- Omar Jason Farah
Artists: Essex Hemphill, Char Jeré, Wayson Jones, Malcolm Peacock, Collin Riggins, Marlon Riggs, Colin Robinson, Jaguar Mary X
Titled after a 1988 poem by Essex Hemphill, dearmuthafuckindreams, revisits the black queer renaissance of the late 20th century—a cultural movement articulated in equal parts rage and imagination. Unfolding across three intergenerational conversations, the exhibition pieces together a lineage of black queer radical politics from the 1980s to today.
Presenting photographs from Collin Alexander Riggins and Colin Robinson, films from Char Jeré and Jaguar Mary X, and words from Malcolm Peacock, Wayson Jones, and Essex Hemphill, dearmuthafuckindreams, plays in the pleasure and potential of convening with our black queer ancestors. Across the chasms of distance, decades, and even death, the works build to a polyvocal chorus that points to a common and poetic politics that is core to the black queer artistic tradition. What emerges is a shared vision for the possibility of black queer love to undo and remake the world we cannot bear. Perhaps Hemphill puts it best in his proclamation that “Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming.”
This spirit is captured in a selection of archival documents that anticipated future black queer descendants who would charge toward new worlds. Inside the gallery, Essex’s words tie the black queer struggle to those of class, imperialism, and apartheid. Peacock picks up this tradition in audio that plays outside the museum, calling for sensory solidarities as our proverbial ship sinks. Photographs from Robinson’s archive—previously unexhibited—capture the perspective and occasionally the likeness of the young poet in New York City. Across the gallery, Riggins’s images question the photograph’s capacity to hold the spirit and sensation of black living. Finally, Jeré and Jaguar Mary X use the moving image to carve space for black lesbian subjectivities within the complicated dynamics of the black nuclear family.
