Resolutely Black

This exhibition, reflection / abyss / vision / legacy was an experiment. Not the usual kind of experiment to make a discovery, nor to test a hypothesis, rather an experiment of collaboration, of finding new ways to work. These forms of working are not to be found in books nor in simplistic gestures of combining individuals to pursue specific tasks, rather they are in the practices of the imagination, the radical Black imagination to be specific. When CSSJ invited Porsha Olayiwola, the world slam poetry champion and current poet laureate of Boston, and Dara Bayer, artist and activist for social justice to collaborate, we did so with an open horizon. There were no rules to follow, what was crucial was the production of a poetic/artistic project, one in which blackness in all its complexity would come alive. As the collaboration unfolded, both found that they shared a passion for the work of Octavia Butler. A visit to the Butler archives at the Huntington Library opened the project in unexpected ways. Poetry, drawings, photographs, the installation of an altar, all were now generated by the enveloping engagement with Butler, her writings, but more so with the fragments of her writings, notes, letters, and more notes. One note reads, “The only lasting truth is change.” As I read that I reflected on this moment, in which the possibilities of change seem open yet not certain. A moment in which the freedom dreams of Black people once again shake America, as they always do. What will happen after the shaking? Both Dara and Porsha provide us with a possible answer, to lift oneself up from the abyss means, “engaging with a legacy,” and that legacy is Black freedom dreams. This then is an exhibition about black possibilities, in which to cite the black musical thinker Sun Ra there is, “always something else.”

That something else is anchored by Black life in this America. Yes, there is racial oppression and domination but in the midst of these forms of domination and death, there has always been the Black struggle for life, the refusal to be what power wants us to be. And so the Black imagination works its magic in this collaboration, refusing the conventional, opening a different space, an alternative horizon in which an altar of possibilities can be built for an “altered future.” There is in this project currents of Afro-futurism and Afro-surrealism running through it, making an appearance here and there, now hidden, but then exploding in the poetry:

and in the background a man
sings out loud to his dead

in a language our grief does not
know but the chant biographs

This project is a search for visual and poetic language. It is one which is produced within the alchemy of the work of the Black imagination, one in which as Butler writes in a fragment produced in the exhibition,

To teach
To shape
A new mind
A new figure
How to be human

The experiment has worked and for that we give thanks to Porsha and Dara for opening new horizons of the possible.

Anthony Bogues
Director, Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice