CARE GUIDE
A SITE OF STRUGGLE 1
Dear Visitor, I have crafted this pamphlet with deep intentionality, care, and respect. As a Black graduate student at Northwestern, this is my offering, which I hope can open up moments of comfort and release for you. The pamphlet brings together selected works from the exhibition that are paired with artworks from The Block’s collection, poetry, and a guided meditation created specifically for this exhibition. The call and response structure is meant to create a dialogue between the emotional weight of selected works from A Site of Struggle and images from the museum’s collection that emphasize themes of community joy, motherhood, self-determination, agency, and Black womanhood. The intent of this resource is not to dismiss the gravity of our collective grief and pain but instead to ask how we can continue building emotional pathways that lead to radical self-care, nourishment, and rest. If it feels aligned with what you need, it is for you to use as you move through the exhibition and continue to process what you have witnessed once you have left. Thank you for being here. With gratitude, H.B.
Table of Contents Communal Gathering, Mourning, and Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Motherhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Self-Fashioning and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Black Womanhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Guided Meditation, by Joshua Bee Alafia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Communal Gathering, Mourning, and Joy On the Black Family By June Jordan
we making love real they mining the rivers we been going without trees and going without please and growing on— on make-dos and breakthroughs to baby makes three’s a family ole Charlie knows nothing about out there where he burning the leaves and firing the earth and killing and killing we been raising the children to hold us some love for tomorrows that show how we won our own wars just to come in the night Black and Loving Man and Woman definitely in despite of all the hurdles that the murdering masterminds threw up to stop the comings of Black Love we came we came and we come in a glory of darkness around the true reasons for sharing our dark and our beautiful name that we give to our dark and our beautiful daughters and sons who must make the same struggle to love and must win
“On the Black Family” by June Jordan from The Essential June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller, Copper Canyon Press 2021. ©2021 June M. Jordan Literary Estate. Used by permission. www.junejordan.com
against the tyrannical soldierly sins of the ones who beatify plastic and steel and who fly themselves high on the failure to feel —they mining the rivers we making love real A SITE OF STRUGGLE 3
Dox Thrash, After the Lynching, late 1930s. Carborundum mezzotint printed in black ink on wove paper, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund, 2017.27. Courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Photo by David Stover.
Call: Through soft shadows and delicate line work, Dox Thrash tenderly explores the weight of community mourning in his 1930s print After the Lynching. The image conveys the pain and grief the four figures must all feel together; a woman and young girl comfort one another while watching someone they knew, likely a close friend or family member, being carried away to be buried.
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Response: This pairing
of black and white photographs celebrates the uplifting possibility of creating community spaces for embodied joy through dancing and music. Roadhouse near Jackson, Mississippi, by noted jazz photographer Ted Williams, conveys the energy of dancing bodies with blurred spaces and overlapping shapes that reflect the camera’s potential to capture both stillness and motion. We are also reminded that the fullness of these moments reverberates beyond the camera’s frame: the vibrations of the music playing, aromas of a crowded dance hall, perhaps a moment of rest with a glass of water or a cigarette, and conversations among friends. Ted Williams was one of the first African American photography students to attend Chicago’s Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He inspired a generation of young African American photojournalists documenting Black American life on Chicago’s South Side during the 1960s and 70s, including Mikki Ferrill. For a full decade Ferrill photographed the dance venue The Garage, also known as “The Alley,” a weekly pop-up music club that took over a car garage and the surrounding alley space at 610 East 50th Street. Over the course of 30 years “The Alley” provided an important space for the uninhibited expression of Black life and culture, in a city heavily divided along lines of class and race. Every Sunday, a large and close-knit community would come together to listen to DJ jazz record battles, dance, drink, and laugh. Ferrill developed a close relationship with the people who came to the space, and she displayed the photographs she took on the walls inside The Garage itself, so that the community could see themselves and the beauty that brought them together.
Top: Ted Williams, Roadhouse near Jackson, Mississippi, 1964, gelatin silver print, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, The Richard Florsheim Art Fund purchase. 2000.25.23 Above: Mikki Ferrill, Untitled (The Garage, Chicago),1973, gelatin silver print, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, The Richard Florsheim Art Fund Purchase. 2000.25.2. Courtesy of the artist © Mikki Ferrill
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Motherhood
Emory Douglas, May 26, 1973, 1973, ink wash and graphite pencil. Richard J. Daley Library, Special Collections and Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. Image Courtesy of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. © 2021 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Call: Several works in this exhibition grapple with the profound effects that racial violence
has on our families. For example, in May 26, 1973 (1973), Emory Douglas depicts a recently widowed African American mother struggling to explain police violence and racial hatred to her children. While many of Douglas’s illustrations of Black women from this era show them as gun-toting revolutionaries, in May 26, 1973 the artist chose a different strategy. The drawing shows a mother with her young son and baby daughter holding each other tightly. The text above the three figures emphasizes the inner turmoil the mother faces. She wants to be honest about their father’s murder by the police and also yearns to shield her children from the harsh realities of how white supremacist systems uphold police violence against Black people. As the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 through the early 1980s, Douglas was instrumental in creating a visual language for revolutionary politics and Black liberation struggles.
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Response: Dr. Margaret
Burroughs originally created Mother and Child in the early 1960s, likely in connection with her 1963 poem “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black: Reflections of an African-American Mother.” The detailed lines of the linocut technique show a mother tenderly gazing at her daughter, whom she holds in her lap. From the shelter of her mother’s arms, the young girl looks out toward the viewer, seemingly bold and unafraid. In the poem, the mother questions what she can do to encourage her child’s sense of self-worth when her child encounters racism from so many sources. Together, this image and poem explore a mother’s fullhearted commitment to helping her child embrace being Black as a source of beauty, pride, and power. As an artist, activist, teacher, and the founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, Burroughs created artworks that celebrated Black pride, Black youth, family, and community. The artwork Hopscotch portrays an interracial group of young girls playing together, likely on a school playground. Burroughs creates a scene of joyful childhood through a lush background landscape and the intricate dress patterns and smiling faces of the girls playing hopscotch and waiting turns outside in the fresh air.
Above left: Margaret Burroughs, Mother and Child, 1996, Commercial reproduction on paper, based on a linoleum cut, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Gift of Margaret Burroughs. 1996.46.1 Left: Margaret Burroughs, Hopscotch, 1996, Commercial reproduction on paper, based on a linoleum cut, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Gift of Margaret Burroughs. 1996.46.2
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What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Reflections of an African-American Mother) By Margaret Burroughs What shall I tell my children who are black Of what it means to be a captive in this dark skin What shall I tell my dear one, fruit of my womb, Of how beautiful they are when everywhere they turn They are faced with abhorrence of everything that is black. Villains are black with black hearts. A black cow gives no milk. A black hen lays no eggs. Bad news comes bordered in black, black is evil And evil is black and devils’ food is black . . . What shall I tell my dear ones raised in a white world A place where white has been made to represent All that is good and pure and fine and decent. Where clouds are white, and dolls, and heaven Surely is a white, white place with angels Robed in white, and cotton candy and ice cream and milk and ruffled Sunday dresses And dream houses and long sleek cadillacs And angel’s food is white . . . all, all . . . white. What can I say therefore, when my child Comes home in tears because a playmate Has called him black, big lipped, flatnosed and nappy headed? What will he think When I dry his tears and whisper, “Yes, that’s true. But no less beautiful and dear.” How shall I lift up his head, get him to square His shoulders, look his adversaries in the eye, Confident of the knowledge of his worth, Serene under his sable skin and proud of his own beauty?
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What can I do to give him strength That he may come through life’s adversities As a whole human being unwarped and human in a world Of biased laws and inhuman practices, that he might Survive. And survive he must! For who knows? Perhaps this black child here bears the genius To discover the cure for . . . Cancer Or to chart the course for exploration of the universe. So, he must survive for the good of all humanity. He must and will survive. I have drunk deeply of late from the foundation Of my black culture, sat at the knee and learned From Mother Africa, discovered the truth of my heritage, The truth, so often obscured and omitted. And I find I have much to say to my black children. I will lift up their heads in proud blackness With the story of their fathers and their fathers Fathers. And I shall take them into a way back time of Kings and Queens who ruled the Nile, And measured the stars and discovered the Laws of mathematics. Upon whose backs have been built The wealth of continents. I will tell him This and more. And his heritage shall be his weapon And his armor; will make him strong enough to win Any battle he may face. And since this story is Often obscured, I must sacrifice to find it For my children, even as I sacrificed to feed, Clothe and shelter them. So this I will do for them If I love them. None will do it for me. I must find the truth of heritage for myself And pass it on to them. In years to come I believe Because I have armed them with the truth, my children And my children’s children will venerate me. For it is the truth that will make us free! Reprinted by permission of the Margaret Burroughs Estate.
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Self-Fashioning and Agency
Carl and Karen Pope, Palimpsest, 1998–99, stills from single-channel video, color with sound, 6:37 minutes. Courtesy of Carl and Karen Pope. Photograph by Clare Britt.
Call: In Palimpsest (1998–99), the artists and twin siblings Carl and Karen Pope, explore
reclaiming individual agency over the body as a means to resist the ways systems of oppression have harmed or stereotyped Black bodies. In a series of three permanent physical self-modifications, filmed and then compiled together as one video, Carl positions his own body as a site of simultaneous vulnerability and power. First, we see the artist having the adinkra symbol “Aya” (meaning “I am not afraid of you”) branded on his back. Second, a small incision is made on the artist’s arm and the small layer of skin is lifted up; a light shone through the skin shows how thin it is. Finally, a poem written by Karen is tattooed across the entire length of the artist’s body. Together, these acts represent the artist rewriting historical narratives and practices of violence—taking charge of how his own body experiences pain and beauty.
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Response: Palimpsest emphasizes the nuanced
Top: Jess Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre: Dee Dee Ngozi, 55, Atlanta, GA, 2016, from the portfolio To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, (2018), inkjet print on paper, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, The Block Friends of Art Fund purchase. 2019.2.1u-v Above: Mikki Ferrill, Untitled (Annual Black Cowboy Parade, Oakland) 1986. Gelatin silver print, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Gift of Mikki Ferrill. 2000.25.4. Courtesy of the artist © Mikki Ferrill
complexity of agency. Photographs by Jess Dugan and Mikki Ferrill speak to the radical necessity of being able to define our own individual and collective identities, and shape how the stories of our lives and our histories move through the world. They also celebrate the significant role that clothing can play in self-fashioning. In Ferrill’s photograph (left), a participant from Oakland’s Annual Black Cowboy Parade faces the camera, casual but bold in his stance while displaying his holstered gun and standing in a grassy area with horses in the background. Since 1975, The Annual Black Cowboy Parade and the Oakland Black Cowboy Association have been educating the public about the important and often overlooked legacy of African American cowboys in the West. In the portrait taken by artist Jess Dugan (above), Dee Dee Ngozi stands proudly facing the camera dressed completely in royal red clothing. Dee Dee’s bright dress, makeup, jewelry, and elegantly draped feather boa shine as a vibrant declaration of the self and beauty. Dugan’s series To Survive on This Shore challenges one-dimensional representations of older transgender people and instead celebrates a wide range of life experiences and intersecting identities. In the personal interview that accompanies this photograph, Dee Dee explains how living a purpose-driven life comes from the courage to fully and unapologetically express your spirit to the world, even when others challenge the truth of your calling. A SITE OF STRUGGLE 11
Still I Rise By Maya Angelou You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?
Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room.
Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
“Still I Rise” from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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Black Womanhood A Woman Speaks By Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound. I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning.
From The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, by Audre Lorde, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white. A SITE OF STRUGGLE 13
Lorna Simpson, Untitled (Two Necklines), 1989, two gelatin silver prints on paper and eleven plastic plaques, 36 inches (diameter, each print); dimensions variable (plastic plaques). Collection of Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum of California State University, Long Beach, Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1990.6a–m. Image © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Call: Several works in A Site of Struggle interrogate the gendered and psychological
dimensions of anti-Black violence, highlighting patriarchy and white supremacy’s deep ties to one another. From Elizabeth Catlett’s …And a special fear for my loved ones (not shown) from her 1946 series The Black Woman, to Lorna Simpson’s Untitled (Two Necklines) (1989), we see Black women artists in this exhibition employing different strategies to grapple with the sexual politics of racial difference. Catlett’s work centers the anxiety and fear of a female relative, viewing the body of a male relative, to articulate how anti-Black violence psychologically affects Black women within their communities. In Mirror, Mirror (1987) (not shown), Carrie Mae Weems riffs on the tale of Snow White to confront the oppressive nature of European beauty standards and the role of visual media in constructing social narratives and images of Black women. Lorna Simpson’s Untitled (Two Necklines) brings the Black female body to the center of her confrontation with the situational context of language, using text and photograph to weave together word associations that are in tension with one another. Different terms for “circle” can elicit interpretations from the benign to the violently sinister, depending on the viewer’s subject position and identity. For example, “cuffs” when listed before the words “collar” and “loop” evokes the violence of shackles and slavery or on its own it might simply call to mind the sleeves on a clothing garment.
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Response: Untitled
(Brooklyn, NY) and Mahalia Jackson and Duke Ellington, Newport, Jazz Festival, from The Block’s collection, add nuance to the emotional and visual registers through which we see Black women pictured as subjects, creators, and individuals. These works serve as a counterpoint to the artworks in A Site of Struggle that show Black women grieving, protecting others, or being threatened themselves. This 1958 photograph by Ted Williams shows famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performing with the great composer Duke Ellington. The upward tilt of the camera’s angle propels Mahalia’s presence to center stage and the embodied power of her singing shines through. Her face is partially illuminated, highlighting her open mouth. It feels as if we can hear her powerful voice moving out over an unseen audience. One of her hands is boldly uplifted while the other firmly grabs the microphone stand, gesturing to the spiritual energy invoked through the song. In the intimate portrait by Dawoud Bey (right), the woman in the photograph commands the camera’s focus. She is slightly guarded in her pose while also drawing the viewer’s attention with the palpable presence and energy of her fixed gaze. The close crop of the picture frame highlights the woman’s individuality: the crisp detail of her hair texture, a New York Housing Authority t-shirt, and the play of shadow and light across her face that celebrates the deep richness of her skin.
Top: Ted Williams, Mahalia Jackson and Duke Ellington, Newport, Jazz Festival, 1958, gelatin silver print, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, The Richard Florsheim Art Fund Purchase. 2000.25.20 Above: Dawoud Bey, Untitled (Brooklyn, NY), 1992, gelatin silver print, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art Northwestern University, gift of Sari and James A. Klein in honor of Lisa Corrin and Peter Erickson. 2014.4.4. © Dawoud Bey
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Guided Meditation The challenging materials on view in A Site of Struggle can elicit a range of personal responses. In a spirit of care, this 12-minute guided meditation was developed by Chicago-based mindfulness and meditation teacher Joshua Bee Alafia, co-executive director of the South Side Liberation Center. To access the guided mediation, use the QR code below or call 847-410-1962. For those listening to the guided meditation in the museum, please use headphones.
https://bit.ly/ASOSMeditation
blessing the boats By Lucille Clifton (at St. Mary’s)
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats” from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 1991 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
This resource was created in conjunction with the exhibition A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, organized by The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, and on view January 26–July 10, 2022. 16
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