Creative and Curatorial Playgrounds of Black Interiority

  • Date: February 18, 2022
  • Time: 2:00 pm—3:30 pm
  • Location: Classroom 421
  • Speakers
  • Moderator/s

Record [Re]Play: Uncovering Black Interiority and Illegibility

Aneeka Ayanna Henderson

Associate Professor | American Studies

Black Studies and English Affiliate 

 As a marketing tool, album covers must herald new and old listeners, but it is often imagined as a façade that functions as a mere accessory for its corresponding music and artist. Despite how vibrant or playful they are, purses, earrings, and other accessories rarely hold the same gravitas as the formal gown. As a sonic accessory, album cover art stands in a similar shadow; it performs as an opening act that buoys the music and artist as the headlining event. My critical examination of album cover art in this project upends this hierarchy. There is renewed cultural interest in vinyl, but Black communities have long used albums as a vehicle for everyday curatorial play in domestic spaces. These quotidian art exhibitions on living room walls constitute a form of play that exists outside of institutions governed by racist, misogynistic, and elitist guidelines for art exhibition. These rituals suggest that albums are an indispensable archive of cultural production, creative expression, and Black portraiture. 

With a focus on Mary J. Blige’s 1992 album, this paper critically examines how a mode of expression we often imagine as an exterior apparatus function as a narrative of Black interiority. Blige is a master teacher in sartorial play; yet, my focus in this project is on the monochromatic portrait on her first album. It dramatically shifted the landscape for hip hop, soul, and rhythm and blues culture just as scholars and critics were eulogizing its demise, signified by Nelson George’s 1988 book The Death of Rhythm and Blues. It was Blige’s album that resuscitated rhythm and blues music and culture just as it was fading, so her album cover constitutes a creation story about hip hop and rhythm and blues music and culture. 

Blige’s career evinces the demand for artists to be seen and her hypervisibility provides a unique contrast to her retreat into the shadow on her debut album. The music industry’s marketing strategies require near constant visibility, so artists are rarely allowed an opportunity to play in the hazy gray areas of ambiguity and Black women are certainly not allowed or imagined to be enigmatic and illegible. Blige’s album is a rupture to this familiar visual vocabulary, signaling her play with opacity, evasion, and contemplation. The illegible album cover art mirrors her refusal to be restricted by one musical genre or made legible by one sound. Her face, coming into and retreating from the light, resists the routine surveillance, dehumanization, and exploitation that young artists experience as it facilitates communal engagement through multiple music genres. She inaugurated new forms of global Black popular culture and fashioned imaginative ecologies for Black female subjectivity by unmooring it from the discipline and order that one genre or single story demands. Blige’s project and interrogatory album title is in conversation with Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, What’s Going On, but Blige created a new kaleidoscopic grammar for Black interiority just as the public dissemination of Black interior life in late twentieth-century film and tabloid television shows exponentially increased.

“Girls of My Color, Find Somethin’ Else to Be: Toni Morrison’s Influence in Contemporary Black Women’s Sonic and Visual Imaginaries” 

Professor Stacie Elizabeth McCormick

 Debuting in 1970 amidst the groundswell of Black feminist intellectual production, Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye laid down a marker for themes that would come to characterize her art and that of Black women artists following her: visuality, the racial gaze, the interiority of Black women and girls, and their radical, knowledge-producing subjectivities. Thus, the measure of Toni Morrison’s influence does not just encompass her bracing storytelling, but also includes what her work makes possible.  

This paper will primarily take up Jamila Woods’ song and video “Sula,” inspired by Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name. The work draws on play and provocation as Woods advances conversations on Black women’s subjectivity. Through nature scenes, the visuality of the nude body, and more, Woods locates beauty in “the Bottom” or a softness and vulnerability often denied Black women. Reinforcing this through lyric, Woods writes, “Freedom and triumph they weren’t meant for me/Girls of my color find somethin’ else to be.” The critical work of finding “somethin’ else to be” represents the way Black girls and women utilize self-invention as a practice of freedom. I read this also as an adaptive praxis (Black adaptation, if you will) a counter-discursive and re-interpretive form of art making that can be both homage and invention. Much like Morrison, whose art was rooted in adaptation, artists like Woods are extending possibilities that Morrison’s work enables. 

Woods’ work also resonates with ongoing politics of Black embodiment where body shame and respectability politics still negatively impact Black women performers (such as: Lizzo, Chloe Bailey, Megan Thee Stallion, etc.). Given these realities, the nature setting of the music video for “Sula” can be understood as representing an alternate space to oppressive visual technologies – the “hostile soil” that makes it difficult for Black girls and women artists to thrive.  The work also reminds us of the ways music can be a form of expressive resistance and release for Black women.  Daphne Brooks writes, “An earnest reading of Morrison’s oeuvre can unearth endless examples of music, like the ‘singing women’ who emerge at the close of Beloved, bringing comfort to the novel’s protagonist Sethe, exorcising the ghosts of slavery by using their voices.” I think of artists like Jamila Woods as an extension of the singing women, freeing Black women from strictures of the past and antiquated notions of Black womanhood. 

In addition to my analysis of Woods, I will also point toward artists who are raising up Toni Morrison in their artmaking, namely Akua Naru and Amanda King, who both lift up Morrison’s generative artistry and pathmaking for Black women artists working to present the complexity of Black female subjectivity on their own terms. 

A Mathematics of Chaos: Structures of Care 

Tonya M. Foster

Years ago, after I had moved away from home, and home had become the place that I regularly returned to with a camera, I became committed to photographing and videotaping the places in New Orleans where my family had lived over the first two decades of my life. My “joke” to my mother was that one day when New Orleans has been reclaimed by water and salt, no one would believe that these places had existed. I wanted to develop proof of existence, to document something felt and heard, something on the edge of legibility that might be tracked through the visual. This sporadic documentation, begun over sixteen years ago, before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, is part of the digitized video archive out of which A Mathematics of Chaos draws some of its visual lexicons. The collection, which shifts between poetry and creative nonfiction prose, and which draws together text and images (found and recorded) is intended as a meditation on New Orleans, on disaster, on belonging, on family, on ideas of home, and on love. Part memoir, part myth, the work explores the spatial imaginary that a specific place with specific histories signifies. How does where we are tell us who we are


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