does this mean i’m a real artist now?
by heather c. lou
Artist-educator heather c. lou documents a year of transition from Oakland to Minneapolis, illuminating how artistic process is intimately affected by personal and professional lives, and sharing the search for voice and healing in a white supremacist environment.
summeri moved from Oakland to Minneapolis in 2016. everybody in my life seemed concerned with this life decision:“Are you sure this is a good idea?”“Isn’t it…cold…there? The weather and the people?”…
More
Even "The Smallest Cell Remembers": Notes on Research
by Chaun Webster
Mn Artists guest editor Chaun Webster considers the precariousness of research, evidence and memory in black geographies.
I am a researcher. I work outside the university, have no degree affirming my qualifications to interpret or produce knowledge. Insurgent. I am nobody (see June Jordan, see Alexis Pauline Gumbs). My work involves a kind of listening—echo—in order to recover abbreviated lives.…
More
Photo courtesy of Chaun Webster.
Are We Black Yet?: On Blackness as Art
by Davu Seru
Drummer, composer, writer and professor of African American literature and culture Davu Seru explores a body of ideas belonging to a kind of "un-finishing school" from Coltrane and their excavated recording, Both Directions at Once, to the seminal sermon in Invisible Man and perhaps black literature which asserts "black is...an' black ain't", asking us along the way: "Are we black yet?"
“If we had not survived and triumphed,there would not be a Black American alive.”[1] —James Baldwin "Black people have…
More
Ad Reinhardt, Painting, 1960. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Black Convivial: On Blackmospheres and Sci-fi Social Work
by Keno Evol
Poet and educator Keno Evol explores Sci-fi Social Work, black sociality, and where “wreckage meets possibility.”
“I hear the storm.”—Aimé Césaire, Discourse On Colonialism“I can always hear somebody running”—Fred Moten…
More
Photo Credit: Uiphotographic.
A Body of Art Subverts the Ban
by Nusaiba Imady
Writer and performer Nusaiba Imady investigates translation, trauma, authorship, and the body in her response to the four collaborations created for Mn Artists Presents: Essma Imady, held at the Walker Art Center in August 2018.
Leila Awadallah and Asma Ghanem, My Garden Is a Security Threat. Photo by Galen Fletcher for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.…
More
A case for this: the (new Black) here and now
by Lisa Marie Brimmer
Writer and cultural strategist Lisa Marie Brimmer sketches an invitation to black post-blackness, a spiral encompassing the resurrection of the everyday, a history comprised of multitudes, and cosmic acts of world building in the here and now.
Intro-diction.…
More
Kerry James Marshall, untitled water study for Gulf Stream, 2004. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Blackness and the Not-Yet-Finished
by Chaun Webster
Mn Artists guest editor, poet and sound artist Chaun Webster, critically engages Douglas Kearney's conceptualization of mess as a way to think about the plasticity of blackness within its spatial temporal continuum.
[[{"fid":"148042","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default"},"type":"media","attributes":{"class":"image-style-large media-element file-default"}}]]…
More
