Iké Udé. “VIBE,” Cover Girl series, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

Often, the idea of illusion is present in the conceptualization or realization of my work. But the invitation by Jorge Daniel Veneciano to contribute to his special edition of ART21 Magazine prompted me to rethink and re-see some of my work more expressly within the framework of illusion.

In a sense, all of the arts, especially the visual arts, are composed as simulacra. Hence they are, in effect, illusions. With this framework in mind, one finds that the phrase, “What you see is what you get,” doesn’t apply to the arts: what you see is never exactly what you get. What you get, instead, is an illusory effect.

For instance, in my 1994 series, Cover Girl, my original concept was a critique of the politics of magazine covers: their simultaneous mass representation and under-representation of faces both imaginable and unimaginable. Viewing this body of work in retrospect, I see the series as an embodiment of illusion. In it, I designed magazine covers as deceptive simulacra of various well-known magazines—including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, Newsweek, and Glamour as well as now-defunct publications, such as The Face, Vibe, Arena, and Mirabella. My covers confused viewers then, and still do, because they were believable: they look and feel like real media products, and so are often mistaken for the real thing. They were deceptive in that sense, designed to convincingly engender the impression of reality in the world of media.

Iké Udé. “Harper’s Bazaar,” Cover Girl series, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

The same illusion is obtained in my 1995 series, The Regarded Self, in which I made simulacra of movie posters. I wanted viewers to perceive them as posters of actual motion pictures. With The Regarded Self, what particularly appealed to me was its economy of conceptually making a movie: to use the movie poster as a shorthand method for envisioning a wildly imaginative, open-ended, and not-yet-feature film. I rarely see more than five percent of the movies advertised through posters, yet I have a one-hundred-percent recall of these posters and can create my own narrative of the movies without ever seeing them. So, for me, the illusory effect of the movie poster was enough to conjure the unseen actual movie.

This tension between reality and illusion is at the heart of both the Cover Girl and The Regarded Self series. Things are not always what they seem. And often, in life as in art—and especially in most of my work—this rule is nearly a constant.

Iké Udé. The Regarded Self, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

Sartorial Anarchy is a more recent, ongoing body of work that I began in 2010. In it, I explore the sartorial ciphers of representation and identity as agencies of illusion. These markers of representation are in constant flux, not fixed; they are negotiable, permeable, and mixable. They are exquisitely multilayered in organization.

Take, for instance, Sartorial Anarchy #5. It’s a veritable United Nations equivalent of costumes, but across time, as well. The work quotes from varied costumes and from varied cultures and periods; it’s important to account for these details. Sartorial Anarchy #5 is composed of: a miniature fedora, 1920s; a macaroni wig, England, 1850s; a fighting stick, Zulu (South Africa), 1950s; a Norfolk jacket, 1859/60–present; a miniature blue/silver vintage brooch of a Philadelphia policeman, 1940s; a two-tone, white-and-blue collar shirt with French cuffs, 2009; canvas boot spats, World War I era; dress shoes, Yoruba, Nigeria, 1970s; an antique chair, origin unknown, 1940s; a gladiolus plant; a vintage side table, origin unknown; an antique blue gabbeh rug, Persia/Iran, 1900s–30s.

Iké Udé. Sartorial Anarchy #5, 2013. Pigment on satin paper, 54 x 36.11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Mixed in multiple layers, the various ciphers of costume and fashion—which originally represented different cultures and geographies—have been effectively dislocated, relocated, refashioned (as it were), and reorganized to create something new, irrespective of their original meanings or assignations. In this work, I created a fashion field without borders: a sartorial anarchy. The resulting composition obtains the illusion of coherence, but upon closer examination, one finds that the sartorial elements employed do not necessarily belong or ought to belong together. Nonetheless, the ensembles work. In this tension, there is an order of illusion, produced by the illusion of order, and this is an essential play that motivates my work.

Iké Udé. Sartorial Anarchy #30, 2013. Pigment on satin paper, 45.7 x 36.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Iké Udé’s latest series, Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty, will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago October 20 — December 23, 2016.

1+1=1
At Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon. The work rests in a corner and bends with viewer movement.

Perception in relation to time is what connects my early work, focused on the digital manipulation of imagery and video, to my current installation works. Video manipulates time and gives the viewer a new sense of it, yet often the viewer is only passively engaged. Two-dimensional work may not make use of time in the same way, and may be a more passive experience than video, but my approach incorporates kinetic movement as an important aspect of viewing.

I do not think all viewers will see my work as I intend. Often my work has prescribed viewing points, sweet spots from which the viewer can experience perspectival effects. With my work, when the viewer finds a certain sight line, forms will align, connections are made, and the drawing seems to complete itself. Finding this spot can be awkward, but I find that the most powerful aspect of the work. To walk around the work is to activate it, to animate it, to make it materialize. There is usually a moment at which the viewer cannot yet align the work but is on the cusp, creating a tension, excited to complete the image. After finding the viewing point, the viewer eventually leaves, and the work breaks apart, or warps, or skews in various directions.

Breakthrough Moment
At Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. This projection on vinyl and latex drawing introduced a viewing angle offset from the work, so the alignment and effect of depth is awkward at most other viewing positions. Foam core constructions populate the floor.

Illusions can be very complex or very simple. I think of my work as minimalist for its limited formal elements of line and plane. But I also limit my materials; I often choose items that do just enough visual work yet reveal their nature up close. Common masking tape, drywall, sign vinyl, foam core, and nylon string all serve as perceptual materials in my work. I want the illusion to be convincing, yet I want the viewer to acknowledge the illusion. My aim is to get the greatest visual effect from economical forms and materials and simple means, a humble illusion disguised as a grandiose gesture.

My work has manifested as video, wall drawings, photographic experiments with lasers, thousands of pieces of hanging string, basic projection mapping, and more. Recently I returned to video with a conceptual goal of simulating computer graphics. My work reads as a digital composition yet is purely analog in capture; this intention, for the work to simulate what it is not, becomes a lure for the viewer to look at the work. The illusion is less about how the visual result is experienced and more about leading to a discovery of the process.

Axis Index
At Suyama Space in Seattle, Washington. This work introduced extreme planar disruptions to a 360° forced perspective drawing with a very precise viewing position in the center of the room.

Side view of Axis Index.

Functioning in a similar way are my light wall drawings, which consist of a projection mapped to a precise vinyl-and-acrylic drawing on the wall. They have an obviously low-fi quality when seen up close, where the precision of the projector breaks down and the pixels become visible. Next to the crisp vinyl line, the projection sinks into space, like a hole in the wall, slightly out of focus. Yet when viewed from further away, at the prescribed, anamorphic angle of forty-five degrees, the works have an uncanny realness, though the disparate materials evade identification.

I just finished developing a solo exhibition to be presented in virtual reality. The work will use newly released technology, which will entail a room-size digital drawing, created in the virtual space by hand. Though the materials are no longer economical, the visual elements are stripped to the essentials: lines and planes in space, arranged to entice the viewer’s movements within it. Viewers can walk through the drawings, using their points of view to navigate a floating sculptural experience. This new medium seems perfect for my work. It produces what I have been searching for: making visible what does not exist.

Ex Image
A new series of work, this piece talks about extrusion of images into space. The white painted marks on individual strings align to create an illusionistic form from one view only.

Masterplexed
At Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. The work is entirely made of drywall, 2×4’s, house paint and sign vinyl. A very simple construction process yet the drawing aims to destabilize that pattern of building.

Fortress
A variable depth foam core structure was constructed as a dynamic surface for this forced perspective drawing to be created.

Virtual Reality tests
This is a snapshot through the viewfinder of the virtual reality headset. Using software like Google Tilt Brush allows drawing in real time in 3D space.

Laser Scans
Using multiple consumer laser levels, I create video and photographs of laser exposed architectures. In complete darkness, the individual line of the laser is profoundly informative, despite its limited area of exposure of the site.

Damien Gilley’s work is currently on view in the solo exhibition Specular, at Hap Gallery in Portland, Oregon June 2-July 9, 2016.

Vinsantos. SHE LIVES ALONE, detail, 2016. Polymer clay, cosmetics, quartz crystal, vintage and antique jewelry and accessories, 16″ x 46″. Courtesy of the artist.

I’ve always surrounded myself with things that look like me, accumulating objects worn and distressed. Piles of antique and vintage ephemera cluttered my home for years, long before I had the idea of putting these things to use. I admit it: I was a hoarder. But instead of collecting out-of-date magazines or cereal boxes or plain old garbage, I was drawn to anything handcrafted.

The idea of throwing away these objects, which someone had poured their heart and soul into, was unacceptable to me. Whether an ornate candleholder, or a broken piece of costume jewelry, or some old, decorative hardware: it was someone’s art, and all art should be preserved. My visual-art career began with mosaics, which led almost seamlessly into assemblage art, created from things that I found both beautiful and interesting, often from the street. In my assemblages, characters began to form and grow. This was never my intention, it just happened. Soon, I was introduced to the world of art dolls through a friend working in the medium. My entry into the world of doll making felt organic, like the next natural step.

Vinsantos. SHE LIVES ALONE, 2016. Polymer clay, cosmetics, quartz crystal, vintage and antique jewelry and accessories, 16″ x 46″. Courtesy of the artist.

As a drag performance artist and a musician, I have spent most of my adult life on the stage. Being in the spotlight definitely feeds the ego, but at the same time it taxes the private life that I hold dear. Doll making allows me to work with the tools of my trades within a degree of anonymity. It also justifies my habitual collecting. The characters I create are inspired by my life as an entertainer and the people who I have been so fortunate to work beside. Musicians, drag and burlesque performers, circus and sideshow folk, costumers, and hair and makeup stylists all contribute the ideas that form these one-of-a-kind creatures. The old and mostly discarded objects that decorate my dolls give them an immediate sentimentality; these repurposed and reinvented objects hold decades and centuries of stories within themselves.

My commissioned works take the art of the sentimental in a deeper direction; clients first rummage through their collections, putting together objects with personal value and historical significance. I’ll often consider these items for weeks before I feel they have found their proper places. I don’t want to be too mystical, but I often sense that I am channeling the energy left in these items by their previous owners. In this process, the lines between art and magic become blurred. I see the art that I create as a mash-up of sculpture, assemblage, fashion design, makeup, and hair artistry. I also see it as the reinvention and preservation of beauty.

Vinsantos. BELLA BLUE, detail, 2016. Polymer clay, cosmetics, acrylic, found objects. Courtesy of the artist.

Vinsantos. WITCH, 2016. Commissioned work. Polymer Clay, cosmetics, clients personal items, 14″ x 36″. Courtesy of the artist.

Photo of Vera Rubin. Courtesy of the artist.

A beautiful photograph conveys what the artist sees as its rightful and best composition. A photo, said to express a thousand words, has millions of thoughts put into it. One can deconstruct and analyze a photographic image through its use of shutter speed, aperture, and exposure—the amount of light allowed to reach the negative as well as the amount of public attention it receives. The image can be under- and overexposed in both senses, depending on the artist’s view. I am consistently let down by the obligation to bring my work to light. But I am often told exposure is necessary if I would like to sustain myself, if I would like to not be poor, if I would like to gain further popularity and build long-term relevance. And a lot of what I am told is true.

It’s tough to find the right balance of exposure for my work. My practice and performance are reaching a relatively stable place now. I don’t know if would call myself emerging because I have always operated within an underground scene. Most of my life has been under the radar of relevance, as I grew up in and out of homelessness and a myriad of other annoying tragedies. My life has existed mainly in the nighttime, as I believe in the redemptions of nightlife and the fundamental expression of queer culture that is manifested within it. For most of my life, my body, my intellect, the way I love, and how I fuck (or do not) have been deemed as not relevant to the mainstream conversation. In the daytime and above ground, I find myself confused, misunderstood, upset, and making little sense to most people.

Vera Rubin, Bananas Flyer. Courtesy of the artist.

This is why I have made my place in the nightlife underground, where I have been making art prolifically for seven years. I’m stoked by my parties, fashion, music, visual art, and writing, and by a community that seems to be really into what I do. All of my art is guided by a general concept of lunacy: a femme energy that controls the night and controls us. This delight in exploring the cerebral irrational and to embracing darkness has helped me tap into a queer collective consciousness and new femme ethic I never knew I was missing but was always starving for. This bliss has its secrets, and its ups and downs.

But to share these secrets with others means exposing them, bringing them to light. Until now, there really has been no reason to do so. But now I am thinking about navigating the exposure to this bliss of the night. Being part of queer culture—that not only involves a new ethic against assimilation, against visibility, against hegemony but also creates a greater, collective, cyborg consciousness—requires care with exposure. I can only take my lunacy seriously to the extent to which I want to recognize the light of the moon.

Vera Rubin. The Night is Femme exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.

Matthew Morrocco. Paul, 2015. Inkjet Print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

In the world of contemporary art, we are inundated by images. From art made to be photographed and shared, to Internet art, and “post-Internet” art, to Instagram and Tumblr celebrities. The normalizing of image making has made one thing clear: if art is not easily Instagrammable, it risks being unnoticed; it risks poor exposure. This prompts a new spin on the thought experiment about trees falling in woods, and yet still, the question remains: if art is not shared, reproduced, perpetuated ad infinitum, does it really matter?

As a medium, photography has a long history of mattering, specifically for the purposes of social progress. From Lewis Hine, whose photographs of child factory workers led to necessary labor reform, to Alice Seeley Harris, who exposed the subhuman exploitation of people in the Congo by Leopold II of Belgium for rubber and ivory. Consider also Robert Mapplethorpe, who drew major attention to homosexual men at a time when most people, particularly President Ronald Reagan, denied their existence, and later, their deaths. More recently, the image of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy found washed up on the shore in Turkey, made by Nilüfer Demir, captured the world’s attention as we watched the swelling numbers of refugees flee their homes for safety. From the beginning, photography has been an arbiter of historical information that sets trends, guides politics, and brings awareness to the unknown.

Matthew Morrocco. Self Portrait with Scott, 2012. Inkjet print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

Other artistic mediums—sculpture, painting, printmaking—speak in metaphors. They are aesthetically advanced, and their histories are long. But photography—youthful, exuberant, still in a relative infancy—remains consequential, speaking not with metaphor but with direct engagement.  Here is the place where the morally questionable can still experiment, where the ethics of society can be restaged and forged anew.  Here is the place where anyone with Internet access can find identity and, like Carrie Mae Weems, take control of their own history. It is from this place that I create photographs. Using the pre-photographic aesthetic lexicon of nineteenth-century painting, and the contemporary obsession with self-imaging, I create photographs that engage with a world that I struggle to understand and a history I am compelled to confront.

Matthew Morrocco. Elliott by the Lake, 2015. Inkjet print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

Good photography is not just an emblem from the past; it is history itself. How would we remember the anguish of the dust-bowl era without Dorothea Lange’s searing portrait of a migrant mother or understand adolescence without Rineke Dijkstra’s beautifully empathetic portraits? Exposure is not about baring it all but about revealing a point of view that remains unknown, a sensibility that must be seen to be understood. Exposure is about Michael Brown’s graduation portrait, Alton Sterling’s family portrait, and images gathered after a mass shooting in South Carolina, or San Bernadino, or Orlando. Exposure is about an image of President Barack Obama embracing a Hiroshima survivor or of First Lady Michelle Obama on the cover of Vogue. Exposure is about Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Caitlyn Jenner or the first all-transgender ad campaign by & Other Stories. Photography matters not just because it is easily reproducible but because within every frame there is the potential to unlock a new discovery for humanity, a new way of feeling or seeing or thinking, a formulation of identity and self worth. Photographs that endure call forth the past from the lost moments of time to animate us in the present and reinvigorate us from the depths of our own individual spirits. Choose your angles wisely.

Matthew Morrocco. Keith in the Mirror, 2015. Inkjet print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

Tino Rodriguez. Invocation, 2008. Oil on wood, 17″ x 19″. Courtesy of the artist.

My work emerges from a need to express and question who I am. Using myself as the subject of my work both questions and reaffirms my position, not only in society but also in the macroscopic world, both physical and metaphysical. Some of the themes in my work are: The Self, Dreams, Gender, and Fairy Tales.

The Self:

The medieval invention of the self-portrait introduced a dimension of mystery to the practice of painting. It is impossible to count the painters who, like master masons carving the keystone of an arch, succumbed to the temptation to leave a record of what they looked like. At first, they slipped portraits of themselves into groups of worshippers in their paintings: Hans Memling stands as a curious onlooker behind the retable of Sir Donne, and Botticelli painted himself in the proud posture of one of the powerful men in Florence, with whom he spent his time.  The power of the self-portrait over the spectator comes from the fact that the painter’s relation to his/her image incorporates the mirror, which evokes a transparent field; with a gaze and a few signs, the self-portrait creates a novel in itself.

I mostly paint self-portraits, and since an interest in the self has always been linked with narcissism, I must redefine the position as the subject of my work. Unlike Narcissus, I do not see the image of myself as an illusion that I may fall in love with. I see myself in the mirror, but the mirror is broken, shattered; each little piece of mirror reflects a different me. I am multiplied, like cells multiply inside the body. I transform myself for each painting. I carefully investigate fashion, architecture, landscape, flora, fauna, and symbolism. I don’t just paint fantasy; I paint a reality that goes beyond the borders of the framed painting. Most of these paintings depict clothing or objects I possess. Each of my paintings is a performance that I perform for myself. I offer myself to my own gaze. I see myself through my own eyes.

Tropical Lullaby, 2007. Oil on wood, 12″ x 16″. Courtesy of the artist.

Dreams:

Dreams are involuntary products of the psyche. They present us with a bewildering array of images and feelings, familiar and unfamiliar, all of which have something to teach us. The communicative power of dreams has been acknowledged for millennia: the ancients credited them with the power of prophecy, and in Egypt, the gods were believed to speak through the dreams of the pharaohs. However, the interpretation of dreams has always been fraught with uncertainty because the messages they carry emerge in an ambiguous and indistinct form. A dream is a narrative and often a highly condensed one, spanning an awesome amount of material with specialized, symbolic shorthand. Although many dream symbols are associated with universal archetypes, their precise meanings are mutable, depending on the psychology of the dreamer and on the context in which they appear in the dream.

My work deals with dreams, but my goal is not to depict or describe dreams. I find dreams as an inspiring source of information because they represent enigmas. I connect the process of dreaming with irrationality; when we’re conscious, we rationalize everything by virtue of our intellect. I have always admired the bizarre, obscure, incongruous, unknown, and mysterious because these qualities are often shadowed by irrationality and because they represent fear and darkness. In our society, we tend to forget that the concept of light would not exist without the concept of darkness. Jean Genet said, “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

The Strange Perfume of Love, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

Gender:

Our society has been successful in creating roles for both women and men. This creation has limited our performances in the sense that we are labeled from birth and therefore coerced to take role one or the other, but never both. Gender is not a natural occurrence; on the contrary, it is an artificial construction, a masquerade, a simulacrum. Anyone who does not fit in the role of woman or man is considered deviant. Gender is a constructed idea that I am trying to deconstruct with my work. I paint people who are neither feminine nor masculine; they are androgynous.

Many spiritual and occult traditions have taught that completeness of being can be achieved only internally, in the union of the male and the female principles that we each carry within us: the opposing active and passive forces of creativity. In the East, this idea of inner union finds expression in the tai-chi symbol and in Hindu and Buddhist tantra, in which a male and a female deity are entwined in an embrace so intricate that the two appear to inhabit a single body. Western occult and alchemical traditions express the attainment of inner reconciliation as the hermaphrodite or androgyne, a being at once male and female. In Jewish legend, Adam was hermaphroditic until Eve was separated from him. And in some Greek mythological accounts, Zeus was simultaneously male and female. Thus the androgyne questions the confining roles of male and female. It contemplates the idea of completion, of wholeness. It puzzles and confuses. Thus the sharp lines between being a woman or a man are blurred.

Persephone, 2003. Oil on wood, 12″ x 12″. Courtesy of the artist.

Fairy Tales:

Fairy tales are optimistic, no matter how terrifyingly serious some features of a story may be. This sets the fairy tale apart from other stories in which equally fantastic events occur, whether the happy outcome is due to the virtues of the heroine/hero, to chance, or to the interference of supernatural figures.

Fantasy, growing out of the fundamentally optimistic fairy tale, represents a uniquely positive response to dissatisfaction. The fantastic responds to destructiveness by building toward disorder through imagining order and to despair by calling forth wonder. My work responds to this characteristic of storytelling. I grew up in a harsh social environment, in which I had to protect myself on a daily basis. To endure, I invented fairy tales constantly in my mind, mostly about escape and transformation. In my stories, I was the hero and heroine; sometimes my escape was aided by someone else. I fantasized to survive.

My work does not offer concrete answers. Instead, the poetic essence of my paintings questions literal and rational meanings. I am not interested in answers because I do not think there are absolute ones. Most questions are enigmas that we carry within ourselves, and they are part of our multilayered, complex existence. Novalis said: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” I think the same of my paintings, which I consider visual poetry.

Gabrielle Civil during a performance. Photo: Michael J. Seidlinger. Courtesy of the artist.

I’m on my knees, a plump, Black woman in black from head to toe, my blue-black lipstick almost kissing the microphone. My thick, black, curly, natural hair is bobby-pinned flat on both sides, leaving my hair Afro-fabulous in the front and back. I stick my hair in the face of a smiling, bearded white man in glasses, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Y’all have heard Solange’s “A Place at the Table,” right?  Yeah! The crowd screams. Y’all have heard “Don’t Touch My Hair”? Yeah! Well, TOUCH MY HAIR. Gasp. The crowd shifts: What?! C’mon. Come on. Touch my hair. I’m bending over and crawling. I’m leaning and entering the white man’s space.

Go ahead.

Touch it.

Nervous laughter.

Touch it. Touch it. Touch it.

I’m hissing into the microphone.

I’m pressing my body flush against his chest.

You know you want to . . .

He’s laughing and squirming. His eyes are closed.

I can almost see the tears forming on the other side of his eyelids.

Just doooooo it. Just dooooooooo it.

I’m crooning. My head is almost in his lap.

His body almost vibrates from my presence.

His hands haven’t moved.

Nothing else can happen until you touch it. Do it right now.

Finally, the poor guy taps my enticing, fuzzy crown.

HOW DARE YOU!

I scramble away from him and rise to my feet.

YOU TOUCHED MY HAIR?!

The crowd roars.

WHY DID YOU DO THAT?

He mumbles something about white privilege.

You better go back and listen to some Solange.

The performance continues.

* * * * *

When I took the stage that night at the Black Squirrel bar in Washington, D.C., an impish frisson of delight tickled through me. Ostensibly a literary reading, with my help, it became something else. I moved the crowd around, pressed my pelvis against the wall in a display of “fat Black performance art.” Hissing, crawling, and confronting the audience felt illicit, mischievous, and wonderful. Bossing, demanding, cajoling, changing my mind, blurring the space between humor and threat, us and them, felt delicious and life-preserving. Who gets to run the space? Who gets to be surprising? Who gets to be bad?

In my early days as a performance artist, I was plagued by the question of who got to do what. As a nice girl, a first-generation-middle-class Black poet, what space did I have for risk, surprise, or perversity? My job was to be smart and well mannered, and most especially good, which is to say, follow whatever the rules of blackness said was right. It is this goodness that got me. Performance art liberated me from all that, the scripts that predetermined exactly what was happening or was supposed to happen, exactly what I was supposed to think, say, and do, and how both powerless and angry I would feel about it.

This moment illustrates one of my favorite aspects of being a Black feminist performance artist: the opportunity to shift the balance between what is expected of me—as a plump, dark-skinned, natural-haired, Black woman—and what I will actually do.

* * * * *

In his essay, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as Ungrateful Black Writer,” Saeed Jones brings up this hair anecdote at a toxic, highbrow literary party: “‘You’ve grown out your hair,’ the poet said, the ice in his cocktail catching light. ‘Now I’m going to do that racist thing where I touch your hair,’ he said as he reached for my afro. His fingers tested the texture of my hair, the way you might squeeze a bath sponge.”¹ Yes, still this, in 2017. Interesting too, the poet knows that he’s not supposed to touch the black man’s hair and does it anyway.  Where does such license come from?

My entire life as a Black woman, I have been entangled in hair discourse, trying to retwist the locks. How white enslavers categorized Black hair grades on charts to claim Negroid inhumanity. How debates raged in the 1960s, pitting righteous, natural Black women against “bougie,” hot-combed ones. How braids and weaves incorporated the synthetic into both Afrocentric and corporate looks: corn row, conk, press and curl, Jheri curl, French twist, high-top fade. This is not an exhaustive list.

To touch a Black person’s hair without permission—and even to ask to touch it—is sloppy and gauche. This has been true for decades. So, when Phoebe Robinson’s book, You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, came out, I groaned: Really in 2017? Really, Solange? We’re still talking about this? As long as racist micro-aggressions and cluelessness persist along with endemic state violence and systemic oppression, yes, I guess we still have to.

* * * * *

At a performance art workshop in Mexico, a beautiful Afro-Latina college student asked me how I dealt with some of our classmates touching my hair. I asked her if people were touching her hair without her consent, and let her know I thought that wasn’t cool. She said she agreed and had been letting them know. But on a personal level, she wanted to know how I felt about it.

It was my turn to take a minute and shift. In this workshop, folks had been gazing into each other’s eyes, speaking in different languages, getting naked. What did it mean that I had barely noticed people touching my hair? Had I let my guard down, being outside of the United States? Or had I just taken it as par for the course, a small price to pay for border crossing? Had I felt a special level of trust in that context?  Maybe all of the above? Her question sparked guilt at my lack of vigilance. Had I been letting my people down, letting the adversary in? Letting them touch me without penalty? What kind of role model was I being for this young woman? I too had been subjected to blithe, unthinking white people asking to touch my hair, and I had felt objectified and angry, thrust into the pernicious choice between being a mammy or a killjoy. Do I really think that’s okay? Of course not. But in that workshop, I felt such great pleasure at being seen and touched, especially because so often in the United States I feel bereft and undesirable.

* * * * *

And yet. The perverse craving. Let’s change it up. Surprise. Maybe I’m neither the mammy nor the killjoy. Maybe I’m both: a queen and a thot, a poet and a PhD. Maybe I can be strong, make you laugh, make you uncomfortable, make you feel ashamed, make you acknowledge your desire. Maybe I am histrionic, enraged, the angry Black woman. Maybe I’m a temptress, a succubus. Maybe I contain multitudes. Maybe I’m your next girlfriend. Maybe I’m just messing with you because I can. Maybe sometimes I do want it. Maybe I do want your hands on my body, but I want to control it. Maybe I don’t want to be scripted. Maybe I don’t want anyone to tell me what the hell to do or how to feel. Maybe, under white supremacy, I can’t take that too far. Maybe it still bounces back, my armor, an aura of power and protection. Maybe this is breaking the frame. Or trying to break it. Maybe this is an experiment in joy. Maybe this is the balance of Black, feminist performance, tipping the scales of identity, history, and art.

1. Saeed Jones, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as Ungrateful Black Writer,” Buzzfeed, April 3, 2015.

W 188th Street, Manhattan, 2017. Image credits: Pascal Troemel.

I’m sick as a dog at noon on a Sunday. Though I haven’t ventured far from the bed, walking is still on my mind. Earlier this month, on Friday, April 14th—otherwise known as Good Friday—I walked the length of Manhattan from dawn until dusk, following Broadway from its start at Bowling Green to the northern tip of the island in Inwood Park, a distance of approximately thirteen miles.

I have integrated durational walking into my practice for years as a framework for seeing, using photography as a catalyst and tool. New York is an ideal city for walkers, one characterized by the duality of anonymity and hard-won sites of personal significance. “Space is a practiced place,” as Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life; it is a reminder of the personal maps we create for ourselves as we navigate the city on a daily basis. By walking the length of Broadway in one day, I continued a yearly tradition started in 2014, where historically the only parameters have been a set route and heightened awareness, embracing the intersection of chance and habitual action.

Beyond seeing, I have also come to understand the importance of walking as a practice in or critique of being seen. Garnette Cadogan writes about discovering the freedom of walking as a kid in Kingston, Jamaica, and the realities of his adapted movement when “Walking While Black” in America. Listening to a radio show recently, I also heard a male author (and insomniac) of European descent describe the self-assured quiet of his late-night walks through Manhattan—a feeling unknown to others because of gender or race. As a white woman, there are certain subjectivities I cannot claim. But this year I planned to move a step beyond the experience of observer, to create a more visible separation and possibly unsettling effect, emphasizing the shift to witness.

Walker Street, 2017. Image credit: Erin Sweeny.

Walking as a poetic and, at times, political act is widely recognized in the approach of contemporary artists such as Francis Alÿs, Janet Cardiff, and Richard Long in works using symbolic gestures, audio tracks and natural materials, respectively. Such works were an entry point for me, revealing how the experience of movement could be framed in a myriad of ways. While the resulting works may be concrete, the presence of the artist is fleeting by design. In stark contrast lies the walking—crawling, rather—projects of William Pope.L, whose primary intent was to move slowly and painfully in situations uncomfortable for both artist and viewer in order to “provoke acknowledgement and reconsiderations of social inequity, homelessness, and abjection.”

The best known of Pope.L’s crawling performances is The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001-2009), which is notable in relation to my own practice as Pope.L followed a similar route to the one I walked last week—though he would travel it dressed in a Superman costume with a skateboard strapped to his back in lieu of a cape, crawling the entirety of Broadway in segments over the course of nine years. In explanation, Pope.L noted that, “In New York, in most cities, if you can remain vertical and moving you deal with the world; this is urban power. But people who are forced to give up their verticality are prey to all kinds of dangers.” The title of his project references the socio-economic contradictions of Broadway, blatantly addressing the underbelly of a street more often recognized as a symbol of the city’s wealth, glitz and glamour.

While my own costume and approach were far more understated, the core aim was similar in terms of the desire to witness and absorb the spectrum of realities in this practiced place. I dressed in black, my face vaguely painted with a ghostly wash of white. Around my neck I’d wrapped a sizeable bundle of fabric to be knotted along the route, a means of tracking distance that also served as a large scarf to hide behind in the early hours of the walk (and on the J train at 5am as I felt others’ eyes on me). Walking from the subway to Battery Park, I arrived at The Sphere just before sunrise, noting the quiet of the plaza that would soon be filled with a throng of tourists in their foam Lady Liberty visors. Then I was off, slowly and silently, heading out of the park and up Broadway towards the Charging Bull and his newest foe.

Untitled, 2017. Image credit: Pascal Troemel.

In past years, I’ve documented or gathered materials as a means of synthesizing the experience and encounters of long walking. This year, while it lasted, the knotted material served as its own record of those first hours as I walked through Wall Street, TriBeCa and SoHo. Small knots for each block, double knots for major intersections: Canal, Houston, East 14th. In addition, there was the surprising freedom of silent interactions with both strangers and friends along the route, including one MTA employee in his bright orange vest who just needed an ear on the corner of Broadway and W. 125th. As I passed through Times Square, another woman with teased hair and frosted lipstick pointed me out to her friends as “the rosary gatherer.” While some eyed my presence with skepticism and most with indifference in a city that has seen it all, others embraced it as an invitation.

But the experience is distilled down into one interaction for me, somewhere near Zabar’s on Broadway and W. 80th. An older gentleman was walking with a rolling cart containing his few groceries. He wore a newsboy cap and walked slowly—very slowly—slightly bent forward over his cart. My intention had been to walk at a similar pace, but I needed a reference point to slow down. Following at a respectable distance, I matched my gait to his. Separately but together, we walked. I tried to put myself in that body, feeling the pull of his shoulders and the slight tilt of his head, his slow but steady way. I continued that way for a few blocks, before breaking step and soon passing my unwitting teacher with a silent word of thanks.

Amanda Long. Wishing Well, 2016. Interactive video sculpture installed at site of the original well in the back yard of the farmhouse. Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, New York. © Amanda Long.

Wishes are typically made in silence and kept in the privacy of one’s mind: a unique moment, when one believes in a future that may be possible. This act of faith is embodied in my work, Wishing Well, which allows each participant to record a wish in a public space, in effect sending a digital message in a bottle to the seas of the internet. Through the Arts in the Park program and the Historic House Trust’s Contemporary Art Partnerships Program, this interactive video sculpture has been collecting anonymous audio wishes since November 2016 at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in Manhattan.

What do people wish for, and what does this reveal about our culture? In their recordings, people are worried about the nation’s political and economic situation and about their health. One woman says, “We wish our country would be more inclusive and loving towards each other.” Another voice says, “I wish for people to be nice to each other and to figure things out in this country.” “I wish that people would be happier,” says another. The sight of the Dyckman’s traditional farmhouse and land makes visitors aware of the home they want and wish for: “I wish we had a new house. (laughter)”

The voices are all distinctive, yet threads of commonality are clear. In the past six months in New York City, certain themes have emerged. I’ve separated the wishes into categories: dreams, politics, health, the economy, love, and humor. Many are in Spanish, French, Hebrew, Chinese, and other languages from around the world; some are even sung.

Wishing Well creates an archive of the dreams, concerns, and humor of local people. Many of the wishes contain a story: “I wish Donald Trump to quit the job. I don’t want him as the President”; “I wish I could be healthy for the next twenty years or however long I live”; “I wish for world equality”; “My wish is for reason, compassion, and sanity to rule all decisions made by all people.”

Amanda Long. Wishing Well with Dyckman Farmhouse in background, 2016. Interactive video sculpture installed at site of the original well in the back yard of the farmhouse. Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, New York. © Amanda Long.

The automated work has become, in effect, an oral documentary of visitors to the historic site, the last existing farmhouse in Manhattan. Since the work presents no recording crew or obvious technology, participants anthropomorphize the well, addressing it directly. Children repeatedly visit the well, asking for magical powers or good grades, tapping on its surface and expecting an immediate answer: “I wished I passed 5th grade!”; “I wish that I would get my grandmother back!” Adults sometimes come alone to turn the crank of the well and wish for a job promotion. In a quiet voice, a woman wishes for a baby. Meanwhile the background sounds offer the context of the street, layered with wildlife cloistered among the farm’s gardens. The static mystery of Wishing Well attracts personal aspirations (a man asks that his business of flipping houses will bring him financial gain) as well as universal hopes for political progress and fears of economic uncertainty (many wish for unity, peace, and a world with more respect and love).

Amanda Long. Audio recordings generated by the Wishing Well visitors, 2016-2017. Interactive video sculpture. Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, New York. © Amanda Long.

Expressed in the wishes is much love, laughter, and hope. This is significant: the ability to wish indicates the freedom to follow one’s dreams. It is a human right. The ability to dream provides strength for each American to stand up for herself or himself in the present and future of this country. In contrast, in the film HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis, a cleaning woman interviewed in the Soviet Union is asked what she dreams or wishes for. As she scrubs, she explains to the interviewer: “I don’t wish for anything. I don’t believe in anything, not even you.”

Wishing Well is an artwork that gives people a space in which to dream. Despite being downtrodden by financial and political turmoil and anxiety, the human spirit has not been extinguished. Prompting people to wish and to dream is essential in the face of authoritarian regimes and is inherent to our democracy. It is my motivation for making the Wishing Well: to collect and amplify the visitors’ voices, for a vision of a better, kinder future.

Jonathan Calm. Lorraine Motel I, 2017. Silver gelatin; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and LMAK Projects, New York. © Jonathan Calm.

I took these two photographs at one of the landmark sites of modern American history and African-American commemoration: the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, and which since has been preserved as part of the National Civil Rights Museum. It is impossible to fathom how often the Lorraine has been photographed, from the now-famous picture by Joseph Louw taken right after the assassination to the millions of shots snapped by visitors drawn to the motel over the past half century.

In June 2016, I went to the Lorraine Motel as the photographer for a BBC Radio documentary about the Green Book guides, which were published from 1936 to 1967 to inform Black travelers of establishments that offered safe and dignified accommodations on their journey through the Jim Crow South. Formerly a Whites-only establishment, the Lorraine became one of these havens after it was bought, and renamed, by Walter and Loree Bailey in 1945.

Perhaps because of the assignment I was given, my attention went to the two cars stationed in front: a 1959 Dodge Royal with lime-green fins and a white 1968 Cadillac, replicas of the vehicles that were parked under the balcony of Room 306 at the time of Dr. King’s death. Somewhat oddly, the website of the museum states that the cars “have no historical significance” but are simply “intended to orient visitors to the time period in which they are about to enter.”¹

Jonathan Calm. Lorraine Motel II, 2017. Archival pigment print; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and LMAK Projects, New York. © Jonathan Calm.

In popular cultural history, the past to which these gatekeepers are set to transport us exists as an amalgam of black-and-white and color images that can be linked to the transition from one to the other in televised representations. I decided to shoot in black-and-white and in color, and what struck me upon viewing my photos were the vastly different historical experiences and discourses conjured by the two visual registers.

Seen in color, the cars convey a sense of historical product placement. They represent the seminal empowerment that cars and car ownership offered African-Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. Automobility meant freedom from a segregated system of rights and amenities, “a partial emancipation of Jim Crowism,” as one scholar put it at the beginning of the post-WWII era.² The American dream of the open road became accessible to Blacks who could afford it, and beyond their practical use, cars came to symbolize the socioeconomic upward mobility of an expanding Black middle class.

Advertising campaigns by car companies celebrated the heightened visibility of Black motorists, but on the road this visibility often came at a high price. Long before racial profiling was coined as a term, the dangers and humiliations of “driving while Black” were very much in evidence. This is the black-and-white vision of the cars in the Lorraine courtyard: the tragic irony that this presumed safe place for African-American travelers became famous as the execution site of the nation’s most iconic Black leader. (As early as 1955, during the year-long Montgomery bus boycott that put Dr. King on the map as a civil-rights leader, he was stopped for speeding about thirty times by White law-enforcement officers.)

The color photograph of the Lorraine Motel captures the place as a time capsule, a reliquary space of nostalgic preservation. It enshrines the site like an almost eerily perfect Kodak moment, much like the interior of Dr. King’s glass-shielded room, which has been left untouched since the fateful afternoon of his death. The black-and-white photograph offers a very different historical and racial reality, one that feels less removed from the world we live in, despite the picture’s monochromatic rendering. In this image, the commemorative wreath that was installed as a tribute to Dr. King’s final moments and lasting legacy also evokes the unsung numbers of young African-American drivers and passengers who never reached their destination because they were stopped dead in their tracks.

1.“Frequently Asked Questions,” National Civil Rights Museum.

2. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944, 2 vols.), quoted in Thomas J. Sugrue, “Driving While Black: The Car and Race Relations in Modern America,” Automobile in American Life and Society.

Natalia Almada. El Velador, 2011. Production still of documentary feature film; 72 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. © Natalia Almada.

In December 2009 while I was shooting my film, El Velador, at a narco cemetery in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Beltran Leyva, known as “El Jefe de Jefes” (the boss of bosses), was assassinated. A decapitated head was left on his tomb. Initially I thought it was a threat; later it was explained to me that it was an offering, indicated by the red gerbera daisy placed behind the left ear of the bloodied head. In the photograph that inevitably circulated in the tabloids and on the web, this floral detail stood out brilliantly against the white marble of the tomb. Perhaps the person who left the head on the tomb was not the one who pressed the shutter release on the camera, but when he placed the gerbera behind the left ear, he most certainly knew a photograph would be taken—and knew, moreover, that the more shocking the sight, the more likely it would be to circulate far and wide.

What are we to make of this image? Is it like the Abu Ghraib photographs, meant to mock, torture, and instill fear? Are they trophies of war, like the photographs of lynched African Americans in the southern United States or the photographs of the religious hung along train tracks in Mexico’s war against the Catholic Church? What is the role of the photographers who made these images? Were they depicting the truth, simply observing, or were they accomplices in the mechanics of war?

Natalia Almada. Al Otro Lado, 2005. Unidentified grave along U.S./Mexico Border (in U.S.). Production still of feature film; 90 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. © Natalia Almada.

It is impossible to look at this image, or any image, at face value. All we can gather from that approach is a description of the image, but no understanding, no meaning. Images must be seen and interpreted, which means that they must be made with intention. They form another language, with its own grammar composed of light, color, composition, and, in the case of cinema, movement. For a maker of images, understanding this is a source of great responsibility and freedom.

The challenge of making El Velador was to create a film about violence without participating in the proliferation of images of violence. The film is often described as an observational documentary. I believe this is a misnomer, for it presumes that the observation is somehow objective and passive. It denies the agency of the observer (the filmmaker), who is constantly making choices about how to represent that which is before the lens in order to convey a certain meaning. There was nothing passive about the making of El Velador. Each shot was considered, both when it was made and during the editing process. More importantly, the decisions were made by me, a woman who is half Mexican and half American, who grew up between Sinaloa and the United States, with a certain privilege, education, and point of view.

Natalia Almada. El Velador, 2011. Production still of documentary feature film; 72 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. © Natalia Almada.

Susan Sontag wrote, “Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view. They were a record of the real—incontrovertible, as no verbal account, however impartial, could be—since a machine was doing the recording. And they bore witness to the real—since a person had been there to take them. Photographs, [Virginia] Woolf claims, ‘are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye.’ The truth is they are not ‘simply’ anything, and certainly not regarded just as facts, by Woolf or anyone else.”

Perhaps Woolf’s understanding of photography seems naive to us today. Does she not consider the photographer framing the image? Does she not ask, for example, what was just to the left of the frame or even why the photograph was taken at all? Of course she is describing photographs before the invention of Photoshop and definitely before selfies. And yet, when I taught a class this past winter, my undergraduate students would describe certain handheld, long-shot video footage (what they called “raw”) as more truthful, more objective. Somehow even this generation of individuals who fabricate their identities on social media is able to suspend disbelief, refuse all criticality, and accept an image as the truth.

Natalia Almada. Todo lo demás, 2016. Production still of feature film; 90 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. © Natalia Almada.

But why? What is the value or the function of believing that photographs can hold the truth and that there is an objective truth to be held? Who benefits from this belief?

To the uncritical consumer of images, photographs and films are the last vestiges of an uncomplicated world that one could rely on, that one could pretend to understand, to know, even to possess. To accept that all images are subjective is to dive into turbulent waters with no life vest. An uncritical consumer gives a producer of images all the power, as any image will be unquestioned. As an image producer, I am the holder of the truth. My finger—Roland Barthes said that photography’s organ was the finger, not the eye—is god. What power!

On the bulletin board in my studio, I have placed two note cards next to each other: one says constructed documentary and the other, documented fiction. In many ways, all of my films have straddled the line between fiction and documentary. It is precisely the tension of the border between the two genres—one that inherently questions the nature of objective truth versus subjective perception—that interests me. For me, a documentary is an improvisation with reality, not a depiction of it, and fiction is a documentation of a constructed reality. The distinction between the two is more about process than concept. In both genres, I am trying to make sense of the world for myself through a lens and to share that interpretation with others.

Ahmed Mater. Desert of Pharan, 2008-2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.

I find it interesting to think about the word public in the context of Mecca—the subject of my most recent body of work. The word represents something bare, exposing elements of oneself or one’s community to be interpreted (or misinterpreted), bringing the state of being public to the public’s attention. A few years ago, I started a project about Mecca called Desert of Pharan, an exercise of thought that began intuitively and compulsively, a continuation of a narrative that runs through all my work. Formulated as a series, Desert of Pharan has been published in a volume in a public forum. Perhaps my work is about the public as an organism: a living and breathing creature that informs and creates, denies and destroys.

This creature, this mythic beautiful and majestic dragon, with its scales tiled one upon the other, has filled the images of my work. It has appeared as lead filaments, bowed down to the magnet that draws them close, as a mass of figures bathed in white cloth, moving as one around the Ka’aba, the building at the center of the Great Mosque of Mecca. The work is not religious; it is the embodiment of two words that symbolize a polarity, a push and pull, the public and space. How can one find private space within the public? And how can the public find a form for its space? This cause and effect, a pull between the desire to commune and the reality of eternal solitude, sits at the heart of Mecca.

Ahmed Mater. Magnetism IV, 2012. Diasec mounted Lightjet print on Kodak Premier paper; 180 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The Ka’aba is like a black hole. It draws us into dimensions that our consciousness cannot fathom. It represents another plane of understanding. Upright, at the center of the circling pilgrims dressed in white ihram, it draws them nearer, tightening the spiral, bringing them closer, transforming each from a singular to a plural to a singular again—to a public. This circling process, or tawaf, propels you—carried by the public, now a people, then a community, permeated by a persistent elation, fulfills a peaceful formation so as not to become a stampede.

Mecca has no permanent physical structures. The demolitions and reconfigurations occur on the surface. There is no commitment to these high-rise, five-star, air-conditioned structures. Stone, mortar, brick, cement, blood, and sweat have solidified them, but, just as the city has recently been redrawn, so it might as readily be taken down again. There is no permanence in Mecca, save the original site of the gathering of the pilgrims, the public. In Islamic culture, the notion of public spaces in which to meditate—taking form in other cultures as temples or churches or the secular contemplative spaces of galleries or museums—was originally articulated as a wall-less form. Public space was delineated simply by the desire for people to congregate, bounded by imaginary walls. This practice of congregation extends within Islamic culture to the majlis, which literally means “a place of sitting,” yet invokes public, ceremonial, domestic, and formal gatherings. This practice of informal, structured arrangement—of seating, of place making, of circling around a central location—happens in public and in private. I believe the more imaginative formation of millions, who each year visit the site of Mecca, will remain as both a (non)physical and symbolic mediation.

Ahmed Mater. Desert of Pharan, 2008-2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.

This attitude toward the public—at once a release of self-consciousness and an abandonment of individuality, as well as a reconnection with one’s psyche—that is found in Islam and is located physically, socially, and politically within Saudi Arabia, is unique. It cannot be replicated, and it feeds or is fed from the satellites within the kingdom. My work, like this attitude, is based on satellites of thought. My work 100 Found Objects is composed of pieces found on the site of Mecca during its demolition; it also extends to broader, more political, and international meanings. Are we humans not a public, and is our world, this island within a universe, not a public space? Recognizing interrelations and practicing an openness of thought can allow histories to be rewritten. The collection of 100 Found Objects sits within a narrative—fictional, truthful, archived, rediscovered—that questions our understanding of public truth and in turn our public space for thought. The notion of public space as defined by physical boundaries is countered by that formed by public thought and conversation.

Saudi life has seen dramatic changes over the past ten years. How we express what we think within public space has been a point of contention, involving risk and spurring international outcry. What happens to us Saudi Arabians within these intangible public spaces and how we are viewed as one vein of a human public are preoccupations of my generation and in turn of my work. (One of my earlier pieces, Evolution of Man, addresses such self-reflective recognitions.)

Ahmed Mater. Evolution of Man, 2010. 5 silk-screen prints; each 80 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In my work, I am channeling the vision that I use to conceive new videos and installations toward a social project; it is a return to a role similar to that of a community doctor. My process of making art is the examination of my public; the exhibition is a proposed diagnosis; my work with the Misk Art Institute, in some ways, is prescriptive. Instead of making art for public spaces, I use public spaces to inform my art. I hope to challenge the notion of “public space,” not only in Saudi Arabia but also international locations. This has the potential to do something differently: to think through not only public space but also a space with a public, a people, and what that space means within our current context. What is its potential, within this new territory, for a public and for a people?

Ahmed Mater. Desert of Pharan, 2008-2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.

Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through June 17, 2018.