Art on My Mind
The art I've been consuming and finding inspiration in lately.
Art has been one of the few things keeping me sane and going these days.
I love going on solo art dates. I love spending full days looking up artists and watching their talks, reading articles about art, and daydreaming/conceptualizing projects I want to create now and in the future. I’ve returned to art, visual art, in particular, because words are no longer enough to express the transitions and spirals I’m in; only the visual, the worldbuilding for myself and others, will suffice.
Storytelling is how we see the world and each other — I say this all the time. It’s also how my brain works. I love that this is how I see the world, stories waiting to be captured and told. When I’m on the back of an Uber moto driving through Salvador, I see so many images I want to make. The same goes for when I’m on the beach or walking to the market.
I hold many identities, but artist, storyteller are at the core of everything I do, and I’ve had so many synchronous experiences and encounters recently that feel like ~*signs*~ to fully embrace this identity. (I love it because I’m truly living my best seven-year-old self life.) I’m art personified. I’m done limiting myself, doubting myself as an artist. And I feel ready to share my art in all its forms because creating, building worlds, taking the ideas in my head and actualizing them, birthing them, is what keeps me sane and fulfills me.
I recently devoured bell hooks’ Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. It had been on my to-read list for years, and I felt like it was time to open it up with the hope of being inspired.
Throughout the essays and interviews about and with Black artists, bell hooks argues the importance of Black sensibility regarding visual aesthetics. She also grounds us in the importance of Black art and cultural criticism from a Black perspective, expressing the need for critics who have something of depth to say when speaking about Black artists and their practices, instead of categorizing Black art as “angry,” lazy, or lacking aesthetic.
Picking up this book when I did was divine timing.
For those who don’t know, I’m a 2024-2025 Fulbright Research Scholar, and I’ve been in Brazil since February 2025, exploring Afro-Brazilian women’s experiences of motherhood/ing. In addition to conducting interviews with these women, this project includes a visual ethnographic component in the form of a portrait series.
In this series, so many notions of what has been said about Black women and themes of race, class, sex, and gender are being challenged. The histories of Black women, Black mothers in Brazil, are being reclaimed via women having autonomy over their story and image. This series centers the (Black) female gaze. It explores critical fabulation in the visual arts. It calls into question the legacy of power, dispossession, and ensalvement in patriarchal societies. Inverting the symbolism of portraiture. Naming, essentiality, memory, identity, reparations, cultural knowledge exchange. Interrogating the archive of Black women and centering Black subjectivity.
I’ve been conducting extensive research and development, visiting galleries, reviewing archives, studying the history of portraiture, and art directing, among other activities.
Ahead is just a sliver of the art I’ve been consuming, and that is inspiring me as I bring this project to life.
Reading 🤓
The essay “Diasporic Landscapes of Longing” from Art on My Mind: Visual Politics speaks to my relationship with photography and the significance of this medium to Black people in general, and Black women particularly. For me, the visual is a way to humanize people. It’s also a method of archival work and a medium to preserve memories, all themes and topics important to my work and that I’ve been exploring.
bell hooks asserts that photographers like Carrie Mae Weems’ image making is about radical subjectivity and “visually engages a politics of anticolonialism. Concretely decentering the white subject, she challenges viewers to shift their paradigms” (66). She also discusses how Weems’ works transform ways of seeing and converge race, gender, and class, “so as to disrupt and deconstruct simple notions of subjectivity” (67). In this essay, she also addresses how photography can recover and bring to the foreground subjugated knowledge…
I can go on and on, but I highly recommend reading it for yourself. It feels like the manifesto of my visual manifesto and speaks more eloquently and clearly than I can at the moment about the power of photography in relation to centering people who have historically and contemporarily been ignored, overlooked, and erased.
Frida Orupabo: Collages of Black women to challenge the white gaze
I came across this article during one of my R&D days. I didn’t know about Frida until reading this article, and I am in love with her collages and the way in which she creates to challenge the white gaze.
Viewing 👀
Ancestral: Afro-Américas - 📍Museu Nacional da Cultura Afro-Brasileira, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
This is one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen. It illuminates the connection of Black art/artists throughout the Americas. What blew me away is how artists, without realizing it, were focusing on similar themes related to Blackness in the Americas during the same periods. I still think about the connections through works from artists in Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S., and how, without placards, it would be hard to distinguish where the images were made or the artists’ backgrounds.
I also reveled in drawing connections between Black diasporic cultures, for instance, sound systems from Jamaica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Maranhão, Brazil.
(I’m in the process of pitching a review to outlets, if anyone has connects, please help ya girl out!)
Gordon Parks: A América Sou Eu - 📍 Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, Brazil
A trip to São Paulo is in my immediate future to see Gordon Parks: A América Sou Eu (Gordon Parks: America Is Me), the largest Gordon Parks exhibit to be held in Latin America. I think this will be one of the best exhibitions of the year worldwide.
Kendrick Lamar’s GNX Tour
I was in my feelings watching everyone enjoy the GNX tour in the U.S., and then Kendrick surprised me with a Latin American leg. I booked a last-minute flight to Chile to see him perform, and I think about this show at least once a day. RELEASE THE VISUALS, PLEASEEEE, I BEG YEEEE. Also, the dancers — OMG, I’m in love with them. Half the time, I was focused on THEM and not Kendrick. Charm La’Donna did her big one with the choreography.
Listening 🎧
These are the projects I’ve been loving and playing on repeat when I need a mood boost or something in the background as I clean, cook, write, etc.
Vie - Doja Cat
I looooove me some Doja. I haven’t had a chance to check out the visuals, but if they’re anything like her Coachella 2024 performance, I will need an ambulance on speed dial because that set was PHENOMENAL. Side note: I hope she ventures into acting because we need it.
Through the Wall - Rochelle Jordan
Tembe texted me ‘Rum’ and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. It feels like my dream never-ending summer, driving in a custom drop-top G-Wagon in the interior of Brazil or somewhere deep in the Caribbean, surrounded by lush greenery, eating fresh fruit, fried fish, and going on hikes and nonstop adventures. I’d love for Solange to feature her on a remix of one of her records.
Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii
Tembe and I were also talking about of love of Doechii and her artistry, and I felt like I never gave Alligator Bites Never Heal the attention it deserves, so I immediately revisited it and OH. SHE. IS. A STAR. Like whatttttt?! Yes.
More to come on this project soon! I’d love to know what art/artists you’ve been drawn to/have been inspiring you lately! Let me know <3