BmoreArt

This interview was conducted on December 8th, 2024, and has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The last time you were interviewed for BmoreArt by Suzy Kopf in 2019, you were completing your first year as Director of Visual Arts at Creative Alliance. You reflected on the learning curve you experienced in that work in Voyage Baltimore in 2022, a year into your next position as inaugural Executive Director of the The Last Resort Artist Retreat (TLRAR). What did you learn during your TLRAR tenure?

Originally my idea was that we would be bringing in Black artists from all over the world to come to The Last Resort and engage in non-transactional social engagements: dinners, short stays at the residency, small gatherings. Our programmatic ideas developed, and our ideas around labor began to shift. What I found is that people enjoyed doing the work.

That idea really started to take shape more definitely in 2023 when our programming kicked off in a more major way.

Does that also mean in a more formalized way?

Yes. The symposium and retreat Lift as you Climb: Achieving Growth, Sustainability, and Impact for Black Cultural Workers was one of the first large scale programs that we did. We had a big dinner party that we did every month, and fundraisers, so these were formal. But we also started to think about how to present a space that would give people the autonomy to do whatever they wanted to do, where they would be encouraged to take a step back and chill, but no one is going to stop anyone from working. 

You left TLRAR in August and have been doing other projects. You recently returned from Miami, where you coordinated a panel series for Prizm 2024 and moderated one focused on “Cultural Currency and Financial Stability.”

The panel brought together Tammy Haygood, Financial Advisor for the Black Pearl Wealth Management Group, Nate Lewis, an artist, and Amber Cabral, a DEI strategist. I was looking at cultural currency and how it can be leveraged and lead to financial sustainability. We talked about creating infrastructures that will fund cultural work while holding companies accountable for not being exploitative or opportunistic. The last part of the panel was around reimagining what our support system looks like.

You also have been a member of the Arts Incubator Workgroup, which is about to deliver its preliminary report to the Governor on January 1, 2025.

We advocate for health insurance and housing for artists, and affordable studio space, especially in places that are not abundant with art districts, such as Southern Maryland and Hagerstown. An initiative is to change how art is taught, discussed, and perceived.

Since your 2019 interview about the “growing pains” of learning the curatorial role, your trajectory seems to have led you to a definitively structural set of questions and points of advocacy—for financial stability, for government investment in the arts, etc.

My experience of lack of support in the cultural and humanities sectors has shaped my thinking. We need to create a societal change for more support to make our sector sustainable and valued. As I started to understand the full ecosystem of how organizations run and what it takes, I am seeing the instability.

You are joining a one-year program in cultural criticism and curation at the University of the Arts in London. Will you continue studying these issues there?

There is a higher investment in art and culture in a lot of European countries. I am excited to see what that looks like, how it operates, and how it got there.

As a curator, I am interested in your approach to spatial organization and programmatic spaces. In your 2019 BmoreArt interview, you identified a 2017 pop-up interactive installation called “The Future of Sports” as one that made an impression on your thinking. It seemed that you weren’t only interested in the immersive “Instagrammable” nature of that presentation, but also how it was used as a platform for activities, such as athletic classes.

I forgot about that. One question I ask each time I put together an exhibition is how can I bring audiences into conversations through interactions; there are folks out there who can potentially influence even more folks. How do we pique their interest and help them to think in different ways? An immediate touch point that I can recall— a year later—is a solo exhibition that I curated of work by Christopher Batten (No Play Fighting, 2019). A lot of it was around his background. He had a punching bag in his studio, and I asked what if we bring that into the gallery? How can this be interactive?

Your exhibition, REVISIT/REIMAGINE is on view at the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum through January 4th. This exhibition converges your interests in immersive design, political and cultural history, and contemporary advocacy. 

Chanel Compton-Johnson, Executive Director of the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum, invited me to be the curator of an exhibition responding to 2024 as “Maryland’s Year of Civil Rights.” I was going to use their archives, but they were mostly focused on the everyday life of African Americans, and kind of missing that tie-in with civil rights. Chanel recommended that I also work with the AFRO. 

Afro Charities director Savannah Wood, quoted in an AFRO article about the exhibition earlier this year, referred to the archival selection process as a partnership.

I made a list of individuals and events that I was interested in, seeing if they had those records. They did the research and pulled all the images. Then I came in-person every week for a month to pick images that I would be interested in showing.

The exhibition presents archival images, books, furniture, domestic objects and plants in assemblages surrounded by works of contemporary art. When I came to the opening, people were sitting on the upholstered seating by Jeffrey Kent’s Being Black in Public (2021) while a violinist played nearby. Next to the furniture arrangement are contemporary artworks by Shroeder Cherry and Ernest Shaw, as well as shelving presenting books by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Isabel Wilkerson, a votive candle with James Baldwin’s image on it, a radio, a telephone, a corncob pipe, a plant, and other materials, all presented in domestic arrangements.

The books came from an initial list of books that I thought were important. Either monumental books for African Americans or the diaspora in total. I was helped to procure those through Baltimore Read Aloud, and some were from the museum library. I always hoped that people would pick up the books and flip through them and possibly take pictures. We also had a QR code that people could use to discover the books and order them. I did wish that people put them back where they found them a bit more! But it was meant to be interactive,

The other items were things that you would find in your grandparents’—or at least my grandparents’—house. The rotary phone, for example. The majority of the items were from the heightened times of the civil rights movement—the 1950s and 70s. I really wanted it to feel like a home. I have plants in my home. My grandparents had plants in their home. There’s an aesthetic value that plants bring. But I think there’s also this innate human value of caretaking and having something that’s living. I collaborated with B. Willow in Remington to curate a plant list that would do well in certain lighting.  

Overall, the installation mixed contemporary and vintage items. I wanted to mesh timelines together. 

In meshing timelines, it seemed you were thinking about intersections of history and the present day. This comes up in an interesting section of the exhibition catalogue that is dedicated to reflections on a 1943 report entitled the Maryland Governor’s Commission On Problems Affecting the Negro Population, 1943. Why, of all the archival documents that you encountered, did this stand out as important to dig into in the exhibition catalogue? 

The way that this came about was Chanel found this document and brought it up to me. I wanted to read this and write about it, considering the theme of revisiting—thinking about a time twenty-one years before the Civil Rights Act was signed. In the 1940s, segregation and Jim Crow were so very alive, and it was interesting to consider the priorities and perceptions that our municipal powers had at that time. I think the hardest-hitting point for me, and I think also for Chanel, was the connection to the Afro. 

You both write about how Ralph Matthews, former Associate Editor of the Washington Afro, “discredited” Black social activism.

He uses disparaging words to describe activists. It was a disheartening conversation about respectability politics. He felt that civil disruptions and grassroots efforts were not going to accomplish their goal. To me, he was on the wrong side of the “Talented Tenth” debate that W.E.B. DuBois writes about. We have seen that it doesn’t matter how buttoned up you are. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. was walking down the street in a suit and tie and getting bricks thrown at him, and he was a college grad.

How did it feel to read that quote from Ralph Matthews?

It was a letdown. Me having the level of access to certain archives now, it just reinforced a particular divide within the Black community that we see over and over again. To publish something like that in print, especially for the purpose of the report itself, is saddening. 

You write in the catalogue about the 1943 report presenting data about inequities that also are reflected in the present day. I believe you are also indicating some cultural reverberations beyond the data.

Yes, we are talking about mentalities and philosophies that show themselves in policy, in action, and within discourse. These things are indicative of the way that we were operating as a culture then, and also how we operate as a culture now.

There are moments in the exhibition where we see contemporary art or ornamentation reflecting historical materials, either through being placed in proximity to each other or even a literal mirror reflection.

In [the introductory room,] I wanted to create a fuller space in which you are surrounded by the installation. The overall purpose of the [installation by the mirror] was for people to see themselves among leaders including Rosa Parks, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, and others. I wanted this section to really be a reflection of the main points I wanted to drive home: although we see these figures as icons and heroes, they are still humans. They occupied domestic spaces. They did what they did, but you can do it too. The overall purpose and hope with the exhibition was to inspire inclusion and seeing yourself amongst great people, and this was the most literal way that I could do that.

REVISIT/REIMAGINE: The Civil Rights Era in Maryland and the Parallels of Today includes works by Quinci Baker, Sanah Brown Bowers, Schroeder Cherry, Shaunte Gates, Kyle Hackett, Jeffrey Kent, Lex Marie, Murjoni Merriweather, Jason Patterson, Earnest Shaw, Victoria Walton, Lionel Fraizer White III, Redeat Wondemu. 

Banneker-Douglass Museum, 84 Franklin Street, Annapolis, MD 21401. Feb 24, 2024 – Jan 5, 2025