CONTOURS OF THE INTERIOR

Exhibition curated at VisArts Center

Exhibition Page

Exhibition Syllabus

Exhibition Reviews: The Washington Post

Curatorial Talk with Angela Tate, Curator, Women’s History at Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

In her poem “Canary”, Rita Dove speaks to Billie Holiday with a gentle affirmation that she did not have to accede to the demands of the public for transparency about her life. Holiday carried experiences and histories in her body that cannot be summarized, infusing her voice with an affective potential that stimulated a well of emotional responses, overflowing from those who heard her. She rendered her soul, and yet so much was still asked of her, with little regard for her well-being. “If you can’t be free, be a mystery,” is a generous offering to Holiday, and one which extends throughout Contours of the Interior. This exhibition meditates on possibilities of withholding, opacity, quiet and mundanity, negotiating the expectation projected onto Black life, and Black femme life in particular, as always readily available to be consumed and extracted. Kevin Quashie engages quiet as, “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life- one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness” (2012, 6). [i] This potential permeates the work of artists Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Sasha-Kay Nicole and zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal, critically considering other possibilities for being, while reckoning with the intricate realities of the world.

What does it mean to create work that is oriented towards the complexities and intangible aspects of the interior self? For Black artists, there is an assumed, limited perspective that one’s work must respond to the realities of navigating structural and interpersonal anti-Blackness and reinforce modes of resistance to inequity. The work is often measured against some notion of identifiable “Blackness”, as if this term has a meaning that is universally held. Elizabeth Alexander describes the Black interior as an, “inner space in which black artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t or should be'' (2004, 5). [ii] Nicole, dumas-o’neal and Ogbara delve into this inner world, releasing themselves of the conscriptions projected onto their practices. Working across photography, sculpture, sound, video, and drawing, the artists create pieces that are open to the experience of the individual encounter.

With intimate detail, in a line into infinity (reaching for you), dumas-o’neal transcribes lines from Lorraine Hansberry’s short story “The Anticipation of Eve,” which narrates the anxiety a lesbian woman feels in deciding whether to share her queer desires with some family members. The artist tenderly holds Hansberry’s words, and the author’s own internal grappling with her queerness, charcoal enveloping the piece and leaving only a glimpse of what is written. In her layering of videos with photographs printed on vinyl, dumas-o’neal contemplates waterscapes that lead beyond where the eye can see

With their heads covered in plastic bags, a distance is created between the viewer and the figures in Nicole’s images. The impulse to forge connections through the face is interrupted. In the anonymity afforded to the subjects, there also emanates the potential for these figures to be many. In A Cultural Subject, there is no body, but a haunting presence remains. Nicole’s work interrogates the harm projected onto Black womxn with subtlety, for violence does not constitute the entirety of their lives.