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ven in an apartment whose four rooms and long, narrow hallway are chock-full of art and affirmations, Kathy Y. Wilson stands out as a work of art herself. Still frank, profane and hilarious after coming close to death last year, she remains Your Negro Tour Guide, as was the name of her popular CityBeat column as well as the title of a resultant book and stage adaptation. And now your guide is leading you through a gallery. Sanctuary: Kathy Y. Wilson Living in a Colored Museum opens Friday at the Weston Art Gallery downtown. Curated by Emily Buddendeck of Northside’s NVISION vintage shop, the exhibit recreates the salon-style feeling of Wilson’s apartment in East Walnut Hills, where the longtime writer and educator has amassed a floor-to-ceiling array of racist objects, locally made art, family photos and other black memorabilia. With its mammy figurines and grinning watermelon eaters, the exhibit could create a backlash. But rather than calling attention to Wilson’s provocative art, Buddendeck’s mission is to showcase the provocative woman she calls an artist. “This is a way to show another dimension of her that provides a lot of context to her writing,” Buddendeck said during a recent interview in Wilson’s living room retreat. In this room, Wilson can gaze upon a print of struggling brothers by the late Cincinnati artist Thom Shaw, who was a friend, or smile at a wiry-haired sculpture of a sister in a swimsuit by Kentucky folk artist LaVon Williams. Whenever she is feeling rage as a black citizen in America, “I come in here and look at a painting or something and calm all the fuck the way down,” Wilson says. But why would someone who’s been so outspoken about racism also seek out buffoonish coin banks and bugged-eyed bobbleheads? How can a home that houses such offensive objects still be considered a sanctuary, a place of refuge?
Left: Kathy Y. Wilson | Right: Wilson scrawls quotes from friends, rappers and the Bible on blank spots in her home.
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“These things are comforting to me when I get them. I call it liberating them because they have been enslaved,” Wilson says. “It’s also me saying I am not afraid of anything America thought I looked like.” The uglier the caricatures, they more beautiful the pieces are to her. The 52-year-old Wilson has lived in her apartment for 15 years and has been collecting for twice that long. She especially enjoys the thrill of the hunt for Jim Crow remnants at flea markets, estate sales and antique malls. “I actually have a physiological response in my body when I’m coming up on one,” she says. “My limbs get hollow. I start sweating. The hair stands up on my arms. I’m like, ‘There’s a nigger. There’s a nigger.’ And I’ll tell (my partner) Kandice, ‘There’s a nigger around here somewhere. I’m getting close.’ ” Wilson keeps a black lawn jockey outside her door, next to her Get Out of My Caucasian House mat. She wanted a jockey ever since she was a little girl in Hamilton. One of her father’s jobs as a child was to paint the statues and their coal-colored faces at a cement business run by a white man. Her dad understood the weight of that indignity even as a little boy, Wilson says. So one night he sneaked in to the business and used a sledgehammer to damage as many jockeys as he could. Though she’s been weakened in recent years by diabetes, end-stage renal failure and congestive heart failure, Wilson grows animated and zigzags an arm to punctuate her story of finding the jockey at a booth inside a huge Springdale antique mall. Wilson was shopping with her friend JJ when she picked up the unmistakable feeling that there was a racist
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