What do you do when your histories are erased, sanitized, or forgotten? How does one fill in the gaps of what “the archive” has allowed for your story? For Black Americans, a continued effort throughout our lives is breaking free of the boxes placed around us: historical, aesthetic, emotional, carceral. As W.E.B. Du Bois argued, to be Black is to exist with a twoness, a “double-consciousness” that positions us to see ourselves for who we really are and also navigate a white world not built with us in mind.
Ruminating on the latest works by Black artists on display inside of Wa Na Wari’s fifth-generation Black-owned house in Seattle, WA, the word that emerges for me is: bountiful. Specifically, the ways in which Black life is abundant, layered, and surprising despite the narrowed lens some folks would like to view our lives through.
After a serendipitous encounter with Josh Nucci, a fabricworks artist I mentioned in my previous piece, I encountered Georgia-based artist Victoria Dugger’s exhibition Bitter Sweet. A mixed-media collection of work utilizing painting and sculpture to explore the duality of being she experiences as a Black, disabled woman through the juxtaposition of grotesque and aesthetic imagery.
The first piece you will come across speaks to the collection as a whole, a large archway with vibrant colors and adornments. Upon closer inspection, what looks to be flowing tassels from afar are actually strands of braided hair adorned with colorful beads. Disembodied legs resembling that of a ballerina with black pointe shoes snake around the archway, contouring these appendages in an unsettling way.
In another piece, Dugger paints roses that weep, T-bone steaks threaded with pearls, delicate china with ornate designs broken across wood floors resembling that of a Marvin’s Magic Drawing Board, and a jet black hand with red nails rips through the scene revealing another world beneath our material facade.
Across her work, Drugger showcases the twoness of the identities she embodies. How femininity, disability, and Blackness hold multiple truths: toughness, softness, the grotesque, and the beautiful. The work makes apparent the ouroboros of it all, how each of these positionalities can engulf itself and become its antithesis, and how this paradox is paramount to lived experience.
Ascending the stairs to the second floor of Wa Na Wari was Larry Cook’s exhibition Horizons & On the Other Side of Landscape. Cook uses a series of photos that explore his own familial archive, highlighting incarcerated relatives in prison spaces and uncovering interior landscapes within. In one photo, two male silhouettes stand next to each other in poses akin to classical dancers, the contours of these bodies suggesting their musculature.
Cook redacts them from the drab background and fills their void with a found photograph of a mountainous landscape. A rumination on the deep interior lives of Black inmates, the redactive qualities of the work makes visible parts of Cook’s family that the carceral system disallows as truth. This work’s ethos seems akin to the “wake work” Christina Sharpe describes in her theoretical text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Through this work of redaction, Cook reclaims his familial stories from the archive and fills their absence with life.
The final exhibition space showcases Erin Mitchell’s The Interior Was Always Ours project, a series of quilted pieces influenced by Black Southern quilting traditions. Large, intricately designed quilted works hang in various spaces in the exhibition space.
I’m immediately drawn to this work and how it is an extension of the traditions of Black women quilters in Alabama like the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers. One large quilt is bordered with a printed grass fabric enclosing a square composed of a plethora of colorful fabric scraps and tassels coming together to make four legs. Mitchell’s work utilizes a variety of found and repurposed scraps of fabric of all sorts, combining seemingly disparate pieces into layered works that personify Black home life, bodies, labor, and more. I appreciate how quilted work ties ideas around domesticity, creativity, and utilitarianism to tell a story. These objects traditionally function as pieces to both warm and delight.
In another piece, Mitchell creates a quilt in the shape of a house with window frames and large doors into her subjects’ lives. We see their varied Black faces and their feet, both with and without shoes. The interiors on view in the house quilt showcase quiet moments of domesticity and familial life while also highlighting their vibrancy with the use of a plethora of fabrics.
Part of the magic of quiltmaking in relation to Black life is that it lays bare a practice central to Black experience: how we all must piece together the tapestry of our lives with how much was lost and omitted from the archive. How a key act of quilting–bringing together multiple pieces of fabric and cloth to make a sustaining whole–emulates the imaginative work of resistance we must do to see what exists outside of the borders that have been placed around us, creating, finding, and rejuvenating stories that have been disallowed from the archive.
Wa Na Wari’s latest works on display subtly tie together three Black artists’ work, weaving together a ruminative and surprising exhibition. Through the use of multiple mediums, these artists showcase the complexity and duality of identity present both in the exteriors and interiors of Black life.