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Hi friend,

True story: art is about people! 

Carnival season is unfolding in the Americas – from the Caribbean to New Orleans (hey Mardi Gras!) But it’s more than just a party. Carnival culture shows how mutual aid has sustained people of color.

Mutual aid is a crucial path for groups locked out of mainstream power and participation. These communities have banded together to create something out of nothing – isn’t that the definition of art? There’s a natural overlap with different women’s organizations – for example the sororities of the Divine Nine, or social clubs based on hometowns and heritage. 

Dr. Tyesha Maddox has researched mutual aid societies of Caribbean immigrants in the United States back to the 1900s. The West Indian Day Parade ties the legacy of early Black migration to our current culture. This video explainer gives a broad view of how Asian American, Black, Chicano, and LGBTQ+ communities have leveraged mutual aid to build resilient networks. 

And our documentary project, Carnival Queens, is screening this month online for Women’s History Month. We’re excited to share the story of Black immigrant women gathering, celebrating, and thriving. Along with the Baby Dolls of New Orleans’ Carnival, women artists shine at the intersection of creativity and community.

Yours in creative solidarity,
Tiffany.

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Required Reading

• What Is Mutual Aid? [presentation via Dr. Tyesha Maddox]
•  ‘Once I Step Out, I am a Queen on Mardi Gras’  
• Carnival Queens  

Hi friend,

February is wrapping up, but it’s always time for Black History! I’ve been reading Anna Malaika Tubbs’ history “The Three Mothers” this month. Her book braids together the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Her hot take? It’s all about the Black moms.

Lifting up Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little, Tubbs sets the stage for the political engagement of their sons. Her original scholarship claps back on stereotypes of Black families as apathetic at best and criminal at worst. Their strategic parenting nurtured the vision that we call the modern Civil Rights Movement. It’s a stark reminder that Black women have consistently overdelivered for the United States.

Those blockbuster mothers set me to thinking about Faith Ringgold and Emma Amos. These cool art moms have been celebrated in recent retrospectives. “Faith Ringgold: American People” and “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” display their shared focus on bodies in active, affirming motion. As I read more about both of these artists, their imprint on following generations is as striking as their work. Amos passed away just before her retrospective opened, but the love for her is evident in the essays accompanying the show.

Which is all to say, there are so many facets to our shared history. Here’s to Black heroines, whether we find them In the library, gallery, or real life!

Looking forward,
Tiffany.

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“Faith Ringgold: American People” is at The New Museum, NY through June 2022. “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” is archived online at The Georgia Museum of Art, GA.

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Required Reading

• Faith Ringgold Has All the Answers [article via Interview Magazine]
• Virtual Discussion: “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” 
• “That’s So Black,” VOL 3: #MeToo 
• and a little Black History bounce! Ella Baker Shaker – Jonathan Lykes ft. Big Freedia 

Spring is creeping forward slowly on the East Coast. A stealthy seasonal cold took most of my household down. Laid out for weeks, I thought about the image of wellness. On Instagram, we recognize it as a slender white woman doing headstands on a beach, or a perfectly framed matcha latte. In real life, it feels like avoiding a steady diet of coffee and candy is enough.

This month, my vision of radical healing tends toward the Brooklyn Museum. Frida Kahlo’s iconic portraiture is on display, but the show’s real value is in her composite strength. Her braces, liniments, and clothing show all of the supports that made her studio practice possible. Her life was visited by pain, illness, and trauma. But her work reveals the courage evolving from her circumstances. Spring is a time when growth peeks out from every crack in the pavement. We celebrate renewal with religious observances like Easter or Passover. The more secular ring in the season with the return of brunch.

It’s a comfort to remember that wellness is not the absence of trauma, but the embrace of resilience. I asked Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, how Kahlo’s physicality framed this exhibition:

“Kahlo’s own lived experience with disability is fully present in her art. One of the most remarkable things about her, to me, is the way that she was who she was. And I think it’s a really important conversation to reframe disability in relationship to Kahlo away from the narratives that you primarily see about brokenness, about fragility. I think that Frida Kahlo must certainly have been one of the strongest people going to do what she did.

This current disability theorizing frames disability in relationship to the problems that normative people have with disabled bodies. I do not think, as is often portrayed, that Kahlo was trying to hide her disability with the clothing she wore. She was clearly very intent on making her presence known, her physical self part of the world, taking up space.”

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving is on view from February 8–May 12, 2019 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Photo credit: Nickolas Muray, Frida with Idol, 1939. Courtesy of Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.