Packaged Black: Collaborative Community Responses

DERRICK ADAMS and BARBARA EARL THOMAS COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY RESPONSES

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DERRICK ADAMS and BARBARA EARL THOMAS COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY RESPONSES

Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator, and Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs. Lead support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This exhibition is also made possible by the generous support of Virginia and Bagley Wright.

Images: Cover - Installation view, Photo: Jueqian Fang. Inside Front Cover - Derrick Adams, Style Variation Grid 10 from Beauty World, 2019. Photo: Jueqian Fang. Inside Back Cover Barbara Earl Thomas, Delicious, 2021. Photo: Zocalo Studios ~ Spike Mafford.

Editors’ Introduction For this iteration of the interpretive guide publication, we invited teams of contributors to respond to Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas as a way to build on the collaborative and creative exchange between Adams and Thomas that is at the center of their exhibition. Packaged Black is a synthesis of a multiyear, cross-country exchange between New York-based Adams and Seattle-based Thomas that began after the two artists exhibited work alongside each other in a group show at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017.

This collection of responses shares in this spirit of collaboration.

The only parameters we gave the contributing teams were a limit of approximately 500 words for written pieces and some image size restrictions for visual formats. In order to echo the presentation of the works in the galleries, we also gave each team of collaborators the choice of working together on a shared response or submitting individual responses that, published side by side, suggest dialogue and indirect creative exchange. In this interpretive guide, you’ll find drawings, paintings, poetry, a diagrammatic essay, a podcast, and more, that highlight the many directions collaboration can take. Teams are made up of friends, colleagues, and other mentormentee relationships.

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We offer this guide as an alternative to the traditional museum wall text, giving license to those outside of the institutional framework of the museum to voice their responses to the installations. We hope that your own responses to Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas will grow in scope as you consider the perspectives offered here, sparking conversations about the role of art in addressing systemic injustices, building community, and opening space for joy and reflection—where it succeeds, where it frustrates—and our responsibilities in the ongoing dialogue.

We thank Jazmyn Scott with LANGSTON, Kemi Adeyemi with Black Embodiments Studio, Georgia McDade, Ph.D. with African American Writers’ Alliance, and Sabrina Chacon-Barajas with Arts Corps for connecting us with several of our contributors, as well as Elisheba Johnson with Wa Na Wari for her collaboration on Packaged Black programming in general. Henry Graphic Designer Mariah Irwin also deserves immense thanks for her work designing this book. And we express sincerest gratitude to the guide contributors for their time and commitment.

MITA MAHATO

IAN SIPORIN

Associate Curator of

Public and Youth

Public and Youth Programs

Programs Manager

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Xaria James & J’Asha James My name is Xaria and I am 16 years old. Something I like doing is art. One of my goals is to design clothes and have my own business.

I like to help people when they are sad by making them laugh.

Something I like writing about is my life, my journey, and my art.

When I was looking at the exhibit, it made me feel like I can do it. I wondered, how did they come up with the pictures and the colors?

I also wondered how long it took them to create their pieces.

My name is J’Asha and I go to Southeast Interagency Academy. I am an art student there and I love to screen print. I enjoy creating pieces on the computer and writing concept sheets to describe my pieces.

This exhibit made me look at things different. It made me pay attention to details a little more, and it made me love to view other people’s artwork and to see what they were thinking when they were creating their artwork.

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Le’Ecia Farmer & Kristina Clark Le’Ecia Farmer is a multimedia artist and designer who likes to push the boundaries of form and to interact with the various meanings that materials hold.

Kristina Clark is a commitment to ancestral healing and transformation through African Diasporic decolonial aesthetics. As an emerging textile artist she is working primarily with vintage and recycled beads, natural dyes, and organic fibers.

WILDEST DREAM We were inspired by the detailed layering, vibrant colors, and depth that Barbara Earl Thomas and Derrick Adams evoke in their pieces.

The exceptional material range of Thomas and Adams’s work interprets the vastness of Black subjectivity with dignity, highlighted in the attention to pattern, poise, and play of light. Our portraits are an emotive call-and-response—at once echoing and evoking one another, while in symbiosis with Thomas’s intricate cut-out garment and Adams’ abstracted clothing pattern pieces. The objects of adornment, whether stretched over a wire frame or arranged behind a glass frame, bring style into the picture—not only the stories we share, but how we share them.

In the joint response piece Wildest Dream, the subject in the orange skirt with the green background represents the ancestor to the subject in black with a red outline. Clark ingeniously created this ancestor out of coffee-stained brown paper bags, challenging and disrupting the material’s connotations. She also incorporates layered tissue paper inspired by the beautiful hues of red, orange, and green in the exhibit. With the descendant, Farmer experiments with the prevalent cut-out technique and incorporates materials used for garment construction. A red line of thread creates the subject, stitched onto a paper and jean background. An unintended play on the theme and technology of call-and-response, “Wildest Dream” celebrates how the telling of our stories can be vast and also specific, detailed and abstracted. We let the materials, the symbols, the patterns carry our stories, across generations.

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Wildest Dream I : Cardstock, acrylic, thread, jean fabric and dried flowers

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Wildest Dream II : Cardstock, coffee grounds, brown paper bag, tissue paper, embroidery thread, wallpaper

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Chinazom Oleru & Beza Ayele & Darchelle Denise Burnett Chinazom Oleru is a sister, a daughter, a friend, a long-time resident of South Seattle, and a Masters of Cultural Studies student at the University of Washington, Bothell.

Beza Ayele Beza Ayele is a writer, critical thinker, laugher, life-long learner, and Master of Arts in Cultural Studies student at the University of Washington, Bothell.

Darchelle Denise Burnett is a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies Student at the University of Washington, Bothell. Bachelor of Arts in Social and Behavioral SciencesAnthopology, Minor in Peace Studies. Daughter, Sister, Auntie, Friend, and Creative.

CHINAZOM OLERU

As I made my way through the last few rooms of the exhibition, a sense of wonder took over. Look at all of this, in here. Painted on canvas were brightly colored hairstyles sat atop mannequin heads, much like they would have been in the beauty supply stores that used to dot the area. Large, bright, and bold, they hung on the walls.

Five, six feet tall, maybe more. Look at us, in here. Big, loud, wild prints covered the walls in a back room. Patterns that looked like they’d been ripped from the photo albums sitting under our living room coffee tables. Cut sheets resembling doilies hung all over a room, like the lace and plastic covered sitting rooms I could still see so clearly all these years later. A table with carefully created beauty tools, painstakingly recreated with the same sort of intense concentration I had used to hold my ears away from the heat of the pressing comb. A chandelier draped down beautifully. My eyes catching the glamour of it just as spellbound as I had been watching the women of generations before me beautify themselves at vanities that mirrored this one.

We’re really in here.

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BEZA AYELE

ON VIEW: BEAUTY AND GLAMOUR. Sought-after commodities. As a young one, the curiosity of routine draws one to them. The intricate lining of the lips. The lengthening of hair. Shapes surrounding us. The curiosity of ritual. “I want the big, and I want the glamour,” one thinks to themself. “When I grow up, I too will have my own form of routine.” Then one can reach a moment. A confusing moment, as one negates the routine provided to them. “I want the big, and I want the glamour.” You are not allowed yet, though. It is not for your age. Then one begins to internalize what beauty is and is not. Okay, fine. “I do not want the big, and I do not want the glamour.” As an epigraph to her essay, “In the Name of Beauty,” Tressie McMillan Cottom situates bell hooks’ commitment to “theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.”

Cottom herself establishes that “Beauty is the preferences that reproduce the social order.” Young ones do not know this yet. Or, they are aware, but their language may be lacking. They begin to internalize that lack. Then one grows up. The internalizing does not end, but now, you have your routine. I want it, but I do not.

Coerciveness of beauty. Romanticizing the routine, but sometimes it drains. What if I do not feel like lengthening my hair? But wait, now one has to think, is it internalized femmephobia? It could, but it could not be. What of the days when one’s looks do not matter?

Can one opt out of that performance? What are the consequences?

Tradition is layered, and also tradition is not neutral. The closeness of tradition and socialization. *lines my lips*

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DARCHELLE DENISE BURNETT

Embracing beauty. Glorifying texture. Defining Black elegance. This is what I see in this art full of texture and color. My art features a woman looking back over her shoulder, catching one final glimpse of the creativity she just witnessed. Running through her mind is a single phrase, “beauty in texture.” The floral pieces are imperfect and beautiful, adding texture to her thoughts.

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Esther Er v in & Georgia McDade ESTHER ERVIN

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Esther Ervin is a mixed-media artist and creator of one-of-a-kind jewelry. She was recognized with several awards, residencies and international exhibitions; including ones in Honduras, Lithuania and Poland. She also has 11 permanent public pieces in Seattle’s Central District.

Georgia Stewart McDade, Ph.D. is a Louisiana native who has lived in Seattle more than half her life. She is a charter member of the African-American Writers’ Alliance (AAWA). Copies of her four volumes of poetry called Outside the Cave and her first collection of prose, Observation and Revelations: Stories, Sketches, and Essays, may be found on her website georgiasmcdade.org/books.

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GEORGIA MCDADE

PACKAGING I All of us are packaged—from birth to death.

In the beginning, someone packages us: carefully, carelessly, in between.

We have no control.

They want the world to see—or not see—us a certain way.

We have no say As we age, we—or one or more for all kinds of reasons—take over our packaging.

This too can be done carefully or carelessly, in between.

What we do is rooted in that first packaging!

We go along our way, perhaps merrily, perhaps not.

We can’t avoid the packaging.

All of us are packaged.

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PACKAGING II Aside from the genes in the chromosome that determined who/ what we are, we arrive unpackaged.

But our caretakers begin the task of packaging immediately, sometimes willingly and before we arrive!

When we meet other persons, a book, a movie, a show, a person who questions our packaging, we sometimes begin to question our packaging, Somewhere, depending on how tightly packaged we are, we may begin repackaging ourselves.

We may be like the butterfly emerging from the cocoon but emerging not nearly so quickly!

This repackaging can be one, several, many of the countless possibilities that exist.

We may or may not examine some of these possibilities.

We may select, incorporate some changes because others have them or tell us to get them.

It takes more than a notion to repackage well, satisfactorily.

Too often we allow others to do the repackaging and allow ourselves to be packaged.

The best advice: Be careful how you package and repackage; always know for whom the packaging is done.

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BLACK REPACKAGING Packaging is universal.

Know that we do not always get to do our packaging.

Repackaging Black, however, is of a different color.

There is repackaging, and there is repackaging!

Am I in charge?

Or is someone else in charge?

Is the someone a person I admire or a person I despise?

Is the someone I choose to imitate or someone I feel required to imitate?

Know that the repackaging is different, varies.

My hair? How do I do it—or don’t? Weave, wig, toupee? Color?

Straight? Curly?

My teeth? Mine or celebrities’ perfect teeth? A gap or an orthodontist to eliminate it?

Do I eat what I want, healthy, of course?

Or do I eat what I want?

Is weight an issue? Am I losing it for myself or others?

Gait—some folks criticize.

Language—some folks criticize.

Tone—some folks criticize.

How do I choose? Change? When?

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And then, much easier, is packaging of attire.

Do I select parts of others’ patterns?

Do I choose others’ patterns?

Or do I make my own?

This packaging is a part of life but can become an individual’s life.

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THE DILEMMA OF PACKAGING So often we don’t have a pattern.

Or, we have a pattern so unlike us that we feel defeated before we begin.

Often we decide there’s no way to become that pattern.

We decide that we must change—a decision made by a sister or society.

We come to learn refusing to conform can be costly—loss, isolation, harm, death.

Surely more of us can more often do our own packaging today.

(Or is that repackaging?)

Questions abound: Is this for money? Fame? Popularity?

Or is this repackaging for the sake of our sanity?

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Chari Glogovac-Smith

In conversation with Barbara Earl Thomas: The Transformation Room

A space, a praying grandmother's house, where Helen Baylor’s “Praying Grandmother” is on repeat. For Black children this space is heaven-sent, magical, transformational, sacred. These prayers cover and protect and rebuke American peril that may come. Grandma’s prayers transport beyond this Earth and drizzle down as stardust.

Song credits: “Praying Grandmother” by Helen Baylor

Given Them Ballroom In conversation with Derrick Adams: Style Variations & Barbara Earl Thomas: Cinderella Redressed

Did we make it to the Ballroom? We think so. We’ve fallen so deep, into the rabbit hole, the underbelly. As we ascend further, we vogue our way through cosmic energy, following the trails that blues riffs send. We improvise our way home, scratching at the surface from below, bootlegging an invitation to space. We’ve arrived.

Regal In conversation with Barbara Earl Thomas: The String Man

This audio experience explores regality recaptured, infinitely Black. The past and present collide through the way Blackness moves as we reshape our gaze. What does nature see when it sees Black? What do the birds see? The skies and sunrise? The String Man guides us in revisiting the world autonomously, in Black ways of knowing and being.

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Chari Glogovac-Smith & Rasheena Fountain Chari Glogovac-Smith is a Ph.D. Student, Digital Arts & Experimental Media Rasheena Fountain is an MFA in Creative Writing graduate and Ph.D. student in the Department of English.

This response is an experimental mixtape of original sonnets and sounds. Visitors can scan the QR codes to listen to location-specific tracks while viewing the artworks in the exhibit.

The Kitchen In conversation with Derrick Adams: Patrick Kelly, The Journey/Mood Board

Patrick Kelly, an icon Black designer, had his very first fashion show in his grandparents’ kitchen. Here is where composer Chari GlogovacSmith find unity; + they also made their first compositions in their parents’ kitchen. We celebrate the Black kitchen as a launchpad and a space for conversations and connections. We make do; we make possibilities. Kelly has been described as love, and we join in celebrating him in a chopped and screwed version of “At Your Best You are Love” by The Isley Brothers. We chop and screw and make do while finding time for joy, meals, conversations, and transformation.

Song credits: "At Your Best You Are Love" by The Isley Brothers

Solid Gold SOLD! In conversation with Derrick Adams: ON

Black music provides a soundtrack to life; it is a form of emancipation and is packaged for consumption. This audio story explores what happens when the appetite for Blackness as a product surpasses Black life. How are languages maintained in the packaging? Can this Blackness be contained?

Song credits: “Get Up Stand Up” by Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Use Ta Be My Girl” by The O'Jays, “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind & Fire and The Emotions,“We Want The Funk” by George Clinton

Praying Grandmother

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Desmond Brow n & Jezsaka Siu & Darrion Quintanal Diaz Desmond Brown is a student at Interagency Alder campus, 18 years old and from California.

Jezsaka Siu is a student at Interagency Alder campus, likes birds, reptiles, and drawing.

Darrion Quintanal Diaz is a student at Interagency Alder campus.

DESMOND BROWN

The designs had a lot of different shapes and patterns. They were black cultures and artists displayed in different ways with black and brown shades.

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JEZSAKA SIU

TV: Looking at life through someone else’s perspective.

Fruit: We are all different but we are all humans.

Birds: We are all able to fly free now and live among each other Roots: You never know how far someone’s roots have grown Tree: Tree of life

The sponge represents how I feel refreshed about my artwork and how I found inspiration.

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DARRION QUINTANAL DIAZ

I think the Packaged Black exhibit is very bright and vibrant. It gives a good look into black culture and individuality. It made me think about individuality and about how important women are, and it made me feel bad for people who grew up without parents so I drew an older woman in an African dress.

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Viv ian Phillips & Marcie Sillman Two wise women plumb the deepest depths and the tiniest cracks of our world to understand how culture and creativity shape our lives (also known as the hosts of the DoubleXposure podcast).

In late 2021, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, on the University of Washington campus, invited us to visit their new exhibition Packaged Black and to record our responses to the show for the museum’s community education programs.

Like doubleXposure, Packaged Black is a collaborative effort, featuring work by artists Derrick Adams and our friend Barbara Earl Thomas. Although the two use different media and artistic approaches, both challenge us to dig deeper into the ways in which art is a tool for understanding ourselves and others.

We were transformed by the show. It is truly monumental, uplifting, and inspirational.

So, we decided to invite you to sample Packaged Black in this special bonus episode of doubleXposure.

Scan with your phone to listen

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The Henry Art Gallery is located on the unceded historic and contemporary lands of the Duwamish, Suquamish, and Muckleshoot nations and other Coast Salish peoples who call the waters and lands of the Salish Sea home. We invite you to join us in this acknowledgment and reflect upon this context.

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Henry

H E N R YA R T. O R G HENRY ART GALLERY

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