Mentored by joeonna alishacuepresentedbelladoro-samuelsbyartFoundationbwormsleyRemnantsofanadvancedTechnology
all artwork © alisha b wormsley Graphic design by studio ercan–Li nazlı ercan & eric li cue art Foundation 137 West 25th street new york, ny 10001
Remnants of an joeonnacueoctoberTechnologyadvancedalishabwormsleyseptember15th–22nd,2022artfoundationexhibitionmentor:belladoro-samuelscatalogueessayist:amandadibandoawanjoessaymentor:kemiadeyemi
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Advancing “technology” beyond the purview of the privileged and powerful, Wormsley imagines another realm one in which care, healing, sacredness, and science converge through Black matriarchal presence. With the works in the exhibition, she creates portals through time, space, and spirit, transforming each object “into a shrine of itself, and then build[ing] around it until its singularity gives way to a constellation,” remarks exhibition mentor Joeonna Belladoro-Samuels. “In beholding her works and her materials, I can’t help but find home. They are charged with memory, and offer me the aspiration of becoming part of the world being constructed by her hand.”
Remnants of an Advanced Technology is a solo exhibition by artist Alisha B Wormsley with curatorial mentorship from Joeonna Belladoro-Samuels. The exhibition is rooted in the artist’s ongoing project, Children of NAN, a physical and theoretical archive that documents the ways in which Black womxn care for themselves, each other, and the earth. Remnants of an Advanced Technology draws from this archive to present three bodies of work: photo-based quilts, tapestries, and vessels. To the artist, these objects become maps, circuits, and the womb. Collectively, they begin to formulate a creation story imbued with notions of sovereignty, one that is grounded simultaneously in ancient and futuristic practices.
— Mother Seal via Zora Neale Hurston
abouT exhibiTionThe
at CUE — the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City — is but one story in the world being created by Wormsley: a thriving radical dimension that centers the agency and decolonized dreams of Black womxn.
It is right that a woman should lead. A womb is what god made in the beginning. And in the womb was born Time and all that fills up space. So says the beautiful spirit.
“There are not enough words, spaces, and worlds dedicated to the richness of Black women,” asserts exhibition catalogue essayist Amanda Dibando Awanjo. For the past two decades, Wormsley has positioned herself as an archivist of this matter. The objects, photos, video, films, sounds, philosophies, myths, rituals, and performances she has accumulated as part of Children of NAN serve as a growing survival guide, a tool that lives between legacy and prophecy. Remnants of an Advanced Technology
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Over the past two decades, I have cultivated an interdisciplinary, mutable practice that upholds Black womxn as a site of their own making. I am committed to centering space for their agency and connectedness — to dream.
Through film/video, sculpture, performance, experiences, text, and sound, I compose and reimagine Black womxn’s stories, negotiating authorship and artistic freedom and envisioning how these narratives might be shared.
In my studio, as I am making objects, I think about the Black womxn’s body as technology, and explore how these objects hold
The Black Matriarch is centered in all of my work. I gather materials in my practice that move through my body of work in the same way that the land shifts through the seasons. I am interested in how objects are formed, as well as movement from recording to textiles to sculpture. This archival frame builds a coherent foundation from which to think about Black womxn’s cultural production.
I see the archive as a kind of “code” and a form of interdisciplinary play. I am drawn to the language of abundance, to combining the dystopian with the exultant through reworkings of Afro-Futuristic dreaming. There is a blending of logic with the unknowable. In the process, worlds are created that I hope allow those who perceive them to lose themselves in a mix of analogue, community, and Black futurity that is limitless.
our DNA and consciousness. My photobased quilts, tapestries, and vessels have become maps, circuitry, and the womb. They represent place and creation, and serve as portals through time, space, and spirit. I’m experimenting with how I can combine these objects with media (and in the distant future, machine learning) to hold survival methods, to act as elders. These objects are Remnants of an Advanced Technology.
For me, Black womxn combine ancient and futuristic practices. This “ancient futurism” is often aligned with the most advanced technologies. I seek to exemplify this by building narratives that mirror my early life, where the old was replaced with the new through family dreamscapes, sister/motherhood, and an interest in science fiction.
Through a physical and theoretical archive that I call the Children of NAN, I have centered and unified my exploration of Black womxn's experiences by engaging with the spiritual potency of the object. The archive consists of photography, video footage, films, objects, philosophies, myths, rituals, and performances that I’ve made and collected over the years. In some ways, the archive is me. It is a blend of rituals and the sacred, of science and dreaming. It is an avowal that for the liberation of all, there must be a centering of Black womxn’s sovereignty.
aRTisT sTaTemenT: aLisha b WormsLey
Over the last few years, Wormsley has designed public art initiatives including Streaming Space, a 24-foot pyramid with video and sound installed in downtown Pittsburgh, as well as several park designs and a newly commissioned public artwork at the Pittsburgh International Airport. Wormsley’s ongoing public program, There Are Black People In the Future, gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification. In 2020, she launched Sibyls Shrine, an arts residency for Black creative mothers that has received support from the Heinz Endowments.
9 alisha b wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the lens of Black womxn, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression. This includes actions such as creating an object, a sculpture, a billboard, a performance, or a film. Wormsley thrives in collaboration.
Wormsley’s work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the Oakland Museum, VCUArts Qatar, Speed Museum, Artpace, Times Square Arts, Mattress Factory Contemporary Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She has received fellowships from Monument Lab and the Goethe Institute, as well as the Sundance Interdisciplinary Grant and the Carol Brown Achievement Award, among others.
Wormsley holds an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College, and is currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with longtime collaborator Li Harris to engage in site-specific fieldwork in international and national topographical locations, with the goal of making a film that establishes a series of portals to an inner space reality for Black exponential potential of Being. Wormsley was recently selected with collaborator Kite for Creative Time’s 2023 commissioned open call. Integrating media, public space, and public interaction, they will design invitations for rest and reimagination rooted in practices of Afro-Futurism and Indigenous Protocol.
quiLTs:2022
earth above as below,
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The quilts, to me, are maps. They are repurposed from a vinyl photo wallpaper I used in previous exhibitions. The wallpaper covered as much of the spaces as possible with images of Black womxn. I used it as a boundary, to claim the space for Black womxn.
There are twenty-six quilts. Twenty-two are aligned with the soul mission and archetypes (African spirituality, tarot), and four are cardinal directions and elements. The quilt pieces act as maps based on the geographies of the subjects depicted on them, and – like those that came before them – they are embroidered with coordinates.
The collectors depart, 2022
The star (Freedom), 2021 maps
The high priestess as the devil, 2021
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— As recounted in 1946 by the Dogon elder Ogotemmelias
TapesTRies:daughterMother
As the threads crossed and uncrossed, the two tips of the Spirit’s forked tongue pushed the thread of the weft to and fro, and the web took shape from their mouth in the breadth of the....Word…
The tapestries, to me, are circuitry. They are made by a process that has been used in stories of creation across many cultures. I’m particularly interested in the Dogon mythology:
The words that the Spirit uttered filled all the interstices of the stuff; they were woven in the threads, and formed part and parcel of the cloth. They were the cloth, and the cloth was the Word.
so says The beautiful spirit: Mother, daughter, and spirit, 2020
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15 spirit
circuiTs
Vessels:
altars to the sacred, 2020
The vessels, to me, are the womb. They are a series of sixteen stained glass works, organized on a large wooden platform, and styled with plants, candles, herbs, books, and ephemera. All the elements are made by my hand, from the molds for the candles to the herbs I grew in my garden. They are an altar to the sacred.
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Sixteen is a magical number. It has a connection to the Ifa in Yoruba. In numerology, it defines a person who influences the spiritual world.
The womb
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The seer, 2021
menToR
belladoro-samuelsjoeonnasTaTemenT:
The first time I met Alisha in person, we strolled down 25th Street after visiting CUE Art Foundation’s gallery space. During that walk, she mentioned that we know someone in common. This was after we had been speaking and meeting virtually, screen to/ through screen–the way that we all have learned, technologically, to communicate in isolation. The person Alisha and I both know is an old family friend who I remember most from my mid-teens, when she and I would talk about me borrowing her driver’s license to enter spaces that the law would not allow me to access. I never took her up on it, but I think of it often, of having someone in my life who was like a mirror that peeks into the future. I don’t have an older sister, and this relationship offered me a way to think about time, connectivity, fugitivity, and sharing. Fast forward to over 25 years later and these concepts have been threaded and weaved across all the conversations I have had with Alisha.
Alisha B Wormsley’s work is a process of mining memories of the future, but for the present. I think of her practice as a kind of response to centuries of Time-Space Compression through the corrective lens of Black Feminism. She simultaneously pulls apart signifiers of time and embodiment and weaves them back together like weighted blankets, with the distinct function of healing. She refuses to center survival alone, instead allowing for many mechanisms of ceaselessness to be illuminated
and honored by their continued use. Alisha transforms an object into a shrine of itself, and then builds arounds it until its singularity gives way to a constellation. This embedded collectivity is an anchor of her practice, emanating from her Children of NAN project, which she describes as the root of all her output. In beholding her works and her materials, I can’t help but find home. They are charged with memory, and offer me the aspiration of becoming part of the world being constructed by her hand.
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joeonna bellorado-samuels is a Director at Jack Shainman Gallery, and views her position as an advocacy role in helping to manage the careers of artists within the gallery’s roster. She is also the founder of We Buy Gold, a roving gallery that presents exhibitions, commissioned projects, and public events. She was on the curatorial team of The Racial Imaginary Institute, and was a founding Director of For Freedoms, the first artist-run Super PAC, which uses art to inspire deeper political engagement in order to impact policy and reshape the American political landscape.
The empress, 2021
from Children of NAN, a material and theoretical archive that Wormsley has constructed over the years; an assemblage of objects and ideas grounded in Black women’s wisdom, magic, and dreaming. The archive serves as a poetic survival guide that flows and grows through time, and that informs all of Wormsley’s work.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Wormsley works fluidly through various materials, combining and enmeshing them to play with their physical and spiritual potential. The works in Remnants of an Advanced Technology draw
play with Form and Time in alisha
amandaadvancedRemnantsWormsley’sofanTechnology:dibandoawanjo
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As a child, I sat at the feet of my mother and foremothers. Listening to their stories, I was moved to silence and awe by a grace that felt as vast as space. Ancestral by nature, this form of knowledge plays time for a fool, eschewing linearity for something more. There are not enough words, spaces, and worlds dedicated to the richness of Black women. Alisha Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology (CUE Art Foundation, 2022) draws from a deep well of matriarchal history, imbuing it with techno-archival methods to position Black women as ever-expanding creators of their own worlds. Featuring video, text, sound, immersive installation, and sculpture, the exhibition opens up the potential for new ways of knowing ourselves, our past, and our worlds by connecting us to the radical power of Black women’s sovereign creation through time.
In Remnants of an Advanced Technology, Wormsley presents a series of twenty-six photo-based quilts that prompt a consideration of the complex roadways of Black women’s futurity. The quilts use as their source material African textiles, repurposed photographic wallpaper from Wormsley’s previous exhibitions, embroidery, and other types of mark making. Varying in size and shape, they are suspended from the ceiling, making it possible to walk around — but not through — them. Their backings are embroidered with maps and messages from Children of NAN. To the artist, these photo-based quilts serve as maps themselves, as the embedded instruction of their embroidery intersects with the long dreamed-of future that the photographs they carry embody.
praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning there was sound and they all knew what that sound sounded like… the voices of the women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.
Interplay of form and time is a key theme of the exhibition, as Wormsley’s work moves seamlessly between the ancient and the contemporary. In her tapestries, Wormsley has physically woven together natural fibers that are dyed a muted color palette of beige, brown, and black. They stand in close conversation with, but also in stark contrast to, the bursts of color and exuberant patterns of the quilts. Each one anchored by a curved branch, the tapestries utilize simple shapes like triangles and circles, with their fibers breaking from the weaving at certain points to hang below. The rustic fabric and the weathered smoothness of the wood call forward the timelessness of the earth, while the metal circuit boards and plates woven into them speak a distinctly technological language. The small metal plates are embossed with text such as:
Remnants of an Advanced Technology features many moments of stillness and pon derance, especially expressed in Wormsley’s sixteen works with glass, made in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Glass Center. These glass vessels, stained in warm and jewel
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tones, are each filled with plants, candles, herbs, books, and ephemera. They are decorated with collaged images from the Children of NAN archive, as well as with images of Black women from Wormsley’s previous projects. The inlaid images, some embossed with gold leaf, form a catalogue of otherworldly Black womanhood that evokes the imagery of Afrofuturism and science fiction. The vessels are arranged on a large wooden platform and together create an altar, an honored and holy space filled with tokens of gratitude and homage. Gold-accented candles, some of which are molded into women’s bodies, are interspersed throughout. Working in tandem with the quilts and the tapestries, the vessels underscore Black women’s spirituality, creativity, and persistence, centering their ability to survive and thrive with joy, love, and community.
This moment in the narrative of Beloved represents the birth of a new timeline, the creation of a new world for the women and their progeny. The characters’ migration “back to the beginning,” is crucially multidisciplinary; they seek to use all
This quotation is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1920s anthropological study, “Mother Catherine.” Into it, Wormsley inserts the word “black,” further emphasizing Black women’s spiritual practice and survival ethos. The tapestries pull at the intersection of craft and code, asking viewers to question the lineages of contemporary technologies, while also imagining new modes of making and putting forth the role of Black women as technologists within their own right.
It is right that a black woman should lead. A womb is what God made in the beginning. And in the womb was born time and all that fills up space. So says the beautiful spirit.
The works exhibited in Remnants of an Advanced Technology call to mind Toni Morrison’s narration of healing methodology in her 1987 novel Beloved. In the book, sheTheywrites:stopped
(Morrison, 308)
possible tools and technologies to build a new future on the back of an ancient bubbling pain. Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology similarly embeds the notion of healing as a multidisciplinary venture by connecting technologies of survival across time to Black women’s methodological ethic of care and liberation.
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Wormsley’s growing archive boldly asserts that Black women are worlds unto themselves. I first came into contact with her work in 2019, when I encountered it in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, in the form of a billboard that read: “There are Black People in the Future.” Radical in its simplicity and assuredness, this statement affirms the lingering truth of Black survival in our violently anti-Black world. The billboard was also evidence, to me, of the potential of Black women to radically hold public space, both in the present and in the future. Wormsley continues these legacies in Remnants of an Advanced Technology by manifesting her radical dreamwork and that of many others, past, present, and future — into a varied, dynamic, and inspiring presentation of work that holds plainly the truth of Black women’s power.
amanda dibando awanjo is a Cameroonian American researcher, historian, and artist. She holds a PhD in Critical Cultural Studies in Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Inspired by W.E.B Du Bois’ 1927 question, “What will people in a hundred years say of Black Americans?,” her research explores the role of Black women creators in the evolution of Afrofuturism. Through fellowships with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the University of Pittsburgh's University Art Gallery, her research has expanded to explorations of the visual culture surrounding Black girlhood in the 20th century.
kemi adeyemi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of FeelsRight: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the volume Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Kemi founded and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary black art. She currently serves as dramaturg for Will Rawls’ project [SICCER]. She has recently curated solo shows by Katherine Simóne Reynolds (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 2021) and Amina Ross (Ditch Projects, 2019), as well as co-curated a group show called unstable objects at the Alice Gallery (2017).
abouT The wRiTing pRogRam This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.
The siren, 2021
This catalogue is made possible by an Action Grant from Humanities New York, with the support of the National Endowment for the
sTaFF Jinny Khanduja Executive Director
boaRd oF dIRecToRs
Theodore S. Berger, President Kate Buchanan, Vice President John S. Kiely, Co-Treasurer Kyle Sheahen, Co-Treasurer Lilly Wei, Secretary Amanda Adams-Louis Marcy Cohen Blake ThomasHornK.Y. Hsu
Exhibiting artists are selected through one of two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and open call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing each exhibition.
for CUE Art Foundation is provided by Aon PLC; Evercore, Inc; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; The William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and Corina Larkin & Nigel Dawn. Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Maryam Chadury Summer Gallery Associate
CUE Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.
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Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artist work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who experiment and take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues.
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