It’s amazing what twisting paths spiders can lead us on if we let them. Several months ago I started checking out the biographies of the women captured with Louise in a 1935 Chicago Defender photo with the headline “They Are …
The Sisterly Affection of Friendship Albums
Three years ago, I participated in a project led by Anaïs Duplan of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies and Katie Parry of The Fabric Workshop and Museum. The project was called Endgame: Black Artists for an Urgent Black Future…
Taps Illustrated
A spider sure knows how to ensnare the unexpected in its web.
A friend received from her sister a discarded library book titled Illustrated Tap Rhythms And Routines by Edith Ballwebber, an Assistant Professor of Physical Education teaching at the …
A Paragraph in that Look
What does Louise tell us about herself in what appears to be the only existing professional photo of her? What clues are there in her attire, her make-up, her facial expression, her stance, or in her inscription to dancer Ludie …
Thoughts on building, remembering, and access
In this research process, I’ve begun building my own personal collection of books written by Black LGBTQ+ people. I already own some chapbooks, a few zines, and a couple of anthologies by community members, but I have started to become …
knick knacks: notes on a curatorial practice
also knickknack, nicknack, “a pleasing trifle, toy,” 1570s, a reduplication of knack (n.) “ingenious device, toy, trinket” (1530s), a specialized sense of knack (n.) “stratagem, trick.” (from the Online Etymology Dictionary)
i buy back all the spirits turned into toys:…
Towards Synthesizing Black Radical Abolitionist Feminism and Black Abolitionist Pasts
This past Women’s History Month started out with me reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. I have been thinking through fugitive and escape narratives, as they relate to the historical trajectory of Abolition …