4th Floor A Movement in Every Direction

Akea Brionne. School Children, from the series An Ode to (You)’all, 2022

Akea Brionne’s An Ode to (You)’all (2022) is rooted in familial legacy and ancestral guidance mapped across state lines, as well as the importance of archival material as an act of preservation, as well as process. The work uses various textile materials, craft objects, and old family photos embedded into the very fabric of the Jacquard—a negotiation of material and labor, the rigor of stitching, of weaving. This grappling with the prevalence of lineage is more than the political circumstances that organized our ancestors’ lives, but the intimacy of the familial as we deal with our present. What is it to create altars for our ancestors, to continue the conversation between a loved one beyond death?

4th Floor

A Movement in Every Direction

Allison Janae Hamilton. A House Called Florida, 2022

Allison Janae Hamilton’s A House Called Florida (2022) combines portraits of tenderness and breathtaking landscapes with surrealist elements to create a piece that highlights a rural community in the South. The work focuses on a particular site of personal resonance and posits Black, southern communities as liminal spaces, whether in their relationship to the history of a place or the very geography of a place. How can a speculative approach upend typical representations of displaced lives? It allows new paths to really see. The supernatural is subversive, always meant to return or restore. Similar to the novel, there is the presence of a spirituality in nontraditional, non-Western forms. Hamilton’s work explores the presence of hoodoo, early African American spiritual beliefs that involve root work and aspects of conjuring. In the novel, there is the legacy of Yoruba religious practices that originated in West Africa. It follows the transatlantic slave trade, that leaves remnants along its path, across the diaspora, in the form of spirituality and syncretic religions—whether Vodou in Haiti and Louisiana, Santería in Cuba, or Shango in Trinidad and Tobago—the belief systems that predate colonialism.

4th Floor

A Movement in Every Direction

Torkwase Dyson. Way Over There Inside Me, 2022

The installation by Torkwase Dyson reminds me of portals, not necessarily through time or space, but into a more abstract place. The production of meaning, since the medium is now removed from the canvas, occurs within the process and materials incorporated. There is the fragmented use of glass and steel, the abstraction of structure and shape, which suggests an uneasy relationship between the body and the physical world. Black people have a complicated relationship with the shores of this country, the land and the economies that sprung from it, the political landscape. We warp space, whole geographies — through migration, through labor, etc. — whether it was the building of the railroads across the country, or the large white populations that fled cities during the Great Migration. There are portals in the novel that upend what we know, that leads to a place outside of time, where mother and son find each other, despite death. It leads to the root of something deeper, a more

4th Floor

Hale Woodruff (American 1900–1980). Blue Landscape, 1968

Hale Woodruff was interested in depicting Black life and the experience of living amongst particular socio-historical conditions. There’s a marked change in works like “Blue Landscape”, which are more in line with expressionist tenets—the exclusion of the human form, the esoteric conceptualizations of the organic and intrinsic, etc. In this landscape, I see portions of ocean and sky, pieces of land, perhaps the shore or distant bay islands. I’m reminded of the various shores and inlets surrounding Jamaica Bay, an important setting throughout the novel. The abstract supposedly rejects the discursive formations that regulate our society, that produce and impose meaning onto land, objects, and even the body. Jamaica Bay opens up into the Atlantic Ocean, and despite the absence of physical form, there is not the absence of meaning. The Atlantic will always be the site of mass kidnapping and displacement of people in exchange for free labor—capitalism’s great, original sin. Though art can claim to be impartial or without subject, even the surreal or abstract can invoke meaning.