Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



neevspoilsbees
@neevspoilsbees

It's Black History month, and as the whitest-of-white they-gays to come out of a Pretty Decent^tm art school, I thought I'd share some of the work of Black artists (and their projects) who've made a large impact on my artistic practice. I wanted to include images, discussion, and personal reflections, so if you don't want the director's cut chost, here are the quick links:

Alisha Wormsley || Adrian Piper || Black Quantum Futurism || Joy KMT || Gyxks || Devan Shimoyama || Tulani


Alisha Wormsley – There Are Black People in the Future

In this project, Alisha Wormsley placed the words, "Their are Black People in the Future," on a billboard which offered local Pittsburgh artists a place to display their work. On her website Alisha describes the work thusly:

Through the inscription and utterance of the words, ‘There are Black People in the Future,’ the project addresses systemic oppression of black communities through space and time by reassuring the presence of Black bodies. In 2017, Wormsley placed these words on a billboard in East Liberty, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s east end that has suffered gentrification. When the billboard was removed by the city, community members protested, in response to this community support, Wormsley has raised grant money to artists, activists, and community workers in Pittsburgh around their interpretation of the phrase “There Are Black People in the Future”. Since then, the billboard has been replicated in Detroit, Charlotte, New York City, Kansas City and Houston, internationally London, Accra and Qatar.

When I first moved to Pittsburgh in 2019, I had the privilege of having Alisha as a professor. Her presentation of this work and the city's push back against it, claiming that it violated the billboard's artist rules around, "political text," was eye-opening. At the time, I was struggling to find how my voice as an artist could impact the material conditions I was facing at my university. Alisha's insistence that statements like this (and those that went further) were 1) artwork, and 2) necessary, helped me realize that I too could claim space for my own marginalized community. Later that year, when I applied for a grant to make vinyl stickers to forcibly de-gender restrooms, I sited this project, and other political site specific works she showed in her class (guerilla girls, etc.) to receive funding for the project.
On a less artistic note, this was also my first real insight to the racial dynamics of Pittsburgh and East Liberty -- the discussions she facilitated in her course, asking mostly white and asian first year students to put into their own words why we thought the city responded was one of the formative events in solidifying my understanding of the intersection between class and racial politics.

Adrian Piper – The Mythic Being

The MoMA describes Adrian Pipers multimedia project, The Mythic Being like this:

Piper began The Mythic Being in 1973, merging a male alter ego (the Mythic Being) with episodes from her own personal history. The project, which includes photographs, drawings, and performances, first took shape in a series of seventeen newspaper advertisements in New York's Village Voice. In each advertisement the artist appears in drag accompanied by a "thought bubble" filled with text from a journal entry she wrote as a teenager. These adolescent texts became the artist’s personal mantras: during the month in which an ad appeared, Piper would repeat the text over and over, to "reexperience it, examine, and analyze it," she has said. The combination of public revelation and private contemplation was an exorcism of sorts, the artist has explained. "The experience of the Mythic Being thus becomes part of the public history and is no longer a part of my own."
If you go looking, you can find videos of Piper performing as The Mythic Being, which I would highly recommend. There's something electric about the way Piper gives voice to the words she repeating. Her performances feel so deeply personal, it can, at time's be difficult to watch.

When I was first exposed to this work, I remember not liking it very much. I was freshly 18, and struggling to place the line between being an adult and a teenage, and trying to understand how to exist at a university which was somehow more transphobic than even my middle-of-the-woods high school. I think I was jealous of Piper's ability to slip in and out of this identity, to separate herself from the Mythical Being and become him with confidence... At the time I was sort of struggling with being viewed as how it seemed my classmate's viewed the Mythical Being--a woman in baggy clothing pretending to be a man with odd social habits. At the time, I didn't clock the power and bravery in her performance -- how every cringe, every, "oh god please stop," running through my mind while seeing documentation of this project in class, was sort of the point. I think this project has stuck with me because it was the first time I needed to reckon with artwork that was totally self-indulgent and electrically revealing and that I wasn't culturally attached to (a la, fandoms).

Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips – Black Quantum Futurism

Black Quantum Futurism, Vol. 1 is a book of essays collected by The Black Quantum Futurism Collective. Their website describes Black Quantum Futurism as:

a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing. Our work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.

This book reads most closely to the ways I've listened to magic practitioners describe the world. Each essay is both instructional and inspirational, focusing on how Black consciousness and the cyclical description of time present in many native African cultures, can help us, "see hope in our dystopian reality."

While the specific practices outlined in the book were developed for use by African descended people, and so have not found their way into my own spiritual/praxis oriented practices, Ayewa's and Phillps' framework left doors open to other marginalized people to learn from their development. These essays offered me a chance to explore, through art, praxis, and spirituality, how I could push towards a better queer future, and how representations of the future, other pasts, or fictional worlds, could have reverberations into the present. And, because I was drawing on their scholarship, it became imperative to be able to answer, "What could I, as a white artist, do to assure their would be Black people in the futures I was working to bring forth--without trying to tell stories that weren't mine or being white-savior-y?"

Joy KMT - Creating Worlds and Other essays

In Black Quantum Futurism, Vol. 1 there's an essay by Joy KMT, a few quotes of which I'd like to reproduce here:

KMT posits that the world, as we understand it is mediated by words, and that words exist," for a definition of experience, for a common agreed upon reality."

Words, KMT continues,

are the boundaries of reality, which cut off a piece of reality and sanction it--deem it--one thing or another. These containers of reality are agreed upon, by consensus or by violence. (emphasis mine) ... It is not considered that words have value beyond rhetorical debate. But simply because reality has been described...

KMT continues, explaining that white culture--as a complex, living system, unwilling to die-- uses violence to build the very words we access to discuss racial violence. That it makes itself look liberal and docile by religating the United States' history of racial violence to the unspoken.

She then goes on to describe how one might construct a word. She tells us the word must have an audience, that then the sorcerer must decide from what mythology they are drawing the word... and that this mythology must be one which the sorcerer fully inhabits. She tells us that those on the margins will pick up the word, hungry for a better way to describe their experiences, and that then, the sorcerer, in order to move beyond a cult, must shepard the word without controlling its meaning.

In about six pages, KMT explained to me about a semester's worth of rhetoric, and made me believe in the power of stories. I think for better or worse, this essay is probably one of the biggest reason I write and cartoon the way I do.

I can't find a copy of it online, but I'm happy to share scans of it with people privately--or reach out to Joy KMT to see if she's able to publish it on her website (linked above).

Gyxks - P.E.T.S (webcomic)

P.E.T.S is the sci-fi GL webcomic that made me realize sci-fi could be sexy, fun, and not uninterestingly problematic cough starwars cough. In the story, our Black girl lead gets kidnaped from the supermarket and transported to an alien world... never able to return home. I'm not going to spoil it, so go check it out.
P.E.T.S showed up on my webtoon at a time in my life where I needed someone's passion project to push me in the direction of making comics. Sexy, self-indulgent, weird alien, comics... Gyxks makes this list as an artist who by just being visibly passionate about their work made me want to get drawing--truthfully, before making this post, I hadn't been up to date on P.E.T.S after I paused reading to get more episodes at once and then forgot I was waiting (not that she'd stopped drawing)--coming back to see 150 episodes after stopping reading around 75 was just doubly inspiring.

Devan Shimoyama - Instagram

Devan Shimoyama is am incredibly talented painter and collage artist who disects queer Black masculinity through his colorful porturature. Devin draws on both contemporary and historical imagery to infuse his paintings with meaning and sometimes humor.

While his work is incredibly inspiring in it's own right, I honestly included him here for being one of the first professors to actively support my dive into depicting queer sexuality, and as one of the first professors to really get the humor in my comics. The life he brings to his own work is something that I think he really helped push forward in my work.

Tulani – Twitter

Finally, I wanted to shout out the work of a friend of mine. Tulani's (@ twinkletoes1428 on twitter and instagram) work is sort of like if you took the color sense of Molly Mendoza and mixed it with the colored pencil charm of Mel Gillman. They create these beautiful elaborate pieces of which exude peaceful, joyful, energy. This past year, I got the pleasure of watching them work while we tabled at Athen's Zine Fair together -- and wow. I usually race to the finish line on each page of work... taking non-judicious speed over all else. Tulani puts down layers and layers of overlapping color. In the time I'd call a drawing done, I saw them put down one or two layers...
I recently had a mentor tell me to slow down and take the ideas behind my work seriously -- and seeing Tulani's technique really drove home for me what that meant. Whenever I see their pieces, it drives home for me what commitment to an idea and piece looks like.

I do think their work translates even better to print and in person, so if you ever get a chance to stop by a fair they're tabling it, I'd highly recommend checking it out.


In Conclusion

I'd love to hear about what Black artists and scholars have influenced everyone's art-- or, if you're a Black artist, I'd love to hear about what you're making.


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