and I see them becoming aware of their abilities, and I see them being able to take control of their lives and I see them being happy and getting paid and doing what they love? That’s what justice looks like.”

These responses struck me because in a matter of words, both Ross and Keesling betrayed the prison system, with its reliance on seeming permanence and unquestionable righteousness, and bypassed any hand-wringing about how reform or abolition is difficult or impossible to think with. (Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete?: “People take prisons for granted.”) Both Ross and Keesling said, no, this is not righteous or justice, nor is it permanent. And, Ross said, we know that.

* * *

For 18 years, Free Write Arts and Literacy has been teaching within the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (CCJTDC). What started as one-on-one tutoring sessions grew into a robust curriculum based on an expanded notion of “literacy” that includes, in addition to poetry and prose, DJing, painting, digital illustration, music production, and other mediums for making sense of and communicating with the world. More recently, Free Write has expanded its reach in order to support its students in areas beyond the CCJTDC classroom.

The expansion is less of a forward bound than a natural extension of the principles and practices grounded in their pedagogy. Free Write’s mission is to provide its students with the tools and mentorship to author the narrative of their life experiences and to create space for liberation and redemption within (and without) the walls of the prison-industrial complex. They have a student-centered approach that allows for the students’ desires and goals to guide the curriculum. Free Write’s extracurricular projects tend to evolve as responses to requests from students and through ongoing conversations with them.

Take, for example, their recent efforts to develop a system to consolidate students’ work and learning in the classroom such that it could stand as mitigating evidence in their court proceedings. This resonates with current national movements for restorative justice and more active community involvement in legal defense, such as the Participatory Defense movement (its most public advocate, Raj Jayadev, was named a MacArthur Fellow last year). For Free Write, this started as a simple practice of responding to requests by current and former students for materials from the portfolios they developed in the classroom—simple in spirit, not in its execution. Free Write staff would take time to curate a selection of work, make the necessary scans and screen shots, and put together a file that students could bring to their attorney or judge.

Each week, Free Write works with nearly 65 of the, on average, 225 youth in pre-trial detention at CCJTDC. In the classroom, Free Write staff and students collaborate on an “asset map”: a double-sided, single sheet that prompts students to list their skills, hobbies, interests, participation in programs, and work experience and asks questions about their short and long term goals, their challenges, and their support systems. (More on this later).

Three years ago Free Write established a production company, Free Write Sound & Vision, that trains and employs former students as audio technicians for live concerts and events. Sound & Vision typically partners with arts organizations and production companies with aligned missions, so the events for which its team is hired to provide equipment and technical support serve both as an employment opportunity and another site of community with other artist-activists in Chicago. Over the summer, the Sound & Vision team set up sound systems at festivals like AMFM’s Feast and the Loop Alliance’s Activate series. In September, they participated in 96 Acres Project’s Radioactive event that broadcasts stories written by current and former inmates at Cook County Jail on Lumpen Radio.

Sound & Vision, too, as Ryan described, came about in response to alumni who reached out to Free Write staff looking to reconnect upon coming home.

Image: Free Write Sound & Vision lead technician Cortez Williams (right, under the blue tent) operates an audio mixer behind the stage during a performance at AMFM’s outdoor FEAST festival over the summer. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

I: Sound & Vision

One of those alumni, Cortez Williams, just turned 20 this month. He is a DJ from the West Side, a former football player, and an alumnus of Free Write’s program from when he was detained at CCJTDC. Cortez learned how to DJ while he was in CCJTDC. “That,” he told me, “was my outlet. When you locked up, I mean, you can’t really do nothing.”

I asked him why he was drawn to DJing over the other art forms that Free Write offers. “I felt like that was my only way of knowing what was going on on the outside,” he continued. “All I could do was listen to the radio and be like, ‘Oh, okay, they got this new song out, I know they got them listening to this new song.’ And hearing the old music I haven’t heard in a long time that’s decent. It low-key will relax you, like, I’d just be singing. I would catch myself later on in the day just rapping the song that I was just mixing. It just kept me calm and I had something to look forward to. I was just ready to go to DJ class. It’s fun, you feel me, and they was telling me you can get paid big money for it, but I wasn’t thinking I was going to get paid big money for it. So when Free Write actually offered me the job, I was real happy. I took the job right away.”

In addition to working with Sound & Vision, Cortez has traveled around the country with Free Write to participate in conferences and events related to youth incarceration. In Michigan, Cortez taught a five-day DJ workshop to fifth graders. He was surprised, he told me, when, at the end of the workshop, the students wrote him a card saying they were going to miss him. I asked him how he understood why they said that.

“I think because I gave them some leeway,” he answered. “Everyone else was talking down to them like they fifth graders, because I mean, they fifth graders and they bad, but when they got to me, I was like, ‘Look, you do this right five times straight, I’ll let you listen to whatever song you want to listen to on YouTube, uncensored.’ So they did it. Everybody got to doing it right. They did what they was supposed to do, and I let them listen to their songs.”

Cortez is no stranger to being talked down to by adults. Even at conferences that allege to center the youth, he told me, it’s all too common for the adults to dominate the conversation. At a conference about youth incarceration in New York, Cortez recalled sitting back with his arms folded as he watched the adults in the room talk over all the young people who are, in fact, the experts on youth incarceration. I asked him what he had wanted to say that the adults didn’t want to hear.

“Money should be being dispersed,” he replied. “They just holding it until they think they found out what to do. I mean, that’s not doing anything. There’s a lot of organizations that go inside the facilities and actually try to help with what’s going on in the facilities. They’re volunteering their time around the country. Why are we still waiting? If they going inside the facility and they need, like, electronics for the kids inside, okay, get them the money they need for electronics.”

Where does he think the money should go?

“Mentors. These judges and these police officers don’t know what it’s like to wake up, go in the kitchen, go in the refrigerator, and ain’t no food in there. In a child’s home. They don’t know what it’s like. I feel like having mentors, like, people who are in the life of the youth– if you get [young people] comfortable enough to share the fact that they don’t have anything in their refrigerator, then, okay, their mentors could go buy some food. So the youth ain’t gotta do nothing stupid to try to get some food.

“What Free Write does is, like, if you can’t get on the CTA bus because you are gang-affiliated and you have to pass your rival enemy’s territory on the bus, Free Write will get you a Uber or a ride. They finna pay my phone bill because my phone was off for a minute, because I was having problems with my mom, so they offered, like, ‘Can we pay your phone bill?’ That’s love. Just having people showing they care. When you young and you get arrested you feel like nobody cares. So when someone actually show you they care, you feel me, they real-life trying to help you, you’re going to try. At least try.”

Image: Cortez Williams, wearing glasses and a backwards hat, looks down at the audio mixer and makes an adjustment during this past summer’s outdoor FEAST festival. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

In addition to working with Free Write Sound & Vision, Cortez has a job selling pizzas at O’Hare. When we met up in December, he told me he had been working overtime at O’Hare to make a good impression so that he would have some sway when he referred his older brother to the job. After we left the cafe where we’d snacked on cinnamon buns and chips and guac, Cortez walked me to my bus stop. As we passed the new Steak ‘n Shake on Halsted Ave., he decided that he would swing back to pick up something for his grandma, who favors their burger, and who he was going to pay a visit once we parted.

In March 2017, Cortez was visiting his grandma when something nearly miraculous happened. “It was an act of God,” he said. Cortez had just been released from three months of electronic monitoring—house arrest. He had gone to see his grandma with his mom. On their way back, his mom’s car broke down. They hailed an Uber, a pool. After a few minutes in the car, their fellow passenger spoke. “Cortez…?” It was Roger Bonair-Agard, a program director and teaching artist with Free Write. “Oh, Roger, what’s up?” As they caught up, Roger asked Cortez if he could pass his contact information around the organization, before inviting him over for a meal. Shortly after, Cortez was DJing at the regular open mic event produced by Free Write, Stomping Grounds. Then Ryan told him about his idea for a production company that would teach young people how to set up and operate sound systems for events. Now, as a lead technician for Sound & Vision, Cortez is paid $25/hour.

“I’m not gonna to leave Free Write, period,” Cortez said. “Free Write kind of saved my life. When I came home [from CCJTDC] I didn’t know what I was going to do. I could’ve went back to doing the things that I did to get me arrested, but Free Write gave me that job that was paying me [at the time] $20 an hour. I don’t have to do what I used to do.”

For many DJs and artists, audio technician work provides a valued source of income in a related field. But it is an industry where straight white men are overwhelmingly over-represented and, when gigs are often passed through personal networks, it can be difficult to thrive for those who don’t fit into the culture. Ryan, himself a veteran DJ and audio technician, began to conceive of a Free Write production company as a way to use his expertise and industry contacts to help bring people with different backgrounds into the field. After Cortez came home and got back in contact with Free Write, the concept for Sound & Vision began to gel.

The training that Sound & Vision offers is not limited to technical skills. It’s a small team, so the technicians are also expected to coordinate the logistics with event producers and plan their own events. They attend regular meetings to discuss the direction and mission of Sound & Vision. They are encouraged to pursue their interests through the company. At one meeting I attended, one technician brought up her interest in organizing a workshop and networking event for DJs. Everyone discussed the equipment it would require, whether the event should have a delineated agenda or be more casual, if DJs are more likely to attend on weekdays or weekends, and the feasibility of securing snack donations. It was added to the calendar that day.

Image: Walter McDavid, a Free Write Sound & Vision lead technician, stares forward from behind the audio mixer he is operating during the outdoor FEAST festival. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

II: Mitigation

Cortez and his grandma were at the polls last November when Cortez noticed something. “Grandma! Look, it’s that judge. Vote no!” It was Matthew E. Coghlan, who, due to a rigorous campaign by several prison reform and watchdog groups that compiled information indicating his racial bias, excessive sentencing, and alleged role in framing two men for murder, was the first Cook County judge voted off the bench in 28 years. It was Coghlan, too, who had tried to send Cortez to jail for 15 years when he was 15.

I asked Cortez if that moment had felt like an instance of justice. He furrowed his brows and shook his head. “No.” How does he envision justice?

“Equality,” he replied. “You can’t have justice until you have equality. There’s always going to be some kind of injustice. Judges are humans, too. So as long as there’s going to be someone judging you on your life based on your actions, there’s going to be justice, but not real justice. You know what I mean? I don’t feel like justice is going to be served until you actually look at both sides of the story…Honestly, I feel like if people take the time, if adult judges take the time to hear the other side of the story, they might look at the bad side of the story like, ‘Man, if I was in his situation, if I can see my daughter’s ribs and she’s not eating, then I would rob somebody.’ The judges, they don’t know nothing about that.”

* * *

Chicago is home to the world’s first juvenile court. The court was established in 1899 in the midst of a social welfare movement led mainly by middle class progressive women such as Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop and their peers at the Hull House. Until then, children as young as seven could be charged and sentenced as (and jailed with) adults. The early reformers built their case for a separate juvenile system on the basis that criminal behavior was a symptom of poverty and derelict public service and that “delinquent” children need protection, not punishment. (The term “delinquent” was introduced in this era to distance juveniles from criminality).

A distinguishing factor of the new juvenile court was the expansion of the judge’s discretionary power. The judge’s task in this new court was to assess an adolescent’s individual needs and determine an appropriate plan for rehabilitation, rather than administer punishment for a crime.

The establishment of the court was soon followed by a juvenile detention home and a burgeoning industry centered around juvenile justice and child welfare. Over the next several decades, the emergence of new professions such as probation officers, social workers, and psychopathologists reflected more holistic, rehabilitation-minded theories of criminality, child development, and economic inequality. A 1934 report by the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research offered a delinquency prevention plan that recommended more recreation programs for youth.

However, through the 1930s, the social welfare ideology of the early juvenile court system began to lose favor. In the midst of rising racial tensions and violence, the courts became more punitive yet again, and judges regained the power to prosecute children over ten as adults. In 1965, Illinois rewrote the juvenile justice act. This act introduced public defenders, thus restructuring the court to be more adversarial than deliberative. In the 1970s and 80s, as the “War on Drugs” infiltrated criminal justice systems countrywide, sentencing became even harsher, and by 1994 the Cook County Juvenile Detention Home was the largest juvenile facility in the world.

I read about all of this in a zine published by Project NIA, an advocate for youth incarceration reform. “A Graphic History of Juvenile Justice in Illinois,” was made in collaboration with youth at CCJTDC and Free Write program director and teaching artist Elgin-Bokari T. Smith. Reading it, a plate shifted, just as every time I learn about the history of prisons. It had never entered my mind as a question, I realized. Why does the juvenile justice system exist? The prison system is so entrenched. Knowledge that the system is a product of particular reform movements, policies, and politics—that it is not permanent or inevitable—needs constant refreshing. I reflect on how deeply I take prisons for granted.

* * *

Last October, I met with Mathilda de Dios, the associate director of Free Write, to discuss her recent work developing a tool—the asset map—that could support students in their court proceedings. Before the asset map existed within Free Write as a tool, it was a practice. Aspects of this practice are hard to capture, such as the kind of rapport that teaching artists build with their student that demonstrates mutual respect. It’s giving students a chance to introduce themselves at the beginning of each class session. (Ryan: “They open their mouths and hear their voices at the table first.”) It’s the way former students are referred to as “alumni.” It’s teaching art in a juvenile detention center, and letting students choose what they want to learn.

Most obviously, though, the asset map follows the primary method that Free Write employs to assess learning and development in the classroom: portfolios. The portfolio method reflects a more holistic understanding of “success” than would a more basic measure like exams.

“To be real,” said Mathilda, “we created that asset map with somebody who I thought was going to be incarcerated for their whole life. And the young man was 16 at the time. I was really sure, because he told me that he was looking at big years, like football numbers, he said. In that situation, I was like, how is it that I can engage with this young person when their legal defense might require them to cop a plea? So we created that instrument as a way to create hope and show the leadership that he had exhibited in our classroom.”

The asset map is designed to express the complexity of the portfolio quickly and legibly to fit into dense, accelerated court proceedings. It is a double-sided, single sheet of paper filled out by the student that consolidates and makes more explicit what the portfolios already indicate: their skills, vision, artistry, participation in programs, experiences, and interests. The sheet prompts students with additional questions about their wellness, challenges, goals, and support networks.

“It is strategic,” said Mathilda, who has previously worked as a college and career coach, “because it’s an instrument that is flexible, basic, and so necessary, and provides a space for portfolio building, which can be used in court as well as with an employer, interview, an application to college or scholarship or fellowship, and ultimately a place for young people to see that their experience, their practices, and expertise matter.”

Tellingly, the asset map is an inverse of an instrument already common to youth detention centers. A “risk assessment instrument” focuses on adverse aspects of a young person’s life: how many times they’ve been detained, whether they’ve been in a fight, the presence of adult support in their home—it measures deficits. These instruments are intended to assess how critical a young person’s needs are, but, Mathilda told me, they don’t create a sufficient action plan to address the needs. “So you are simply measuring the risk,” she said, “and you’re not doing anything about it and certainly not engaging the young person as a navigator or author of their own future…It tells you nothing about [an individual’s] capacity or resilience.”

Where a Free Write student’s portfolio travels and who sees it is far from standard. The division of labor in a juvenile court system is complex, and one of Free Write’s roles is to help its students navigate an obscure bureaucratic system. First, the portfolio has to be taken outside of the Free Write classroom with the approval of the Youth Development Specialist, or YDS, a CCJTDC employee in charge of movement for the particular group in the classroom at that time. That YDS reports to a Team Leader, who will give the portfolio to a caseworker. Then, the caseworker shares the portfolio with the student’s parent or directly to their lawyer or public defender, who can bring it into the courtroom and make the effort to call attention to it during proceedings. At that point, the culture of the courtroom as created by the judge and prosecutor determines whether the portfolio is even looked at.

If the portfolio does successfully pass from person to person at each step, it is because of Free Write’s relationships and reputation within the system. Currently, Free Write’s influence wanes the further it is from the classroom.

Image: Ryan Keesling, executive director and co-founder of Free Write Arts & Literacy, stands facing the camera on the second floor of Chicago Art Department, where Free Write is a resident organization. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

“We have this model. We understand the intricacies of what it takes to get that student’s voice into the courtroom,” Ryan said. “Now we ask that the other stakeholders along that chain realize they have that power and begin to invest specifically and intentionally in helping that young person’s voice make it into the courtroom so these mitigating factors can be heard by judge and positively influence the outcome for that young person.” Ryan estimated that there have been a couple dozen times over 18 years when they’ve been able to noticeably and positively impact a student’s outcome in court. That can mean a host of things, like a diminished sentence, a case thrown out, an alternative to detention or court-ordered care, resulting in hundreds of years shaved off of sentences for Free Write students.

Combined, the portfolio and asset map resonate with another practice for assessing a young person that already exists in the courtroom: mitigation packets. Mitigating factors are those aspects of an individual’s life beyond the alleged crime that could influence a judge to reduce the severity of their sentence. Mitigation packets include materials like letters from teachers, family, and community members, participation in programs, and school records. They are typically compiled by mitigation specialists who are hired by a defendant’s attorney at a high cost. Mathilda, who previously worked with a mitigation firm in Evanston in order to better understand the process, has been developing Free Write’s mitigation packet strategy in conversation with alumni Walter McDavid.

Image: Walter McDavid, wearing a White Sox hat, smiles and look directly into the camera while DJing at Free Write Art & Literacy’s January open mic event Stomping Grounds. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

Walter McDavid is 23 years old and has been DJing since he was 12 years old. While in Free Write, he started writing a mythical sci-fi book about dragons that he hopes to finish by his birthday in July. He loves to draw, and he learned the techniques of digital illustration in the Free Write classroom. But he doesn’t like having to add color. “I can give it its general form, but the actual color and feel of it should be up to whoever’s looking at it. And when you actually look at something, it’s a product of imagination. So why should only my imagination be implemented into this artwork? If I leave it in black-and-white, then I give it its structure, but you give it its feeling.”

After coming home, Walter, who was born and raised in Englewood, got in touch with Free Write program director Elgin-Bokari T. Smith to ask for the artwork he made during his time in the Free Write classroom at CCJTDC. Elgin invited him to DJ at Free Write’s open mic event, Stomping Grounds, along with Cortez. Now Walter is also a lead technician with Free Write Sound & Vision, in addition to working with Mathilda to develop mitigation strategies. Walter and I met up in December at Chicago Art Department in Pilsen, where Free Write is a resident organization.

Sasha Tycko: Can you talk about the mitigation process and how what you’re working on with Free Write relates to it?

Walter McDavid: It’s basically trying to give our students that are with Free Write the best possible file, profile, for them to either take to their judge, or just to have—for them to even possibly have a better outlook. Because, as a youth, yeah, you’re going to make tons of mistakes, but you still have time to progress and make it better. And you also have a lot of good things. They not going to go into the courtroom and just tell all the good stuff about you, so you have to do that on your own. So that’s what we’re trying to come up with, how to file [the good stuff]. And actually compile those files and documents. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought.

ST: What are some of the complications that you’re dealing with now?

WM: Actually getting those things on paper. Because, although people writing letters and stuff for you is a good way [to build the file], actually getting people to write those letters is really hard—as well as just trying to get the judge to actually pay attention to it. It’s not just a file of papers. It has its purpose and meaning. So just giving it enough meaning and purpose to actually hold that standing that it should [is difficult].

ST: What has to happen for the judge to take something like that into consideration and for it to have a real impact on a young person?

WM: I mean, the young person has to believe in it and take that stand to say, “Hey, I have this and this is important.” If the person it’s about doesn’t feel it’s important, why should anyone else? So I think that’s a major key in it.

ST: Do you mind sharing your own experience with mitigation, since you said you went through the whole process yourself?

WM: Well, I ended up getting some mitigation specialists when I was going through my case. And for the first, like, two months, they would come every week, twice a week, and I would just sit there and look at them. Because, one, I didn’t understand what a mitigation specialist was, and, like, I just didn’t see its purpose or its standing. I didn’t understand why they were just coming out to sit with me. I didn’t get it. But I did some research and I started to understand, like, “Okay. Y’all trying to help me. Let me help you help me.”

So, I went through the process of just compiling my family tree, my past, basically. I didn’t have any record, so they didn’t have any files at all on me. So it was just a lot of sitting and talking for a good, like, year and a half, twice a week, every week. It was extensive, but in the end the books were huge with my information. I didn’t understand at first how much I had done, since I was still young. But it was cool and it actually did have a major impact on how everything ended up going. If not, I don’t think I’d be sitting here. I think I’d still be downstate [in prison]. So I’m thankful, I’m glad I actually went through and figured that out.

ST: What was included in your mitigation packet?

WM: Letters from my teachers, my mother’s colleagues and stuff, people I had been around, church family, regular family, grades, programs and stuff that I’m included in, sports programs. Just any and every possible positive aspect of my life that had come across in our conversations when we were going back and forth was compiled into this folder. And it was just a lot more than I thought.

ST: You said that you didn’t really understand what the point was at first, and then there was a shift when you started to do research and become more actively involved in the conversations. Do you think that because you did that research on your own, that’s why it was successful? I guess what I’m asking is, if you hadn’t, would it not have been as successful?

WM: I mean, the one thing that hurts people the most is courtroom lingo. If you don’t understand what they’re saying, you just don’t know. When they were saying “mitigation specialist,” I’m like, “What does that even mean? What are you? Why do you keep coming [and] trying to talk to me?” Then I started to look it up and ask questions, and it came around that, oh, just, “We’re trying to help you take as much time off as possible. We’re trying to give you the best look possible to the judge.”

ST: So what impact did it have?

WM: I was looking at 21 to 45 [years]. I actually only spent altogether five years. So, I’m glad. I’m really happy that I didn’t have to do the numbers that I was actually looking at.

* * *

I asked Cortez if his participation in Free Write helped his case. Not while he was in detention, he told me.

“But as far as on the outside, since I’ve been home,” Cortez continued. “Free Write helped me a lot. My probation officer said, like, I might get off probation in February. I had plead guilty because I didn’t want them to send me back to [adult] county court, because there was a possibility that the State’s Attorney could have asked my judge to get me transferred back to the county courts. So before they could [do] any of that, I plead guilty so I could stay in juvenile court. They gave me five years probation, but I only have to do two-and-a-half. But now I’m finna do half of that two-and-a-half, mainly because of Free Write.

“I made an appeal, I gave them check stubs from [Free Write Sound & Vision]. Got the plane tickets from Free Write, to show that Free Write was taking me out of state to teach and speak at conferences. [The probation officer] got the California plane tickets. I was teaching kids how to DJ; that’s in my profile. So basically anything I’ve been doing with Free Write, she been putting in my profile. My judge loved it. So like I said, I was supposed to do two-and-a-half out of that five, but I might end up doing half of that two-and-a-half. So, I mean, Free Write, they helped me. I’ve been working with them since I’ve been home. I’ve had a steady job since I’ve been home. So [the courts are] pretty much looking at me like, ‘Okay, he’s growing up.’… So yeah, they helped me. Not when I was locked up. When you locked up, all they see is them chains on you.”

* * *

I’ve come to understand that this question (how do you envision justice?) is a misdirection, merely an opening for talking about what art enables. Art involves much more than imagination—that popular link between art and politics. Art encompasses a set of strategies, ways of relating to others, forms of knowledge, a means for community, an industry, and, yes, imagination, a gift for seeing the potential other way. Ultimately, the Envisioning Justice residency became, for me, about the unique strategies that art and artists employ, and how these can address (and end) mass incarceration. Free Write is one of the most compelling arguments I’ve encountered for what art is for and what justice is.

* * *

Sasha Tycko: How do you envision justice?

Walter McDavid: I don’t know. Because I can’t really envision justice. Because although I may see something as justice or being right, looking at it from someone else’s perspective, they may be right and justified as well. So I don’t really have that outlook. I don’t have that vision. I like to allow everything to be as it is because it’s not like you can actually control nature. Kind of hippie ain’t it?

ST: If you say so.

WM: I’ll say so.

ST: That’s very open-minded. Would you ask other people to also be that open-minded?

WM: No, because I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to be open-minded, and yet it has been my most effective way of making it through everything. Because, although I may see something as wrong, yeah, I can speak on it, but just because I see it as wrong doesn’t mean that I’m right. There’s a lot of different ways that things could go. It’s not always black and white as to right and wrong. There can be a lot of different shades and variations to it. You just gotta figure it out.

ST: How would you sum up the impact that Free Write has had on your life?

WM: Free Write has given me my love back. Because, I mean, after I came home I didn’t have any of my DJ equipment. I didn’t have any of the things I wanted to do anymore. So after getting back into it with Free Write, they gave me a DJ controller, a laptop, stuff to work on. And, like, they just gave me everything I love back. So the music, the feel of the crowd, that freedom again.

* * *

ST: How would you sum up the impact Free Write has had on your life?

Cortez Williams: Free Write just been supporting me since I been home, period. I had never been to college, I had went to try but then I ran into some trouble with my financial aid. They didn’t want to give me all the money for my books. So I told Ryan, and Ryan bought them for me. So Free Write pretty much just been supporting, like family. If I need someone to talk to I can call Free Write, talk to Free Write. They pay me well, it’s pretty much like family support. That’s really what somebody needs. Support. Someone they can come to. They support you on the art side, they support you on the school side, I mean, they offer to pay your phone bill, make sure you’re safe. Ain’t no better than that. They care for real. You just need more organizations that care for real.

This article is published as part of Envisioning Justice, a 19-month initiative presented by Illinois Humanities that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact.

Featured image: Elgin-Bokari Smith, a program director and teaching artist with Free Write Arts & Literacy holds a microphone up to his mouth in a circle of young people in attendance at January’s Stomping Grounds, the regular open mic event produced by Free Write. Photo by Chelsea Ross.

Starting from the proposition that art-making is world-making, Sasha Tycko combines community organizing and curatorial work with writing, music, and performance. Tycko is a founding editor of The Sick Muse zine and an administrator of the F12 Network, a DIY collective that addresses sexual violence in arts communities. IG: @t_cko. www.sashatycko.net. Photo by ColectivoMultipolar.

Creating the right recipe of offerings for the families in your community isn’t an easy task, but that’s what Bright Star Community Outreach works to do everyday in Bronzeville. Providing everything from family service and parent education to workforce development, trauma counseling, and advocacy opportunities, Bright Star takes a holistic approach to their work and wraps their arms all the way around those who walk through their doors for support or service. 

A born-and-raised Chicagoan, Bright Star’s Nichole Carter moved to Knoxville, Tennessee as a teenager, then, after acceptance into Spelman moved her to Atlanta, she spent time working in housing developments and mixed-income housing. Eventually, what she learned during her studies and work in the South would make its way to the South Side of Chicago through a position as the Director of Community Strategy and Development at Bright Star.  

As the person at the helm of Bright Star’s community programs, she was the one who took a leadership role when Bright Star became one of seven community hubs for Envisioning Justice, a program initiated by Illinois Humanities that investigates the role that art plays in how we understand, educate, and intervene on Chicago’s criminal legal systems. In our conversation Carter shared a bit of her backstory, how that work shaped the work she does now, and the vision she has of justice and the roadblocks that slow down that progress.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

TH: Given your area code, it sounds like you might be from Atlanta, or that you spent some time in Atlanta. And now you’re in Chicago at have now been at Bright Star for a few years. What’s your background, what brought you to this work, and how did you end up at Bright Star?

NC: I am actually a native Chicagoan. I was born here and lived here until just after my freshman year of high school. And then my family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, for my dad’s job. He’s in higher education and he was Vice Provost for research at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. So culturally that’s a big shift between Knoxville and Chicago. And during that time there was an even bigger shift than than there is if we were to make [that move] today. So, I was in Knoxville for three years. After that I graduated from high school and went to Spelman. And so that’s my Atlanta connection.

TH: Oh, I see.

NC: I actually lived in Atlanta for almost twenty years including undergraduate and working. After a while I felt like I needed a change and I went back to Knoxville and reconnected with someone that I knew in high school, got married, then I moved back [to Chicago]. So I’ve been here since May of 2015, and in between I was always back and forth to Chicago. I have grandparents here and family here so I was never a stranger to the city. But it’s much different when you visit and when you live here. That’s a little about what I did prior to coming to Bright Star. For a while I actually worked in mixed income property management. Are you familiar with that at all?

TH: Yeah.

NC: There’s a lot of it. So the first mixed model that everybody uses across the country, I actually opened the first one in the nation.

TH: Wow!

NC: It was around the time of the Olympics so they tore down all the housing projects outside of the [Atlanta University] Center which was also not far from the Georgia Dome cause that’s where a lot of the Olympics would be held. I was the first manager there during construction all the way through lease up. And while I was there I realized that no matter what the socioeconomic perspective of the whole was, whether you were paying $0 for rent or $1000 for rent, families were in trouble. So after being in property management for a number of years I actually went back and got a masters in marriage and family therapy. And I really wanted to help families. After graduating was when I actually went back to Knoxville and started working at the Knoxville area Urban League. I was a director of all of their youth programs.

So while I was not directly doing counseling work, I was still able to use a lot of what I knew from looking at systems and root causes to help address these issues through the programming that we would offer the young people.

Fast forward to moving back to Chicago, I have known Pastor Harris since I was eight or nine years old. We used to sing together. Following him on Facebook I saw the work that he was doing–at that time it would have been called the Bronzeville Dreams Center. That was work looking at trauma and violence but addressing that both through faith and community leaders. So I was very interested in this work and I reached out to him just to see what opportunities were available and to see if he could help me get plugged into the sector and pass along my resume. As he was reading my resume to make sure he was going to plug me in with the right people, he said, “I’m not going to send you anywhere, I want you to be with me!” So I started as the program director, and I worked on seven different programs at Bright Star. I’m currently the Director of Community Outreach and Programs. So my role is to basically take what we do at Bright Star in terms of our core values, which is looking at mentoring, development, family programs, and advocacy to create different opportunities. [Our work is] to look at different opportunities to create programming that addresses some of those areas. So Envisioning Justice is under my purview because of what my role is.

I’ve been very excited to work with what we’re doing. You kind of heard me mention Still Till–that’s actually something that we were doing in advance of Envisioning Justice. Bright Star Church is located at 4021 S. State Street, which is a historic property of the Roberts Temple Church Of God In Christ and where Emmett Till’s funeral was held. So we use that platform to bring to our community the memory of what happened with Emmett Till but to also discuss what kind of things in our community are Still Till. So we worked in that advocacy vein, looking at the criminal justice system and its effects, even before Envisioning Justice. It was just a seamless transition to bring that to the community as well.

A streetview of Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on South State Street. It is a sunny day, there is a tree blocking much of the facade. There are two cars parked in front on the street and a person riding a bike. Photo by Tony Smith.

TH: Thank you for telling that story. What were some of the things that you brought with you that translated well from your work in the South to your work on the South Side of Chicago? And what were some of the things that you found to be very different from the work you had been doing in Georgia or Tennessee to what you’re now doing with Chicago communities?

NC: Right. So, what I found that was similar was that there was no lack of need in either location. The inner city in Knoxville was very different from the inner city in Chicago and I would say that maybe the gravity of the situation that’s going on [is different, too]. So while there’s violence in Knoxville, it doesn’t rival the violence that’s here in Chicago but it’s still impacting in the same way.

In Knoxville there was an urgency to make a difference and to impact lives. I find there to be the same urgency here in Chicago. [Bright Star] is trying to figure out how to both prevent and intervene at the same time. So I think that that’s kind of where our, where I am personally but also where Bright Star is as an organization. You can’t really choose to be on one side or the other. I don’t think. You have to try to prevent it so create things and structures that can help change the trajectory of the population, also while addressing the things that have already happened to them.

A photo from the Bright Star block party in summer 2018. There is a balloon arch made in the design of the Bright Star blue, orange, and white logo. There is a person standing just behind the threshold on the street in front of the arch. Photo by Tony Smith.

TH: I’m really interested in just the scope of the work that Bright Star does and the programs that are offered. And I’m really curious to know–from your perspective–what is the importance of having that kind of range? That kind of all-encompassing, one stop shop approach where you can go to Bright Star and get everything you need for all aspects of the family and different needs. It seems like Bright Star is the type of place that you can go, and you don’t really need to go too many other places. Or it’s gonna lead you directly to any other places you might need to go. That’s a huge thing to take on but it is also an important way to approach community. So, why that approach?

NC: I think that our approach is to really look at trauma as violence. We realized that the answer is not linear. When you’re thinking about trauma and violence there are many different ways that it can be addressed. I also think about how when there are people in need, it’s really important to be able to help that need without them having to go to many different places because they’re already vulnerable. I would also venture to say that in our Black and Brown communities we’re less likely to get help.

TH: I’ve also noticed that when explaining programs and how the organizations approaches its work, Bright Star uses and shares a lot of data to back up the ideas. Can you talk more about that?

NC: It’s been really important not only the way that we collect the data but the way we use the data [to inform] how we set up the work. The data that we’ve gotten is not just public data but also data we have gotten through intentional surveys. We’ve done surveys of sixth graders, eighth graders, tenth graders, and twelfth graders, as well as the population of 400 adult community members in the greater Bronzeville community. And the way that we’ve used that information has been to hear the voice of the community regarding what the community needs. It’s really important to us that anything that we do includes the voice of the community. Pastor Harris has a saying, “Nothing about us without us.” And we believe in that firmly.

That’s kind of how we look at programming as well because we can think that we have created an amazing program, even if it is based on data. But once you’re asked for the voice of the community and asked them to sit down with you to dissect what the data is, and then you say, “Alright based on what you’ve heard, what should our next steps be…?” When you do that and you’ve included individuals, you get much better buy-in sometimes. And so that’s the principle that we have used.

Bright Star has really morphed over the years. We’re still pretty young. We’re in our tenth year and over the years we’ve added programming as the community has requested so that we can meet their needs.

TH: When I think of church and growing up in the church, I’m reminded of how much culture is infused in that kind of space. And when I think about Envisioning Justice and the focus on art’s incorporation into conversations around Chicago’s criminal legal system, the creativity in the work of an organization like Bright Star and the work you do in your position maybe not as clear. So I’m curious about where you see the creativity in your work. And how does that relate to your approach with the work that you’ve done with Envisioning Justice.

NC: Pastor Harris used to actually travel the world, singing gospel and jazz. So art is really ingrained in what we do and in the programming that we offer to young people. During the summertime we always have creative outlets for them–whether it’s music classes, whether it’s dancing, whether it’s art. I’m [also] thinking about culinary expression and other things we’re trying to incorporate. Our larger challenge was bringing that to our adult population. They may come to a concert, or they may do things like that, but in terms of having classes or any other engagement, that was different.

But also one of the things that we’ve been able to capitalize on is the history of the building that we’re in. So I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but she was actually a renowned blues guitarist.

TH: Yes!

NC: And her start was at Roberts Temple. So we’ve been very fortunate to be able to use our history to bring awareness as to what’s already in the community as well as use that as a bridge for some of the arts programming that we are endeavoring to do.

The community conversations [as part of Envisioning Justice] were actually a much stronger part of our programming. But the arts piece gave us another backbone to begin to strengthen that so that we have a greater voice concerning arts in the community.

At the Bright Star block party in summer of 2018. A crowd of people stand around several tables with art materials and activities on them. The two people in the foreground are working together, holding paints, and looking down at the project they’re working on. Photo by Tony Smith.

TH: That’s an incredible history to tap into. Between Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Emmett Till. So, along those lines, Envisioning Justice is about art but it’s also about that justice piece, right?

NC: Right.

TH: What does a vision of justice look like to you? What is justice? Whether it’s in the work that you do, or your history, the work that you’ve done across the country. What is justice?

NC: That’s such a great question and that’s probably why you asked it. In some ways, if I’m really honest it’s hard for me to define because it feels almost impossible. With the kind of climate that we’re in now and in terms of the lenses through which people are seeing, justice seems like a fleeting thought. If I were to change the lenses, it would be so that everyone is seen on equal footing. And so regardless of your gender, regardless of your race, everyone is allowed to tell their story. And that their stories matter in terms of what the ultimate outcome is for them.

The other thing–I definitely believe that there is a system where there should definitely be consequences for actions. I think that those consequences should be equitable. And I think that people should be allowed the opportunity to serve whatever system or to be held responsible, but it doesn’t need to weigh them down as they go forward. Those are the two things that I see or would like to see as I think about justice.

TH: What do you think are the biggest roadblocks on the path to a more just, or a more equitable system or world or city or society?

NC: The structure of systems, which I think are informed a lot by levels of systemic racism, is probably a big influence in why there is injustice. And if I were to take away racism, I could replace that with opportunity. I think that there is a level playing field for the opportunities that individuals have, and thus creates, I think, a pipeline into those systems, if that makes sense.

TH: Yeah. And then, finally I think, well my second-to-last question is, when it comes to Bright Star, and for someone who might be here now reading your words, and getting a hint as to what Bright Star does, can you speak to who is Bright Star for? And I know it’s a community organization for Bronzeville but does it does it speak beyond that? What kind of people could turn to Bright Star if they needed the kind of things that you’re able to offer?

NC: Our initial scope is the greater Bronzeville community and the city of Chicago.

For instance, we have a our own 1-800 number so anybody across Chicago, really across the country, can call in if they’ve been a victim of trauma or violence. And anyone who feels that they could benefit from our services is welcome to be a participant in what we offer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a certain socioeconomic group–it can just be anyone. So if the parenting classes that we offer could be of benefit, anyone can come. Most of the services that we offer are free. And that’s so there isn’t that barrier there [for people]. But really we’re available to anyone who feels that they can be helped by anything that we have to offer.

TH: Finally, is there anything that we haven’t discussed that’s on your mind that you want to talk about?

NC: About the initiative as a whole: just to even begin to think about what we imagine the criminal justice system could look like has been such an uplifting and rewarding experience. And I teased with Elliot and Slater the other day I said, “We will find funding to continue this and I’m looking forward to it. But all of us at Bright Star feel that whether or not we get that formal funding from Illinois Humanities, we’re going to look for ways to continue this work.

TH: Yeah, that’s incredible. And that’s always a challenge, right? You have initiatives that happen to spark something. And then the question is, what happens next? But it’s been wonderful to see how groups like Bright Star have come into a kind of community or make deeper relationships with this cohort of folks doing this work in so many different ways. It’s been great to watch from my perspective. So I just want to say thank you for your time.

NC: Well, thank you.

This article is published as part of Envisioning Justice, a 19-month initiative presented by Illinois Humanities that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact.

Featured Image: Portrait of Nichole Carter, standing in front of a tiled, white and grey wall with arms folded across her chest and looking directly into the camera. She’s wearing a black and pink dress with horizontal stripes and a layered pearl necklace. Photo courtesy of Bright Star Community Outreach.

Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, and director/co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center. Her writing has been published by Hyde Park Art Center the Broad Museum (Lansing), in Support Networks: Chicago Social Practice History Series, Contact Sheet: Light Work Annual, Unfurling: Explorations In Art, Activism and Archiving, on Artslant, as well as various monographs of artists, including Cecil McDonald, Jr.’s In the Company of Black published by Candor Arts. You can also read her writing in the upcoming Art AIDS America catalogue for Chicago and the online journal Exhibitions on the Cusp by Tremaine Foundation. Find more of her work at tempestthazel.com. Photo by Darryl DeAngelo Terrell.

“Intimate Justice” looks at the intersection of art and sex and how these actions intertwine to serve as a form of resistance, activism, and dialogue in the Chicago community. For this installment, we talked to Cameron Clayborn in his Bridgeport live-work studio space about popcorn ceilings, inner dialogue, and letting your freak flag fly. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

S. Nicole Lane: Are you from Chicago? If not, how did you end up here?

Cameron Clayborn: I’m from Memphis. I was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and then my parents moved me to Memphis.

SNL: Cool. And do you live in Bridgeport?

CC: Yeah. So this is a live-work space. Everyone who has a space here works here, except for one person. But she’s awesome. So she lives around the corner.

SNL: And what did you study at SAIC?

CC: I studied sculpture and sometimes sound. I never took a performance class except for one time, which was about the practicalities of being a performance artist. I don’t know, it just never felt like it was the best thing for me to do. I don’t know. Taking a performance class there just always felt a little weird. But now, thinking back on it, I could have taken them, but really all I ever did was just hang out with the performance kids and mainly the MFA performance people, so that was my way of being in the scene or whatever. Because otherwise I was not interested. Did you go there?

SNL: No, I didn’t. I went to school in North Carolina. And then I moved here with a partner of mine which I’m not with anymore. I had never been to Chicago, and I love it.

CC: It’s the best city. I do love Chicago. It’s crazy but it’s cool. [laughs]

SNL: It’s crazy, yeah. So you make work in a lot of different mediums. How is that process different for each medium that you’re working with? Or how do you work through those different processes?

Image: The artist is nude standing on a table in an art studio. Illustrations, pieces, and ideas hang on the wall. There are items on the back part of the table as well. The artist is looking to the left down at the table. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

CC: Oh, it’s always a crazy-ass balance. Even right now, it’s even more insane, just because it’s about circulation, like where our work gets to go and how it’s being able to be processed. So sometimes we’re always just like, “Mmm, are we able to actually fit inside this space because we don’t want to use this language?” or something like that. So, for me, it really is about circulation, the reason why I make so many different kinds of things [is] because I want someone to be able to travel with my work and not just be able to see it in a static space. But then, usually or most of the time, it’s all sourced from the same content, where it’s like, my body, or something autobiographical. It could be as simple as a color. It’s always coming from the same sort of source, and then it just explodes out into these different things. So, right now, I’m super obsessed with my grandma’s ceiling.

Do you remember the popcorn ceiling? My grandma, she actually had glitter in hers. It was in this one room in the back of her house, and I used to sleep in that room after I moved out of her bed and was like grown enough to sleep in my own when I would go to visit her. And it’s like, I don’t know, ever since then I’ve been like super obsessed with it. Because after my grandfather passed away, she was pretty much the matriarch of the family and sort of had that home and that was like her thing. I see it is her work, since they built it on their own. I don’t know, for some reason any time I think about that glitter ceiling, it’s nostalgic but it’s also feminine. I can wander in it for some reason. Because the glitter wasn’t always easy to find. So you kind of had to move your body in order to see it.

But yeah, I presented it inside of this big-ass box and it was like, mobile and being pushed around with an amplifier.

SNL: So the popcorn piece that was mobile—what exactly is it?

CC: It was this gigantic box—maybe not that big, but big enough for my body to fit inside. And then I had this amplifier installed on top of it, and then one of my friends sort of pushed me around and I could talk to people. And so, the thing about the amplifier is, we set it to an echo, so when I’m talking to people it sounds like it’s an echo chamber but then also it sounds like I’m lost in space or something inside of there. And the piece is called “A Mobile Portion of Granny’s Home.” Everyone always thinks that I know secrets. They’re like, “Oh, don’t you have any secrets to tell?” [Nicole laughs] “Where are you? What’s your purpose in this?” I don’t know, it was really strange questions. They’re always just trying to figure out  what the box is. [both laugh]

SNL: Did you explain to them what it was?

CC: No, just because in that sense that’s where I get to kind of flirt with the guests? And I feel like, to me, the essence of flirting is always sort of being aware of knowing that you have a particular content in your mind that you don’t want to forgive yet, or give over yet. So it’s like, always sort of fun to be like, “Oh, yeah, I am a box, but I’m only going to be here for a couple minutes.” You know? And you throw it completely off and they’re just like, “Oh, okay.” So it’s all that enticing conversation is really what it’s about. To me, it’s the art of conversation more than anything. And then also my social anxiety. [both laugh] You know? Because I’m like, “I’d rather be inside this box instead of actually have to interact with you.”

Image: The image is in black and white and features the artist wearing a white tank top and lying on her stomach. The body is half nude. There is fabric all around the subject and she is looking directly into the camera. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: Because they also become more comfortable, too, talking to you.

CC: Yeah, talking to me. Because there’s no inhibitions.

SNL: Yeah. So in your other performative work, how do you get past that social anxiety?

CC: That’s why I’m actually about to start pursuing acting, too. Not as a career or anything. I just kind of want to try it. Because I’ve never respected it as an artistic medium, really, until recently.

I just sort of forfeit my body for the sake of the idea. So then I just have no choice but to do whatever it is I have to do. Which is kind of interesting, because the first kind of set of performances that I did coming out of school was set to this track that I made with my own voice, that was then dubbed super duper low, and it told me what to do in the space, while also telling particular stories about me. So it was sort of omniscient, sort of like a narrator. And so I feel like that, to me, is that same sort of forfeiting. Having my inner dialogue—which is pretty much all that voice was—telling me what to do. It helped me shift in because I was already using whatever anxiety I had to channel it.

Image: The photo is in color and has a pink hue. The artist is seated in the center of the frame holding one of their “container bags.” In the foreground are two other container bags which frame the artist’s body. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

SNL: Could you talk a little bit about how or why you’re drawn to using your body or bodies in some of your work?

CC: Yeah. That’s a big, big question. [laughs] I grew up with a dad who was very physically active, and a coach. He put me into a lot of sports and things like that. So physicality and using my body is something that I just know very well. I think when I did kind of come to art school, I started understanding that that physicalness that I was desiring for could be served in performance art. Yeah, so that’s probably the reason I use my body, because it makes sense to do.

SNL: When you’re working through performance work, do you sketch things out? Or how does that work? How does the beforehand planning go?

CC: Yeah, it’s happening right now. I wanted to do a performance in this space called “Loud, Organic, Lovely.” It’s been, to me, a built-up performance of maybe about two years. Usually, I’m so object-based. I have to make the set first, and then I start working with it. So the performances I did as I came out of school, with these big sack pieces, I actually asked my friend who was a choreographer to help me understand the objects more. Because watching her interact with them and being like, “Oh, this is kind of how I can shift around this and turn that over to here….” Usually sometimes if I don’t have the language myself, I just ask someone who does! [laughs]

SNL: And in terms of the sculptural work: The sacks, are those–?

CC: Well, they’re called container bags. That’s the language I use. The container bags are just literally sourced from my body measurements. So the way I kind of came about those was through my research into fetishism. Which was interesting, because the more I started researching it, the more I started to understand that the word “fetish” itself is kind of an inherently racist terminology. And the objects that that word is in reference to are like called “nkisi nkondis” and they’re from West Africa. And they’re like religious sculptures that these people would make and then they would actually nail into the sculpture itself in order to activate its power. I mean that’s just kind of the progression of western or colonialist thought. After sort of researching that, I was like, “I feel this kind of intimacy towards my objects.” And for me I just liked that weird language of just using my body in order to work my body out.

I just sourced it from a body measurement or even from someone else’s body that I want to conjure in the space. For the last one, it was my dad.  I took his body measurements and then I sort of made them up. Yeah, and then I filled them with sand, and then usually I work out with them.

SNL: Do you view your work as resistance? Do you have any thoughts on that? Or has your work changed in any way, in the last two years, since the election? Or has it not?

Image: The artist is seated on his studio table with one leg crossed and the other stretched out. The image is in color with pieces, ideas, and images hanging on the wall behind him. He is looking directly into the camera and is nude. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.

CC: Yeah yeah yeah. I think that visibility is something that really matters a lot to me. I feel like it’s so important that my image be present wherever it can be present. I mean, as far as the art community, I used to be upset at the exclusivity of it, but now I’m starting to understand that, really, it’s not as exclusive as we think it is. People can come and go if they want. It’s just that usually I think that the content and things that we want to do are usually what people don’t want to talk about, and they don’t want to celebrate it, and they don’t want to be in the space of it. It’s also that some of the work is kind of political, is hella Black, is hella gay, is hella queer, and people don’t know how to react to that. And they would just rather not be in that space. And that’s what I love about art people so much! It doesn’t mean that we’re right, it doesn’t mean that they’re any more aware or not socially conscious. I mean, trust me, I’ve been around plenty of art people who say stupid-ass shit all the time. But they’re still present in the space and they’re present to have dialogue, and I think that, any time we have an art show, to me that’s a celebration of expression. Which I think we shouldn’t forget about that. And I think sometimes we do, just because, you know, ego gets in the way and we all want to be art stars.

If I want to make an artwork that is me twerking, to some weird inner-dialogue voice, I can fucking do that, and you should be able to watch it, and you should all watch it. I just feel like we should all let our freak flags fly as we want. [laughs] You know? Fuck it. Like, that’s the only way you can resist. That to me is resistance. It’s just being. You know, so many of us are not being, just because they’re afraid to be.

Featured Image: The image is in color and has a pink hue. The artist is seated with a “container bag” on her head. She is holding it with one arm. The other leg is propped up. Two other “container bags” are framing the artist’s body and two smaller ones are on the floor.  She is wearing a white tank top and shorts. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. 

S. Nicole Lane is a visual artist and writer based in the South Side. Her work can be found on Playboy, Broadly, Rewire, i-D and other corners of the internet, where she discusses sexual health, wellness, and the arts. She is also the Office Manager for the Chicago Reader. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jordan Levitt.