The women are guided by the voice of singer Lois Deloatch, who soulfully intones:
I’ll fly away
To a land where joy shall never end
I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away, oh, Glory
I’ll fly away

When they reach the top of the courthouse steps, Lanier extends her hand above her head and, with a closed fist, she knocks on the door twice. She waits briefly, stretching her fingers as she presses her open hand against the door’s surface; immediately the courthouse bell tolls as the two 12-foot-tall doors swing open to a gentleman welcoming the group of women into one of the oldest courthouses in the United States.

The 1767 Chowan County Courthouse is the site of an installation, Memorable Proof, by artist Letitia Huckaby that is part of the “Harriet Jacobs Project,” an ongoing initiative directed by Lanier and curated by Rivers. Collectively, their work is dedicated to the memory of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a trenchant autobiographical account of her enslavement in Edenton and escape to freedom. Jacobs wrote the book under a pseudonym Linda Brent, in 1860, revealing the harrowing details around the mental, physical, and sexual abuse she suffered from her de facto owner, Dr. James Norcom, whose torture she fled, hiding in a small garret in her grandmother’s home for seven years.

While Incidents was lauded within abolitionist circles upon its publication, it eventually drifted into obscurity for about a century. Historian Jean Fagan Yellin eventually resurrected the book’s legacy, proving the work was not a fictional account as was long believed. She conducted extensive archival research to conclusively link Jacobs to her writing and her subsequent abolitionist work in the postbellum North and South, publishing the biography Harriet Jacobs, A Life in 2004.

In 2006, Lanier, director of North Carolina Historic Sites, learned of Yellin’s scholarship, and began pursuing a unique activation dedicated to Jacobs’s legacy. At the time she was the organization’s curator of cultural history, and in 2008, Lanier organized a book release event in Edenton for Yellin’s publishing of the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. As Lanier recounted in a 2008 article with UNC Press, “One of my goals as a public historian is to help create spaces where visitors can experience emotional impacts, discover connections to the past, or have epiphanies of historic relevance. In such moments, an internal bell rings out in the face of human experience preserved in the amber of historic preservation.” Since the 2008 launch, Lanier has picked up the baton of this historical stewardship from Yellin, and she is now passing the curatorial baton to Johnica Rivers to ensure that the memory of Jacobs is indelibly tied to Edenton.

With Memorable Proof, Huckaby and Rivers activated the historic courthouse using a combination of photography and textiles to create portraits of members of the Fannie A. Parker Woman’s Club, an Edenton-based civic organization founded in 1909 by Black women under the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, established 13 years earlier in 1896. To create these silhouetted portraits, Huckaby photographed Edenton chapter members on location, placing them behind a floral sheet as she shot the images, later printing them on sheer panels of flag fabric. In the windows of the courthouse, her subjects appear like ethereal apparitions. The sheerness of the fabric lets in light that reveals the gridlines from the windowpanes and the views outside, giving the work a layered, palimpsestic feel.

Rivers said she envisioned Memorable Proof as a “site responsive” installation: the silhouettes’ placement above the judge’s bench, lining the courthouse’s semicircular apse, evokes the exalted reverence of saintly figures memorialized in the stained-glass windows of a church. Here, she situates the women with a regal presence that centers their status as community caregivers and historical caretakers. This site holds important familial connections to Jacobs; her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, secured her freedom in this courtroom, and as a manumitted woman, Horniblow bought the Edenton home that concealed her enslaved granddaughter for seven years.

Memorable Proof is part of a larger activation of Jacobs’s hometown, organized by Lanier and Rivers who have created a cultural experience through a series of artistic interventions. Titled A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, the pair brought together an interdisciplinary group of women who have studied, written about, or invoked the memory of Jacobs within their academic, artistic, and cultural work. The inaugural Sojourn activation encouraged a deeper engagement with research materials and ideas that artists and writers draw upon in their work. Addressing the group over dinner one night this past March, Rivers said of their mission: “What we are embodying here is land as source material. It is not enough to go into the archives. You need to go to the place.”

With the Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs project Lanier and Rivers draw upon Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, positing the idea that everything is art and that art can be used to transform society. Analogous activations include Rick Lowe’s development of Project Row Houses, in which artists are invited to create work within the context and community of Houston’s historically Black Third Ward. For Sojourn, the duo have created an environment in which artists work in concert with the community and visitors to that community to realize the final works.

Lanier and Rivers approached this unique curatorial project by asking themselves, “How do we reveal the hidden markers of their lives on the land?” They created an experience akin to a close read of Incidents by highlighting elements of Jacobs’s life alongside her historical context as a way to bring her story to life and deepen the community’s connection to her life’s work.

“It has been painful to me, in many ways,” Jacobs writes in Incidents, “to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea.”

During our own sojourn to Edenton this spring, Lanier and Rivers took the group to the Providence Burial Ground where Horniblow and Jacobs’s mother and father are all interred. Along a nearby creek bed, volunteers handed out white rose petals from baskets for guests to cast into the slow-moving current as church bells peacefully rang in the distance. It was a moment of quiet reflection and meditation as we called upon the memories of loved ones who have traveled into other realms. The intense emotions conjured throughout the day prompted tears of sorrow and joy as friends and strangers alike comforted one another as we traversed the land and the profound sensations of grief, loss, gratitude, and hope.

To quote Jacobs, “The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own, I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for my own.”

Sojourn itself asks participants what it means to be called to the hearthstone of someone they’ve never met, to break bread with them, to walk the land they once trod, to smell their favorite spring flowers, to gaze upon the waters that set them free, to raise a glass in their honor.

For Lanier and Rivers, the goal of Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs is to embody the care to community that its namesake gave to Edenton, with the goal of making sure Jacobs is never forgotten again. Back in the courthouse, tucked in a small vestibule on the second floor is a fireplace with a vintage Victorian-era pole screen next to it. Above the hearth is a photograph of Harriet Jacobs, seated in a large gothic Victorian parlor chair boasting a slight upturned grin, welcoming us to her very own hearthstone.

Her admirers included famous writers and artists alike who professed their love for Baker through the monikers they bestowed upon her: “the New Black Pearl,” “the Creole Goddess of France,” “the Bronze Venus.” Their fixation with the entertainer, and her blackness, reverberated in famous quotes. Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw,” while Pablo Picasso was infatuated with her “coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles.”

These expressions of admiration have defined and shaped Baker’s legacy, but what lies beneath the surface of her life is rarely broached beyond biographical footnote. Her persona was far more complex and nuanced than the two poles of primitivism and commodification suggest, and in recent years writers, artists, and historians have re-examined her life not only through the social constructs that defined her, but also through her subtle resistance to them.

A new exhibition, “Icon in Motion,” now on view at the Neue Gallery in Berlin, explores artwork inspired by Baker alongside the intersectional dynamics of the interwar era that shaped her activism. In the show, curators Klaus Biesenbach, Terri Francis, and Kandis Williams examine Baker as a modernist muse and her enduring influence on contemporary art. Instead of viewing her through the prisms of performance and aesthetics, the show sheds light on how the image of Baker has been cultivated, rendered, distorted, and preserved over time, and how that imagery both reflects the past and is being rearticulated in the present.

Yet, despite the fervent calls for unity during this period, the face of the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles was overwhelmingly male, the contributions of Black women largely overlooked, sidelined, or silenced. As art historian Kellie Jones notes in South of Pico, her groundbreaking scholarship on the Southern California Black Arts Movement, “Black women were integral to both the struggles for Black freedom and women’s liberation. But as a number of writers have concluded, black women were expected to disregard the racism and class privilege of white feminism and turn a blind eye to the misogyny of Black Power.”

Despite these challenges with mainstream visibility, Black women artists and arts advocates in Los Angeles did manage to forge new pathways that circumvented sexism and racial bias, creating revolutionary work and spaces to show it. Here are five of them.

Read “Building Faith in the Future Part 1: The Rise of the Black Arts Movement in California” here.

When the smoke cleared, local activists channeled their anger and grief into positive affirmations of identity and self-worth. Forged within this crucible, the Black Arts Movement thrived, using visual art, poetry, dance, and other forms of creative expression to create an aesthetic around Blackness that was detached from the white gaze.

While the movement originated in New York with Black literary activist Amiri Baraka, it quickly gained traction in California, where diverse voices and new mediums were flourishing.

For African Americans, the practice of quilting not only preserves memory through the use of repurposed fabrics, but also plays a vital role in protest, as artists have used—and continue to use—the medium to assert their voice to claim identity, tackle racism, and confront sexism. Practitioners of textile arts fuse material and message in expressions of freedom and liberation. This contemporary application of the craft has its historical antecedents in the American South. As a tool used for clandestine communication, quilts contained secret symbols that guided the enslaved to freedom through the Underground Railroad. The symbology contained in these quilts also harks back to African imagery, including the Kongolese cosmogram, a symbol that represents birth, life, death, and rebirth. For many enslaved people, these linkages to African roots became essential ties to home and identity that resisted erasure during slavery.

As articles of ancestry, quilts were passed down through generations as family heirlooms. But quilts are also important artifacts of a Black artistic legacy that is often overlooked. “We are all artists. Piecing is our work,” artist Faith Ringgold once said. “We brought it straight from Africa. … That was what we did after a hard day’s work in the field to keep our sanity and bring beauty into our lives.”

The communal process of creating quilts—the quilting bee—is a gathering of women who work collaboratively, sharing skills, valuable information, and history with one another. With that in mind, below is a contemporary quilting bee, highlighting six Black women artists who have used the métier of cloth to share their stories and bear witness to world-shaping events. With every stitch, appliqué, and brushstroke they weave tales and references from the past with modern themes. Using traditions rooted in Southern vernacular craft traditions, these Black women conjure the memories of their foremothers, whose work was often relegated to the margins of art but who have now gained the attention they deserve.

At Art Basel Miami Beach, which opens today to VIP guests and runs through Sunday, New York’s Nicola Vassell Gallery will present a two-person booth featuring the work of artists Fred Eversley and Alteronce Gumby. Titled “Color Vaults,” the presentation will look at the two artists’ shared affinity for space. For the art fair, viewers will see how Eversley and Gumby are kindred spirits engaging in an intergenerational dialogue that explores the way each artist renders the concept of energy through their distinct use of light and color.

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 2021.

“Alteronce and Fred are two brilliant artists, a generation apart, whose ideas about energy and the cosmos make them uniquely suited to mutual engagement,” said Nicola Vassell, the gallery’s founder.

Known for leveraging his aerospace career into art-making, Eversley creates highly polished parabolic sculptures that captivate viewers through their kinetic permutations of shape and color. The transformative properties of color played a critical role in the work that Eversley created in his New York studio for “Color Vaults.” The 80-year-old artist spent the pandemic’s initial lockdown in his New York studio, separated from his production equipment and most importantly his primary color sources in L.A.’s Venice neighborhood. 

[Nicola Vassell discusses opening her gallery and changes in the art world with curator Donna De Salvo.]

Through the use of new pigments he procured while in New York, Eversley experimented with new combinations of color and processes that expanded his vocabulary. “You end up with an infinite variety of possibilities different than I ever did before,” Eversley said in a recent Zoom interview with Gumby. “I’m still experimenting with them. I’ll probably run out of life before I run out of possibilities.”

The properties of the parabola and its “U” shaped, conical design captured the imagination of Eversley at a young age. After reading an article in a science journal about the process of rotating a liquid on a vertical axis to create a perfect parabola, he proceeded to conduct his own experiments using a photographic turntable and Jell-O until he created his own parabolic lens. That curiosity led him to pursue a career in engineering, beginning in the mid-1960s, when he moved to Los Angeles. He found work at Wyle Laboratories, which was contracted by NASA to build energy testing laboratories for the agency’s Gemini and Apollo missions. 

Alteronce Gumby, The Sky is Not the Limit, 2021.

After a debilitating injury sustained in a car accident, Eversley convalesced in Venice, home to a cadre of artists that included Charles Maddox, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, John McCracken and John Altoon. During this time he began experimenting with materials and physics, designing resin molds to create a parabolic shape that Eversley described  as “the only shape known to man that is the perfect concentrator of all forms of energy.” 

Gumby’s introduction to art came when he was 19, while an architecture student studying abroad in Barcelona. A visit to the city’s Picasso Museum, filled with works that represented the broad spectrum of his career from childhood drawings to ceramics, ignited his interest. Though Gumby initially took up figurative drawing which then evolved into De Kooning–influenced abstraction, a chance encounter with shimmering shattered glass at a broken bus stop pavilion changed the trajectory of his practice. He began to incorporate painted broken glass into his work, experimenting with the idea of deconstruction and reconstruction as expressions of energy. 

“All matter that exists already exists—it’s just destroyed and reformed into another form of matter,” he said. His abstractions soon transformed into cosmic landscapes, created on shaped canvases. He assembles these crystallized topographies from shards of painted glass, raw lapis, red jasper, and other crystals that create a mirrored effect that reflects the surrounding environment. His paintings are further transformed by the light in the space where they are shown, and as the viewer walks around the paintings, the iridescent colors and reflections shift, evoking the sensation of being in a luminous halo of stardust. 

Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 2021.

For his contribution to “Color Vaults,” Gumby will present news landscapes that are an expression of energy between the sun and the cosmos; he forms the painted glass shards into mosaic patterns that resemble constellations of stars within a galaxy—constellations of gemstones thoughtfully placed throughout the painting add a textural element that encourages the viewer to experience the paintings from various angles. The shapes of his paintings are often squares or two rectangles placed together to give the appearance of tectonic plates shifting apart. 

During their Zoom conversation, Gumby asked Eversley about the difference between engineering accidents and artistic ones. The stories behind their process and their work elucidate the valuable role chance plays in their growth and development. “As an engineer you get into accidents also—good accidents” Eversley said. To which Gumby emphatically replied, “That’s what I call painting too.” 

Their respective commitment to the core themes of their work while embracing experimentation with material and process has led to an evolutionary process that yielded numerous discoveries that prompt further inquiry. “Each piece is essentially a surprise,” Eversley said. “Each piece is its own animal.”