Contemporary Art–Painting, Public Art, Photography

Undisciplined Pleasures, Vigilant Defiance 1.0 & 2.0

Sarah Khan

Vast is the African Indian Ocean World (AIOW). The polyethnic peoples and cultures crisscrossed the waters and engaged in dynamic exchanges around language, foodways and much more, long before the hegemony of European colonization. The 16th Century Central Indian Illustrated Sultanate manuscript, The Book of Delights, sparked my recent two bodies of prints. I expand in the dismantling and reassembling the Book of Delights. The act allows a death of one form and the rebirth not only of seriously playful characters but also of the self and unimagined possibilities for others. By recreating the past, I assure futures.

The cookbook, written in Persian and Urdu, includes African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women who dutifully serve the bon viveur patriarch Ghiyath Shah of Malwa. The Sultan commissioned the cookbook when he retired to his City of Joy, 1469-1500 CE. Largely intact, it includes detailed cookware, flora, and pastel-vibrant illustrations that surround the Sultan. Demure and dutiful polyethnic attendants, frozen in profile, prepare spice laden foods, medicinals, attars and aphrodisiacs with skill. The women also hunt, fish, and engage in animated culinary, philosophical and religious debates.

And yet, the illustrated cookbook demanded a playful visual critical fabulation. Slight notice centers on those in the background, who harvested, hunted, prepared, cooked, and served in infinite ways. Originally painted with a range of skin colors, the images portray the AIOW women who worked, created, obliged, and most likely serviced the Shah. Few explore the African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women’s lives depicted. Yet from where, in that vast Central Indian and AIOW, did the disregarded come from? What were their nuanced narratives? Was the work a delight? Did they find the city joyous? If the polyethnic world of the zenāna/harem prospered unfettered, with the Sultan cancelled, what might these un-imagined lives and worlds dream into?

I deleted the Sultan to dismantle erasures. In a liberated zone, I visualized and crafted rose-, orange-blossom, and spice-infused realms derived from the larger Indian Ocean World. In a variable series of prints and portraits, fifteen former attendants transform and meet across time and space. They participate in undisciplined pleasures. An additional three historical female figures from the African Indian Ocean’s East African, Arab, and South Asian worlds—Queen Bilqis, Razia Sultan, and Freedom Fighter Abebach emerge. And, when called to arms, the women brandish an assortment of weapons, alight on their steeds, and defy all forms of injustice. 

All femmes materialize with some of the many AIOW names like Uzza, Marjane, Tashu, Tsigerada, Gudit, and Bilqis. Their names, uttered and written in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Malay, Hindi, Sinhala, Amharic, and Swahili, behold a depth and power. All the names and spice aromas emanate and originate from the AIOW lands. Via magic and play, pre-colonial languages return, in sound and form, to their rightful owners. The scents of the earth after the monsoon rains, rose, frankincense, black pepper, cinnamon, clove, orange blossom and myrrh reignite the senses. An erased archive materializes, and a past is recouped.

Fountains for Black Joy 

Pamela Council

A presentation of playful fountains by Pamela Council and their working fountain theories. 

Black Folks Comfortable in Their Own Skins

Lewis Watts   

I would like to show and talk about a body or work where I have been examining portraits that I have been making of Black Creatives and others who are comfortable in their own skins. This has involved photographing individuals while documenting a variety of subjects in various parts of the world. I noticed that I always seem to be drawn to people who carry themselves in a way that is not determined by outside dictates of who they should be or how they should present themselves to the world. I have found that in many cases these people are artists, intellectuals, and activists in their communities. I have exhibited and published the beginnings of this work, some of which I have photographed at Black Portraiture(s) Conferences in Paris, Florence, Johannesburg, Harvard, and New York. I have also photographed the Black Joy Parades in Oakland, Afro Punk Festivals in Brooklyn, Paris, and Atlanta as well as on the streets including South LA, New Orleans, Harlem, London, Berlin and most recently Charleston, where I am working on a project in conjunction with the African American Museum that is under construction there. Currently I have work in the exhibit “Seize the Time” about the life of Angela Davis that is showing at The Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers. I think the juxtaposition and connection of that exhibit to the conference is a strong one. It raises issues of public perception as opposed to private life which is something that Angela has discussed. I also contributed images to another exhibit “A Million Roses for Angela Davis” that was at the Staatiche Kunstammiunger in Dresden Germany. That exhibit addressed the efforts by the school children in what was then “East Germany” to free Angela when she was imprisoned in the 1970s, her long history and connection with Europe and how her images has been exploited as well as celebrated throughout time. 

I have also lead panels during past conferences would be willing to do so again if the need arises.  Please let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to the conference in any case.

L. Kasimu Harris 

The Black Bar in New Orleans is the epicenter of black culture in New Orleans, which is the driving force of New Orleans culture. Black bars in lounges are the homes to social aid & pleasure clubs, Black Masking Indians, and community. Historically it was and remains a respite from the rest of the world and the unfair treatment folk faced in areas outside of their neighborhoods. There are records of Black gathering spaces in New Orleans that date back to the late 1800s, with music, dancing, and drinking. It is where practice, play, and performance intersect throughout the year, and most notably during the carnival season in the city. 

These bars became a safe space, where patrons could buy affordable drinks, eat, listen to music and fraternize. If they were in the Mississippi Delta, we’d call it a juke joint and in South Africa, it’s a shebeen, regardless of what it’s called and where it is, their importance to the culture and community are too often overlooked. But now, the Black bars in Black communities are turning white.  

The shifts made me think of the work of photographer Birney Imes’ “Juke Joint.” From 1983 to ‘89, Imes took his camera around the Mississippi Delta and documented bars in the black parts of town. He took the viewer inside to experience the cracked walls, scribbled signs, games at the pool table. Decades ago, Imes knew those Juke Joints, so omnipresent and region defining, had a tepid existence. Now, the number of juke joints languish in the single digits.  It made me think of the Black neighborhood bars of New Orleans. I wanted to capture them before they were unrecognizable.

Since 2018, I’ve documented these spaces using my camera, and doing interviews. But most importantly, I bear witness to the Black genius that percolates from these watering holes.  

Traditionally, on the Sundays approaching Mardi Gras Day, Tyrone Stevenson, Big Chief Pie of the Monogram Hunters, and his adult son Jeremy, lead Indian, practice inside the First & Last Stop Bar at the intersection of Pauger and Marais streets in the South Seventh Ward. Tyrone, 50, has gone to Indian practices there since he was 12. Backed by the driving sound of a bass drum played horizontally with two mallets and host of Indians and band members, rhythmically shaking the zills of tambourines and popping the drumheads on the two and four, Stevenson and the other chiefs sing a four-bar phrase between chants: 

Mardi Gras morning I won’t kneel, I won’t bow. 

Shallow Water, Oh mama      

‘Cause I’m the big chief and I don’t fall down 

Shallow Water, Oh mama 

Hooray, what they say

Shallow Water, Oh mama 

The Black culture bearers will persist, toil, and preserve their traditions. But, will New Orleans and beyond realize the importance of these spaces? Will these Vanishing Black bars languish or persevere? And when these Black bars turn white, the culture is displaced and the loss of places to practice, play, and perform is devastating to the tradition.  

Jacqueline Gopie

Painting Play

Historically, I have not seen many “Fine Art” paintings of Black or Brown children that revel in their carefree joy and play in an unrestricted, uninhibited way.  At least not the way children are celebrated by all those European painters that fill the museums like Homer, Cassatt, Sargent and Sorolla. 

Typically, when paintings of children of color are included into the European canon they are portrayed through the filter of a deprived socio-economic context and that narrative is used to justify their joy or marvel at it in a patronizing way.

They are never just playing, just being children freely lost in play and their environment. 

Growing up in Jamaica in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s play was my refuge.  My family had been broken up when I was about two years old and I, along with one of my sisters was sent off to live in an all-girls boarding home for several years.  I can’t remember all the trauma, but I can recall most of the places I used to play.

In the summers we were left on our own outdoors for hours and had to amuse ourselves – we were free to engage with our imaginations and create fantasy worlds. When the summers were just too hot, we often went to beaches, rivers, public swimming pools and baths to play in the cool waters.

So initially my paintings of children reflected on my own childhood memories of Jamaica and the freedoms I enjoyed there.  Those early paintings were directly aimed to elicit memories and conceptions of childhood play and leisure.  They were intended to be unapologetically beautiful, nostalgic and resonate with a Caribbean eye of a certain age. 

As my work developed, my focus shifted from recollections of Jamaica to the scarcity of this sort of representation of Black and Brown children in American culture and of how these children are never truly regarded as children by the larger white population.  

My recent exhibition titled “Freedom to Play” at the Copper Door in Overtown, Miami – a historic black neighborhood – offered images of Black and Brown children engaged in simple, universal forms of play; running, playing with hula hoops, lying in the sand and floating in the water at the beach.  The images are inviting however the titles are provocative – intended to confront the viewer with the realities of how racism restricts, controls and literally ends the lives of Black and Brown children who were doing nothing more than playing. 

My presentation will address how my work seeks to change this inequity and highlight my efforts to insert more realistic representations of Black and Brown children into the conversation.  My paintings are a counteraction, an antidote to the barrage of negative images perpetuated by all forms of mass media that reenforce racist stereotypes.  Essentially, they are my contribution in the effort to change minds by creating new images that alter racist/post-colonial perspectives towards more humanistic and inclusive ones.


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