Worlds Within and Without: An Ekphrastic Catalogue
Acknowledgement
This exhibition was made possible through a collaboration between the Art Bridges Foundation, the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and the College of Visual and Performing Arts at James Madison University.
Generous support for this catalogue project provided by Art Bridges. Loans from artists Che Lovelace, represented by the Nicola Vassell Gallery, and Lina Iris Viktor, represented by Salon94, helped to augment this exhibition and catalogue. The Madison Art Collection would also like to thank Zachary Gray for the loan of Val Gray Ward’s Peace the Way Home.
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Director’s INTRODUCTION
Bridging Worlds Through Art
For those who work in museums and galleries, the most exciting part of a loaned exhibition is the unpacking of the artwork. Each work arrives in huge crates that mask the dimensions of the art within. Even after opening them, you typically see only packaging material. It’s only upon excavating through layers upon layers of padding that you are rewarded with the work itself. The sight is a familiar one; by the time installation arrives, you have stared at these artworks in books or on screens for hours (sometimes years). You know the artists as intimately as your own friends, and can describe their creations in detail.
On a cerebral level, you know what you will find. Yet, every time the last layer falls away to reveal a painting or sculpture, there is a moment of breathless wonder. In this moment, the idea of human creation and creativity pales in the sight of it.
It’s the same awareness one feels when encountering poetry, a realm in which language becomes art. In the hands of poets, words are transformed into literary brushstrokes to create new imagery, new meaning. There is something extraordinary about the metamorphosis, as well as those who dedicate their lives to mastery over the art form.
The link between visual and poetic art is one that dates back to ancient Greece, and it is one that the Madison Art Collection and Furious Flower have embraced for decades.
One of the first collaborations between the two organizations occurred in 1994, when items from the African collection were exhibited in conjunction with the African American Poetry Symposium. The occasion of the 2024 Furious Flower Conference presented the perfect opportunity for another ekphrastic project, one that would inaugurate a new partnership between James Madison University and the Art Bridges Collection.
Art Bridges is the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton. The mission of Art Bridges is to expand access to American art in all regions across the United States. Since 2017, Art Bridges has been creating and supporting programs that bring outstanding works of American art out of storage and into communities. Art Bridges partners with a growing network of over 220 museums of all sizes and locations to provide financial and strategic support for exhibition development, loans from the Art Bridges Collection, and programs designed to educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local audiences. The Art Bridges Collection represents an expanding vision of American art from the 19th century to present day and encompasses multiple media and voices.
By showcasing the work of contemporary Black artists alongside the literary works by Black poets, we celebrate these voices and the intersection of different art forms. Through this catalogue, we generate a dialogue that will endure long after the artwork moves on to the next gallery.
VIRGINIA SOENKSEN Director of the Madison Art Collection
Director’s INTRODUCTION
Black Worlds | Ekphrastic Encounters
The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University is the nation’s first academic center dedicated to Black poetry. Our mission is to celebrate, preserve, and educate others about the rich legacies of Black poets and poetry. Since 1994, every 10 years, we have hosted the Furious Flower Poetry Conference, and the fourth decennial conference, held September 18-21, 2024, celebrated The Worlds of Black Poetry as its theme. The event, held over four days, had over 800 registered attendees, more than 70 panels and performances, and showcased over 50 Black poets from around the world.
As the conference convener I wanted to maintain the tradition of engaging the visual arts that has been a hallmark of the conference over the decades. The conversation between artists and writers is a longstanding one. Over centuries, across geographies, and spanning media, the interiorities of both groups has been and continues to be mutually inspiring and is its own genre of writing known as ekphrastic poetry. Black poets and artists in America, too, have a long and rich tradition of ekphrasis stretching as far back as the first published African American poet, Phillis Wheatley, who penned the poem, “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works,” in response to “creations” of enslaved Black artist Scipio Moorhead.
What I love about poetry and what I love about ekphrasis as a poetic practice amounts to the same thing: the possibilities of encounter. In reading poems, we engage in a sharing of interior landscapes—the poet, through language, offers us a glimpse of their internal world, which is received by the reader and interpreted through their own interiority. The artist does the same through the medium of their art. With ekphrastic poetry—especially when access to the source art is available (Scipio Moorhead’s original work is lost to us)—this conversation is multiplied. First, we see the artist’s interiority through their work, then we see it again refracted through the poet’s eye; meanwhile the poem, as its own work of art, reveals something of the poet both related to and separate from the artwork to which it is responding. Readers/viewers are able to witness the transformation of inspiration into new art, and in their role as readers/ viewers participate in the alchemy of it themselves. It’s magical.
The first ekphrastic conversation, thus, was a curatorial one, and I was thrilled to collaborate with Virginia Soenksen, director of the Lisanby Museum at James Madison University, the Art Bridges Foundation, and independent artists to compose an exhibition that would be in conversation with the conference’s theme. The intersection of the conference and the exhibition also offered an irresistible artistic opportunity, and so I invited several poets who attended the conference to engage with the art, and to each write an ekphrastic poem in conversation with a piece of their choice. This catalogue is the result.
Within these pages is a conversation between and among Black worlds. As readers, you will encounter high-resolution photographs of stunning works of art by contemporary Black artists accompanied by poetic responses from Black poets. Some poets feel similar resonances; for example, poets Abdul Ali and Mahogany Browne both animate Mickalene Thomas’ Portrait of Qusuquzah #5, giving the portrait’s sequined subject an assertive and fiercely proud voice. On the other hand, while Joy Priest and Furious Flower graduate assistant Haylee Chase Edwards are both moved to formal play in their poems responding to Nengudi’s ACQ series—Priest’s sprawls, playing with white space while Edwards’ is packed into a concrete poem shaped like a triangle—the energy of the poems is different. Priest’s piece is a long slow moan of defiance, while Edwards’ throbs with a claustrophobic anxiety. Moreover, just as the disparate pieces of art in conversation create the exhibition Worlds Within and Without, the poems, too, by proximity and theme are in conversation with each other. This catalogue is a site of encounter—an invitation to you, dear reader, to explore the words and worlds of these writers and artists. I hope you’ll discover something new about your internal world, too!
LAUREN K. ALLEYNE Executive Director, Furious Flower Poetry Center
Photo by Adriana Hammond
David HAMMONS
David Hammons (b. 1943)
Untitled, 1988
Rubber tube, frying pans, and metal chains 48×18×7 in (121.9×45.7×17.8 cm)
Art Bridges
Asequence of cooking pans, rubber tubing, and gold chains hang from a nail. If thrown on the ground, David Hammons’s Untitled would look like everyday junk collected on a city street. Through the assemblage of unrelated objects, Hammons’s sculptural practice presents unexpected symbols of daily life through emotive sensibilities.
Aged and damaged, the skillets and pans featured in Untitled contribute to an elevated color scheme. A bodily shape emerges out of Hammons’s discarded materials. Black, silver, and gold, trimmed with necklace-like chains, suggest an elegant outfit.
Based in New York City, Hammons employs critical wit to contemplate material symbols, especially those related to a Black urban experience. While his sculptures recall Dadaist ready- mades, Hammons’s works expand upon the cultural value of found components.
Sharan STRANGE
Making
a Home for Ghosts
In skillets. Pans. Heirlooms, doppelgangers of lineage… Imagine them as constellations, strewn by ancestral nebulae. One, black as the darkest sky. Cast as a head, Deep, voluminous black. Back burner and stewing…or boiling over? The human afterlife is a realm purely of thought, they say. Memories, secrets, and regrets, especially, move the ghost. Hang its musings out to dry.
This one hungers with yearnings of the body as much as the will. Dangling chains—veins stringing a figure unseen until seen. These “organs” insist on nurture—remember greens, gumbo, rice, peas, oxtail bones, and gravies. Even chicken feet thrust above the pot’s rim. Oil pooled and eddying over flame. Golden patinated belly, glazed through years of grease and fire, culinary conjure, gatherings under the kitchen’s yellow bulbs.
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Yet the heart reminds us: Ghosts love light, the shine of existence. This one silver, dully gleaming—as if from the cradle of a galaxy. Inspirited by daily scouring, though craving, too, the residue of a life seasoned, grit of the cares it carries clinging—like salt, like sand—within crevices.
Give me a body (demands the ghost), but hollowed of pain, of all detritus. Yoke me only with possibility, the armor of thick love and constant use to burnish, and new heat coursing through me…
Iain Haley POLLOCK
To Assemble a Ritual of Praise Around Them
I have a bad habit of mourning the dead before they’re gone. In both days of snow and of bloom, I visit my mother, but I lost her years ago. In my grief, she becomes objects: Fluted perfume bottles. Bullets of lipstick. Grandfather clock with stalled pendulum. Stacked books of theories and incantations offering protection against her annihilation as if palisades to a small city overlooking the coastal plain. Brass chains dangling geometric pendants and hung between wearings on the corner of her bedroom mirror. Skillets, cast iron and Teflon, bearing their grease and char. Loud engines of the too-fast cars she drove. She drives. She is not far from me, days of snow, days of bloom. Why do I build mausoleums around the breathing? Why do I leave them enshrined in this damp, close air? They are still warm to the touch.
Perhaps to elegize the living is to assemble a ritual of praise around them. I think this on my better days.
But you know: most days are not my better days. Most days, with rubber tubing I strap to my body the objects I’ve made of the dead (who are not) and haul this weight wherever I go.
I could cross over the ridges bluing in the distance and see them, the above-ground dead, hear the hum and beat of them, inhale their scent. I could cross over, but I fall back into habit: the living, the breathing —I mourn them before they are gone.
Niki HERD grease
gold-plated yokes
long-staple cotton nooses or a goose
stepping & it’s bougainvillea summer the sky corporeal blue
a recollection of water, lost
e. hunt say gaze as memory over here there : waft of wind bones smokin’ on grills baby’s white shoe—
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About the POETS
SHARAN STRANGE‘S recent poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Reimagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters; This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets; Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic; Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry; Black Imagination; The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary; and Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor. Her writings have also been included in Georgia’s Poetry in the Park series and in gallery and museum exhibitions in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Oakland, and Seattle. Her collaborations with composers include librettos for chamber orchestra and opera (with Courtney Bryan of Tulane University) and a song cycle (with Paula Grissom-Broughton of Spelman College), and they have been performed by The Dream Unfinished Orchestra, American Modern Ensemble, and International Contemporary Ensemble, among others.
IAIN HALEY POLLOCK is the author of Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (2011), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, PoetrySociety.org and The Progressive. Outside of publishing poems, Pollock performs his work widely, from the Dodge Poetry Festival to libraries and art centers; he curated the Rye Poetry Path, a public poetry installation in Rye, NY; and he serves on the editorial board at Slapering Hol Press and on the board of Tiger Bark Press. Pollock currently directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College, where he edits the literary journal Inkwell.
NIKI HERD is the author of two poetry collections, The Stuff of Hollywood (2024), The Language of Shedding Skin (2011), and the chapbook ____ , don’t you weep (2022). She co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (2019), a “hidden gem” according to Ms. Magazine. A fourtime Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in The Adroit, Pleiades, New England Review, and various anthologies. Herd’s work has been supported by MacDowell, Cave Canem, and others. She has taught at the University of Houston, Washington University, and is an assistant professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.
Photo by Madeline Brenner
Mickalene THOMAS
Mickalene Thomas (b.1971)
Portrait of Qusuquzah #5, 2011
Rhinestones acrylic, and enamel on panel 72×46 in (182.9×116.8 cm)
Art Bridges
The artist’s muse is a trope associated with the white male gaze, in which women subjects in art are valued by Euro-centric beauty standards. Mickalene Thomas resists this gaze in her collaged- media portraits of Black women.
In Portrait of Qusuquzah #5, Thomas’s friend Qusuquzah stares directly at the viewer. Her richly painted skin is adorned by vibrant fields of rhinestones. Depicting lovers and companions as muses, Thomas endows her sitters with individual complexity.
She states: “The women I choose are women that possess a directness in themselves, a palpable confidence that’s attractive to me and that I want to capture. . . I see them as vehicles to express my own feminine self. They’re like catalysts for new forms of expression.”
Abdul ALI
THIS IS HOW YOU SIT FOR A PORTRAIT
I am fucking royalty
Nevermind, my supervisor
Is a real Karen.
Crown coiffed Head high
I use a mudmask To keep my skin tight
The days are long Since I started picking
Up night shifts.
I don’t believe In disappearing
In muted colors. Give me sunsets,
The tropics, against My diasporic skin
Worlds Within and Without
This photographer Ain’t never seen
A beauty like me. I am fucking royalty
Pose. Shutter. Snap. Immortalize me.
Portrait of Qusuquzah #5 (Detail)
Mahogany BROWNE
Ain’t Stuntin’ Them
FOR MICKALENE THOMAS
She don’t care about nothing &
Nobody unless you talking rent check
She Bonnie and buoy
She natural buffed nails & acrylic press ons
She snap her gum & chicken neck for the table
She feed a million
No one thank hers
She don’t give a damn
She don’t care none
She ain’t stuntin’ them
She too busy
bathing your babies & burying her own
She too busy
Signing up voters & still redlined out of her neighborhood
She too busy
Being
Breathing
Believing
A better day gonna come
Cause a better day be she
She too busy gardening
She too busy pastoring
She too busy baking beef patty
She too busy for the noise
I mean, she’s a prayer
Yea, she’s a psalm
Look at her glitter shadow
Check her fly rise
See her soar & know
She sees you judging her
She still let her mangoes hang
She still sip her tea slow
She blow sweet breath of life into the room & create an anthem of our dreams
Whew! She too damn busy living, baby
She too damn busy loving & frankly
She already done paid the price of your toll
Nandi COMER
Portrait of Qusuquzah
Most men can’t tell a diamond from crystal. Can’t tell a Cadillac engine purr from a garage-scraped truck. Does it matter? They all come with a thirst to grab at my insides. So I learn to hum in every key of woman. Make a mockery of their ruin. They don’t know I am made of shadow and lip. As a girl, an auntie, who was not really kin, taught me to use my mouth to prepare a new mascara brush, Another bought me my first pack of hairpins and a butterfly comb so shiny with shimmer I just knew I’d have a man eating from my longest nail. I am a two-toned velvet gal, spread flower and looking to be hitched. I preside over my legs and my small wrists. I know every moonflower eventually dies of sunshine or under the pressure of a tire or tucked in a boy’s shirt. But before I am disappeared the world will know my waistline was meant for sequence and rhinestones. I never gave in.
Portrait of Qusuquzah #5
(Detail)
About the POETS
ABDUL ALI — poet, writer, and cultural worker — is an arts administrator who lives and works in Maryland. Mr. Ali has held distinguished teaching appointments at Johns Hopkins University, Howard University, and currently Morgan State University. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Robert Deutsch Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Sewanee. His debut collection of poems, Trouble Sleeping won the 2014 New Issues Poetry Book Prize. When Mr. Ali isn’t teaching writing, he’s working with community-based arts nonprofits through his consultancy.
MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, a Kennedy Center’s Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. She is the Executive Director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders and community members. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, & Black Girl Magic. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree awarded by Marymount Manhattan College and is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center.
Photo by Khary Mason
NANDI COMER is the Poet Laureate of Michigan. She is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. Her poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, and others. She serves as a poetry editor for Wayne State Press’ Made in Michigan Series and is the co-director of Detroit Lit.
Conditioning Queen) sculpture is constructed from found metal refrigerator parts and nylon pantyhose. The contrasting materials explore themes of gender. The industrial objects exude masculinity while the delicate fabric of hosiery is intimately linked to the female body.
Nengudi uses nylons that have been donated secondhand because, as she states, they have a “residual energy of what it means for a woman to wear these objects.” The rigid and inflexible metal components symbolize the harsh trials and monumental milestones of a woman’s life in a male-dominated world. The resilient flexibility of the pantyhose illustrates the ability of women to endure hardships and be shaped by triumphs.
Nengudi is also a dancer, and these sculptures are constructed with an exquisite tension that simultaneously suggests the physicality of a string instrument and the endurance of her own body.
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Haylee Chase EDWARDS
three tight fibers of impatience anchor down my lover’s hips and rust creaks all over her iliac crest. i would dab it off if i could, but we have to wait some years ‘til we can have a say over our breath, blood, oxidization or ‘til it stops feeling - like we’re being torn at the gusset with the waistband still fraying and stained from the last time it felt like this - like the copper pipes reaching down from the sky were omens, telling us that it would be our turn next. i can’t fit hope in me anymore, i think we’ll be getting repossessed soon enough - maybe just be a sharp sting, not so severe but she says baby i’m still scared where do we go? how do we push our legs faster than the runs in our stockings? how do we leave this place that hates us so, tread above the shipwreck, far enough away that we don’t get hooked on the nasty bits, filed down by a predator’s teeth like he’s drowning us worse than before? like the ruins are all we deserve, like the hurt lies at sea level, like the doors will never open again? like we can never take a another breath again? like it’s meant to choke us, like the end is ahead?
For you: — Chain of grief-leaves pulled into a bowtie. I call
Each ache down
Name it gone, God, good For you, for you, for you
Eleven -minute intervals of
Auditory devotion: — Give Me Architecture. Give Me something better than Escape. Give Me a reason to send up this prayer: — Give It an Arrow: — Home.
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About the POETS
HAYLEE CHASE EDWARDS is a learner and lover of literature enrolled in the English MA program at James Madison University. She has six published poems, all appearing in the IRIS Literary and Arts Magazine, and she has new pieces forthcoming in IRIS and the Virginia Literary Review. Chase has received several awards from the English department and Graduate School at JMU, including the 2023 Cynthia Gilliatt Bibliophile Award, and a Regional Travel Grant Award. She is currently a Graduate Assistant at the Furious Flower Poetry Center where she is an Editorial Assistant for Furious Flower’s journal, The Fight & The Fiddle.
JOY PRIEST is the author of Horsepower (2020), which won the Donald Hall Prize, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (2023). She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship and the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review. Priest’s poems and criticism have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Sewanee Review, among others. She is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the Curator of Community Programs and Practice at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).
Lina Iris VIKTOR
Lina Iris Viktor (b.1987)
VII — All Creation Held Its Breath. Ad Astra., 2022
Gold, acrylic, copolymer resin, print on cotton rag paper
Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian-British artist based in Italy. Her work blends painting, sculpture, performance, and photography, often using 24-carat gold.
Drawing from her background in film and performance, Viktor’s art explores themes of time, life, and the relationship between the finite and infinite. Her use of black and materials like gold and volcanic rock creates a sense of timelessness, while also challenging perceptions of ‘blackness.’
Influenced by West African traditions, Egyptian iconography, and European portraiture, her installations are both intimate and expansive. Viktor’s work is held in several prominent museums.
Worlds Within and Without
Aurielle MARIE
The Matter of Time
Tonight, if the wind betrays a world, then I am a world made unrecognizable. The light slips in from between me. If a breeze severs each minute from the hour, fine. I still exist. I still hold together the ruin and make it brilliant. I, who the sun abandoned like a thrill. I, ugly and opened wide. I, the soft dagger of a shadow. I, turn and turn and find myself on all fours— fine. I, a beast, sure. Yes I, slick of oil for tongue. Yes, dirt black and rich. Against the night, I compare my intuition. I, who knows the cool breeze is on her way before she arrives. I, who knows the leaf aches to fall before he do. Who am I? What could I possibly know, before I know? What name does the moon call me? If I moan what black clock climbs out my mouth? If I glimmer, who comes to collect? See how every natural frond bends toward my breast? See How natural my longing is? How long I been natural? I am as old as the myth and the mouth that first told it. What does the sky whisper about the wars I’ve won? The lovers I’ve kept?
There is no song unless I vibrate the air— No song. No world. No word. No matter. Without you? No warplane, no child unmade by fire, no wound to the skin of the clouds. So, which of us moves heaven and earth? Which of us is a hell while the other a whole world?
What that moon knows
What she doesn’t say, is:
This dark one is mine. We make each other necessary. We’ve learned how to curl and glitter unto the vulnerable evening. We do not run from the ugly heat, the darker side of golden hour.
We been here. We belong.
Worlds Within and Without
Shara McCALLUM
What Bends to the Breath of All
out of the field of creation I emerge first woman whose skin is night nakedness adorned as I by palms framing my body formed of the force that ordained this savannah these grasses out of which I peer unto a new world not yet hunted or hunter I blaze at the start of time witness to origin as to infinity to a universe conducting its wind through my wired copper hair I set afire as the gold-leaf moon too is lit by the hand of a creator who is in my likeness and in whose likeness I am made whole am wholly made
Lauren K. ALLEYNE
Be/Held
The looking between us is holy —eye to eye: I to I— we make and unmake each other an alchemy of I-mage forged in the hold of brilliant night twinned light & shadow a luminous blackness so full of itself it spills, blossoming into its own lush & fertile universe— the dripping moon’s thumbed gold the puckered night the star-scratched palms the flame of hair the light-licked shoulder & pebbled nipples the whorled petals the attentive stalks— & drawn inside its godsome stillness I am a ripening a reckoning, a resplendence, a reaching earthflower & moonroot, I & I be & I be & I be
Worlds Within and Without
About the POETS
Award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural strategist AURIELLE MARIE (they/she) is a Black queer storyteller, political organizer, and child of the Deep South by way of Atlanta. They earned their Bachelor’s in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from Evergreen State College. Aurielle’s poetry debut, Gumbo Ya Ya, is the recipient of both the 2020 Cave Canem Prize and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, and is out now with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Aurielle has received many awards for her political activism, including being named one of Creative Loafing Atlanta’s 20 People to Watch (2015), being a Kopkind Colony Journalism/ Activism awardee, a 2016 Roddenberry Fellowship Finalist, and a 2022 fellow of Scalawag Magazine’s Freedomways Reporting Project.
SHARA MCCALLUM, born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, is the author of six poetry books, including No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize. Her work has been widely published and translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Italian, and French, and set to music by composers. Honors for her poetry include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Silver Musgrave Medal, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. An Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State and faculty in the Pacific MFA Program, she served as the 2021–22 Penn State Laureate.
Photo by Adriana Hammond
LAUREN K. ALLEYNE serves as Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of two collections, Honeyfish and Difficult Fruit; two chapbooks, Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel; and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her award-winning work has been widely published in journals and anthologies internationally, including The Atlantic, Ms., and The New York Times. Alleyne, who hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, has been recognized with a United States Artist‘s award nomination (2023), an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017) and shortlisting for the BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry (2020). In 2022, Alleyne was awarded the JMU Agency Star Award and an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Barkley L. HENDRICKS
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017)
North Philly Niggah (William Corbett), 1975
Oil and acrylic on canvas 72×48 in (182.9×121.9 cm)
Art Bridges
Barkley Hendricks painted the people he encountered in everyday life. He stated, “there’s a lot told in what one wears.” Hendricks enjoyed meeting individuals with extraordinary styles of dress. He painted his family and friends, as well as people that he met on the street. The details of personalized clothing in Hendricks’s portraits ground his sitters in the everyday, while backgrounds of uninterrupted color recall Byzantine religious icons, elevating the notion of the ordinary.
William Corbett, the subject of North Philly Niggah, grew up in the same North Philadelphia neighborhood as the artist. While Hendricks left to enroll in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Corbett was incarcerated for armed robbery. The two men reunited after Corbett’s release, and Hendricks painted this portrait. Corbett coolly gazes at the viewer while finely garbed and immaculately groomed, and his appearance bears no trace of his time in prison. He stands tall, equipped to greet his future with radiant confidence. 30 Worlds Within and Without
Brad WALROND
WILLIAM’S PLAYLIST - Hot 100 Billboard, 1975: A TRIPTYCH
Thank God I’m a country boy. Marmalade, jive talkin’, the hustle. Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Mandy, listen to what the man said sister golden hair! Mr. Postman, Rhinestone Cowboy . . . he don’t love you ( Like I Love You).
Please! Pick the best pieces of my love up before the next teardrop falls.
(Hey, Won’t You Play) another somebody done somebody— wrong song—sorry.
Get down tonight. Love will keep us together one of these nights.
bad-blood robin, my eyes adored you. You’re no good fallin’ in love
Island girl lady, let’s do it again That’s the way I like it loving you.
Fame! Fire! Shining star, laughter in the rain. Philadelphia Freedom
Have you never been mellow Black Water.
It is the fur for me. I am William Corbett the Philly; the human
I won’t never let you not see me like this; like you know I know this is every loving thing
The shirt collar, disturbing the peace Peeking out from all that peach
You need me hangin’ in your life Belt tied belonging to an undoing
Pull me close. No you come here! Trust me your need. What I need to make you
Bet you never knew you needed to be shook like this
I can feel you imagine what I could do to you, & yeah you would absolutely let me.
No green screen in the background The whole truth spreads out behind us
The whole culture can’t help but keep falling in. Failing for their need for our plush coat strung to that horny sound
In the city of your dreams Still Will, I’m your blood brother
canvas the true artist world leave a possibility; when the sacrifice icons dress in the Deliverance.
POET COMMENTS:
This contrapuntal poem is in response to: North Philly Niggah (William Corbett), 1975 by Barkley L. Hendricks. The poem in the first column is comprised of all the songs that charted at Number #1on Billboard’s 1975 Top 100 chart. The poem in the 2nd column is in the voice of William Corbett. The poem in the 3rd column proceeds from the 2nd line of each couplet. Each column can be read separately as their own poem. Read from left to right the first 2 columns can be read as their own poem. The entire poem (all three columns) can be read line by line from left to right. I was inspired by Hendricks centering black subjects in his portraiture work. In particular William Corbett was an ordinary member of Barkley Hendrick’s North Philly community. William Corbett was also formerly incarcerated. Barkley’s rendering enables the viewer to consider the iconic force of Corbett’s style and personality and the incalculable value a community confers to its members apart from their economic or social status. William’s gaze in this portrait is so arresting and inviting. The sense of confidence, fashion, and style captured here felt to me like this image is quintessentially American and was made to be seen by everyone. This impression is what led me to the 1975 Billboard charts. What was America listening to in 1975? What if Barkley L. Hendricks North Philly Niggah was the visual companion to their soundtrack on billboards all across the country?
North Philly Niggah (William Corbett), 1975 (Detail)
Gbenga ADESINA
First Winter
Those first Africans arriving on the marshy shores of Point Comfort, Virginia in a Dutch warship, a crypt of lash, suicides, and passage through stormy darkness, it was said, did not wail until they disembarked and saw their first bitter fog and cold and harshness of snow. They saw birds, sparrows and warblers, fall through the fog and drop like feathered stones of ice. Mute thunders. The rain was misery. A bitter map of lightening slashed overhead
An electric wind moved through shorn, leafless trees, and made howling music from the void between dry branches that sounded like the groan of a ghost.
You could hear the groans of rivers as they dried up. Time was measured by the menace and approach of darkness. Seven white geese with twisted beaks and their young ones lay dead on a frozen blue lake.The Africans saw these and trembled and wondered about the Europeans who desired an empire out of this harshness and what cruelty they must be capable of.
I see you though, their seed, their descendant, in your fur peach coat, the clockwork of collar with purple lace frills, you are regal, my lost King. You are locked in a landlock island. When its winter, a raw window opens across centuries inside you. You know by some half forgotten fable of a lost kingdom that was once yours. You are stoic, or you think you are. You wear your weary well and call it Jazz. But you are cold, aren’t you?
About the POETS
BRAD WALROND is a poet, author, performance artist, and one of the foremost writers and performers of the 1990s Black Arts Movement centered in New York City. Walrond’s debut collection, Every Where Alien, (2024) Moore Black Press | Amistad / HarperCollins, chronicles the author’s own Black queer exploration of the world, amidst the discovery of 1990s-early 2000s New York City underground art and resistance movements. Brad’s poems have been published in: The Atlantic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, African Voices Magazine, and elsewhere. Walrond holds a B.A. from The City College of New York and an M.A. from Columbia University.
GBENGA ADESINA, is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He received his MFA from New York University where he held the Goldwater Poetry Fellowship and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received support from the Poet’s House, New York, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Folger Shakespeare’s Library, Washington DC, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, and Harvard University’s historic Woodberry Poetry Room. His work has been published in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Guernica, Narrative, Yale Review, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He’s the inaugural Mellon Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University.
Val Gray WARD
Val Gray Ward (1932-2024)
Peace the Way Home, begun c.1972
Quilted cotton and assorted fabric, various manufactured objects 108×108 in (274.32×274.32 cm)
On loan from the Estate of Val Gray Ward
Val Gray Ward’s quilted memoir, Peace the Way Home, reflects over 50 years of her personal life, activism, and theatrical career. The title plays on the Black Southern phrase “piece the way home,” but Ward altered “piece” to “peace” to encompass her philosophy and activism.
Ward dedicated the quilt to her childhood friend, Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize winner. When encouraged by Brooks to write a memoir, Ward chose instead to weave her life into a quilt, incorporating names, photos, mementos, and textiles from influential people like Sammy Davis Jr., Maya Angelou, and Sonia Sanchez. The quilt also includes fabrics from Nikki Giovanni’s grandmother, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and many others, creating a tapestry of Pan-African consciousness.
At the quilt’s center is the emblem of FESTAC ’77, a festival held in Nigeria where Ward’s Kuumba Theatre represented the U.S. The quilt symbolizes both a journey home and a celebration of Black heritage and global connections.
Joanne V. GABBIN
Meditations
on “Peace the Way Home”
IN MEMORY OF VAL GRAY WARD
I made this quilt to write my life. I fashioned it with pieces Of resistance, desire, love and loss.
I flaunt the bright colors of freedom In Kente patches—red, orange Green, gold—studded with cowrie shells.
Sankofa birds and brilliant butterflies Decorate the white linen canvas. They fly above the chaos of my world.
FESTAC’77 mask is the centerpiece, My homage to Africa and Art Emblazoned in black and gold.
Kuumba, the life force that shaped me, Is dancing everywhere And singing the songs of my people.
I stitched beloved names with personality. No name is a copy of another. Each—original, special, and permanent.
My hand-sewn letters intertwine the patches Like a Wintergreen embrace On a foggy mountain night.
38 Worlds Within and Without
My children occupy every loving space— Babatu, Kenneth, Akintola, Rhonda— They are the bearers of legacy and peace.
Pieces of Mukai’s dress And Kumi’s stripped shirt are remnants Of those who protect as ancestors.
My soul-mate’s face, Even now, lights up mine. Love is lasting and unjudgmental.
I wrap my quilt around my shoulders Remembering Zora’s horizon And Gwen’s welcome table.
Then I lay myself out in all my jumbled humanity And invite you to read me like a book.
Bettina JUDD
The Way Home
Butterflies and boteh flap and circle dance in metamorphosis eternal technicolor and blood brown hue. The curls recall a carolina wren turning on itself, caught in the movement of a movement.
In the cloud of our names what makes a life eternal is calling them all the same one by one and simultaneous. Each stitch of them a prayer: Long live Africa
I am Black & proud mother and child plant and animal and changing and changing
I’m changing. If I wear a mask let it be my own. Pieced out of blood memory and future dreams. If I have forgotten a name I know your beautiful face. If I owe you something, here is all the gold I have ever owned.
What makes a life?
That which was lost and made its way to my needle bound me to earth this time this thread pieced together with you and you and you…
About the POETS
JOANNE V. GABBIN is a distinguished English professor and an awardwinning figure in African American literature and poetry. After earning her B.A. from Morgan State College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Gabbin began teaching at various institutions before joining James Madison University (JMU) in 1985. She became director of the JMU honors program in 1986, a full professor in 1989, and founded the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective in 1987. In 1994, she organized “Furious Flower,” the first academic conference on African American poetry, and later established JMU’s Furious Flower Poetry Center in 2005. Gabbin’s publications include Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition and Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present. An avid art collector, she is also the owner of the 150 Franklin Street Gallery in Harrisonburg.
BETTINA JUDD is an interdisciplinary writer and artist whose research focus is on Black women’s creativity and feminist thought. She is currently Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, The Offing, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern, 2023) and patient. poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) which won the Hudson Book Prize in 2013.
Che LOVELACE
42 Worlds Within and Without
Che Lovelace (b.1969)
Worshippers, 2016-2022
Acrylic, oil pastel and dry pigment on board panel
CLovelace lives and works in his lifelong home of Trinidad, which he considers his ultimate subject. His vibrant, energetic compositions present a nuanced exploration of postcolonial identity, grounded in a deep commitment to the Caribbean landscape and its community.
Worshippers shows figures dressed in Baptist-like clothing holding hands in a river. This work was among fourteen paintings shown in his solo exhibition Che Lovelace: Bathers, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2023). This exhibition involved the artist meditating on both depictions of bathers throughout the art historical canon. Framing this immemorial trope in the specificity of his own culture, Lovelace celebrates the bather as an intrinsic figure of the Trinidadian vernacular.
The artist’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, X Museum, Beijing, and the Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon.
Aaron COLEMAN
Let the Spirit Fall Fresh
through the circular song of we and me: please breathe and weave leaves and vines of light. Wade in the hush till raw us sprouts raucous fruit: not first but full-bodied with time, bruised
constellations laid brown and shining so that black minds might move: dance shore: swell the surface of the water that is the words that are communion beyond religion—
voluminous, voluptuous, ecstatic voice and pluck and growl and thought pulled way down into—then out
of bouts and whereabouts: with what rivers and spills deep beneath cold grief. In the muck what seed survives? How do seed and reed unfurl magenta and sky, turquoise joy and gold
sorrow? Ghost fronds fresh from tomorrow ache their way: up along shadow crag and soil, red earth, wet earth elemental so thereby eternal—
returning forever. This hard black lean and rock hurdles and spirals: through a darkness called space we don’t yet know yet come from, are held by, and float inside
right now right now right now plus forty some odd infinite years and mules we mull for the offering opening the furious flower: tremendous, totemic, lovingly brooked then belly-blown into bloom—
Ajanaé DAWKINS
God’s Gonna Trouble
God is a love theory. I explore her in the water. I explore her in the lap of a woman who speaks in tongues, holds my face, oils my head, plaits my hair into currents.
The women who reared me gather to run their mouths—to talk God’s ear off ‘bout my safety. my future. The direction of my making. On my behalf, they hold heaven hostage.
I want to love my folks this way. Waist deep in river, dress clung to me as I’m clung to a sister to beg protection for my blood. Spirit keeping me warm.
This is a tradition I cannot let go. My academic inquiry don’t make Spirit come. And so, I wash my methodologies in water. I hang them to dry. What theory can I prove,
afraid to get wet? Afraid to let my tongue loose against tide? Afraid to make space in my belly for God? To house her in my bones? To sing her out?
Nikema BELL
Deliverance
You are the salt of the earth, I tell the bathers in the frame— each brushstroke a heartbeat, a hue-filled pulse alive with praise.
The painted figures lean in to listen, their bodies glowing with tints of oil. Worship is the beginning of deliverance, I tell them as the tide laps at their feet. Here, there is no division— only the pull of hands and the clapping of waves.
Reclamation hums in the air, the brine tangling with their breath. A soft canticle rises from the canvas, each voice a ripple of sound, washed by the salt spray that cradles their flesh in a sacred embrace.
This is the day we chant Yemaya mother of oceans, of wind and waters, for the sons and daughters still sleeping in the bosom of tides, we sing: Awake. Arise. Remember.
About the POETS
AARON COLEMAN is a poet, translator, and educator. He is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Coleman is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025), among other titles, and the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Poetry.
AJANAÉ DAWKINS is an interdisciplinary poet, theologian, and performance artist. She writes about the lived experiences of Black women to explore the politics of faith, grief, sisterhood, and sensuality. She has been published in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review, and more. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX is forthcoming with the New Delta Review. Ajanaé is a co-host of the VS Podcast the Theology Editor for the EcoTheo Review, and the 2024 Urban Arts Space Artist-in-Residence.You can find her on the dance floor, in the local winery, library, karaoke night, or in her kitchen cooking something slow.
NIKEMA BELL, raised in Linstead, Jamaica, graduated from the University of the West Indies in 2022 with a BA in Literatures in English and a Minor in Creative Writing. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in English at James Madison University, focusing on Victorian and Postcolonial Caribbean Literature. A first-generation college student, she aims to earn a Ph.D. to explore the connection between mental health and creativity in literature. Beyond academia, Nikema enjoys poetry, singing, painting, and long walks, and hopes her blend of academic and creative passions will make a meaningful impact in literature and beyond.
Photo by Marcus Jackson
This catalog for Worlds Within and Without was collaboratively published by Madison Art Collection and the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, funded through a grant from the Art Bridges Foundation. Copyrights on all artwork and poems are retained by their creators and/or assigned agents. The artwork and poems contined herein are reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
No part of this catalog may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of Madison Art Collection.
Exhibit/Project Coordinators: Virginia Soenksen, Madison Art Collection and Lauren K. Alleyne, Furious Flower Poetry Center | James Madison University, 800 South Main Street, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
Cover image: North Philly Niggah (William Corbett), 1975 (detail) by Barkley L. Hendricks. Cover and interior design: Robert Mott for RobertMottDesigns.com. Exhibition poster design featured on page 1 designed by Virginia Soenksen. The primary typefaces used in this catalog are Artegra Sans and Minion Pro.
Printed in the United States of America
January 2025
The Madison Art Collection (MAC) is an encyclopedic collection of objects from around the world held at James Madison University (JMU) for the academic, local, and global community to enjoy. The MAC serves as the primary visual arts resource on campus, offering public exhibitions, students internships, and collaborations with faculty to enrich the curriculum.
The public gallery space for the collection is the James and Gladys Kemp Lisanby Museum, which opened on January 27, 2012. Named in honor of JMU alumna Gladys Kemp Lisanby (’49) and her husband, the late Retired Rear Admiral James Lisanby, the Lisanby serves as a venue for dynamic exhibitions featuring works of art from the collection.
As the only art museum in the Shenandoah Valley, it offers the region access to the arts of the world through dynamic thematic exhibitions. In the interest of lowering barriers to the arts, the Lisanby Museum is free and open to all visitors.
The MAC is part of the Office for Creative Propulsion (OCP), an administrative unit sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs that exists as part of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center dedicated to Black poetry. For more than 25 years, Furious Flower has reached thousands of poets, educators, students, and poetry lovers through its decade-defining conferences, groundbreaking media and anthologies, workshops, reading series, and seminars. Furious Flower continues to impact literary communities on local, regional, national and international levels, creating platforms for Black poets to engage new audiences and for audiences to experience Black literary culture.
