E. Jane

Photo by and courtesy of E. Jane

E. Jane (b.1990, Bethesda, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by Black liberation and womanist praxis, their work incorporates digital images, video, text, performance, sculpture, installation, and sound design. E. Jane’s work explores safety and futurity as it relates to Black femmes, as well as how Black femmes navigate/negotiate space in popular culture and networked media. Since 2015, Jane has been developing the performance persona MHYSA, an underground popstar for the cyber resistance. MHYSA operates in Jane’s Lavendra/Recovery (2015 – present) -- an iterative multimedia installation -- and out in the world. Jane considers this project a total work of art -- or Gesamtkunstwerk -- that honors and examines the life of the Black diva and of Black femmes in popular culture. In 2018, MHYSA followed her critically acclaimed debut, fantasii, with a live EU/US tour. Highlight performances include the ICA and Cafe OTO in London and Rewire in The Hague. Her second album NEVAEH came out in February 2020 on Hyperdub Records in London. (Continued)

E. Jane received their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and a BA in Art History with minors in English and Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College in New York in 2012. They have performed at The Kitchen, MoCADA, and MoMA PS1 as one half of sound duo SCRAAATCH, alongside collaborator chukwumaa. They have exhibited their solo work in group shows in the U.S. and internationally at institutions and galleries including MoMA PS1, Anonymous Gallery, Shoot The Lobster, EFA Project Space, Studio Museum 127 in New York, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois, Chicago, and MCA Chicago, IMT Gallery, and Edel Assanti in London. Their installation, Lavendra/Recovery, has been shown as solo exhibitions entitled "Lavendra'' , both at American Medium in Brooklyn, NY in 2017 and at Glasgow International 2018 in Scotland. In 2015, they wrote the widely-circulated NOPE manifesto, which was recently featured in Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020, Verso). They were a 2016 recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a 20192020 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and are currently a Harvard College Fellow in New Media as a part of SCRAAATCH.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2021.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?

EJ: I was in undergrad, focusing on art history, philosophy, and creative writing. My school required that I take visual arts classes to graduate because the art history department was within the art department. I was doing my study abroad at the time and had to take these classes while in Paris. I took a History of Photography class and black and white photography for the first time; I like learning about the history of art, but I also learned that I preferred making art in response to it than writing a paper. It took me years until I accepted being an artist as an identifier because it felt more like an aspiration. You don’t understand how art can be a real profession until you meet other people who are doing it. Another thing that doesn’t get discussed is how artists make money. It’s not necessarily just from shows; that’s one way that artists make money, but there’s also grants, fellowships, and residencies that pay. The Studio Museum pays a $20,000 stipend, which is an entry level job. You get paid every two weeks and it turns into a very real job. You ’re maybe selling art and possibly teaching. Most people I know are doing some combination of all of it to survive being artists. I’m teaching at the moment to pay my bills, and I have no problem with that. It’s really messed up that people think that you can’t have a job in art, but it was the only thing I was good at after leaving school and came natural to me. I started pursuing it seriously but I told myself that I would work on a photo series and if this art thing doesn’t work out, I’ll try to get a PhD in Art History. But then someone liked the photo series I was working on at the time and it became my first solo show, and it started working out. I got into graduate school, so I decided that I could pursue art - not that grad school is the only way to [do that]!

E. Jane,

"You are a light shining (Maxine Waters)" (2020). Installation view in "This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20" at

MoMA PS1, December 10, 2020 – March 14, 2021. Photo by Kris Graves

GM: Why do you work in the specific mediums that you do (performance, installation, and media)?

EJ: When I was in D.C. after graduate school, I was in a performance scene. My friends were performance artists and I was very moved by performance, so I decided to try it. I think a lot about the performativity of the everyday. If you ’re into fashion or pop music, you understand that there’s a lot of persona construction happening in the world, and that you ’re always performing. Performance is this space where you get to take that, twist it, and really manipulate reality. A big project that I’ ve been working on for the past six years has been MHYSA, which is a performance persona that I created. She came out of me being in my studio and thinking through media, specifically R&B music, music videos, and history, and these performances of femineity and power. [I was] basically watching Black femme hood unfold in R&B music performances and thinking about these women and their histories, as well as understanding my role as an artist and how powerful it is to keep a history and an archive. I was making these lip synch videos in grad school, so I was already working with these videos, but I had a professor, David Hartt, say to me, “I want more sincerity from this. ” And I thought about my own performing art background from childhood and realized that I had performed, sang, and danced on a stage. So why was I pretending that performance was this foreign, abstract concept? Performance is a way to connect your body to concepts you ’re studying in the world, or histories that you ’re interrogating. Video art is a way of slowing down time and a moment. One of my videos that was in the Studio Museum residency show is called “LetMEbeaWomanTM.mp4” (2020), and it contains a series of speeches from Black women accepting major awards. The first clip is of Diahann Carroll accepting a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress. The work as a whole is about a desire to perform inside of femininity as a Black woman and getting a leading role is one way to do that.

GM: So looking at recent figures like Halle Berry, Viola Davis, and Taraji P. Henson?

EJ: Not Halle, because I focused on people who have histories of singing. The Viola Davis speech was just this moment, because her being a darker-skinner, femme Black woman on public television was a national phenomenon and was just so powerful. The speech she gave [when she won the Emmy] where she recited Harriet Tubman was such a huge deal to me. I’ ve manipulated it in different pieces before and brought it back to this project. [She was] super phenomenal in that role as Annalise Keating. The speech was super interesting, and I don’t agree with all of it, but I love her optimism and the melancholy when she talks about trying to have a space in a white dominated media field. And with Diahann Carroll, it was the same thing – it was a situation where people denied her for so long, like roles on Broadway, even though she had had a successful television show. She’s the first Black woman lead to have her own sitcom, “Julia” , and she could sing.

GM: That’s right - when Kerry Washington was cast as the lead for “Scandal” , she was only the second Black actress to have a lead role on a television drama series. There had been this huge gap.

EJ: Yeah, it’s really wild. And when Diahann died, The New York Times wrote a really nice obituary that really broke down the significance of her career in relation to all of that, and her struggle with still making it, despite proving that she was good enough. Her [Tony] speech is really interesting in that this white male director wrote her a role, and she’s thanking him, and I cut all of that out! (Laughs) I have her talking about her longing, and the piece thinks of these moments of longing over this desire to successfully perform this construction of femininity that was given to us by white people. I’m ambivalent about performing, because I know there’s so many reasons why we have to interrogate this. (Continued)

E. Jane,

"LetMEbeaWomanTM.mp4 (Still)" (2020). Single-channel digital video (color, sound), fabric, monitor. 6 min., 56 sec. Courtesy of E. Jane

There’s this moment [in my video] where Beyoncé is complaining about having to do these somersaults in the air while singing, and she’s saying, “I’m so tired! I’m so hungry! It was my idea to perform while upside down!” (Laughs) So she can’t be mad at anyone but herself. That’s a moment of vulnerability for Beyoncé that people don’t acknowledge. She’s singing while doing summersaults in the air! Being able to slow those moments down, make space, and draw out nuances, is really fun with video. Right now, I basically just use mediums to express the embodiment of the diva and what that is.

GM: What was your experience being an artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as your participation in the exhibition “This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019-20” (2020-2021)?

EJ: It was a great experience. I talk with Naudline [Pierre] and Elliot [Reed] about how we were definitely spoiled in the way that [The Studio Museum] supported our vision. Not that art spaces don’t do that, but they showed us how we should be treated. It’s now a standard that I compare every interaction with a museum with, and that’s really great; being nurtured in that way is really invaluable. In regards to the exhibition, it was really nice to be able to try out new things with the work and think through how to show the remnants of a performance that’s very much embodied and in the world. How do I connect this to the larger questions in my practice?

MHYSA —

"NEVAEH LIVE" (Behind the scenes) (2020). Single-channel digital video (color, no sound), mirror, and LED lights. 15 min., 3 sec. Directed and edited by E. Jane; choreography by Jumatatu Poe; assistance by chukwumaa. Installation view in "This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20" , MoMA PS1, December 10, 2020 – March 14, 2021. Photo by Kris Graves

GM: What are you currently working on?

EJ: I have a solo show that’s going to be at OCD Chinatown in New York City in November. That’s going to be really exciting. The presented work is very much going to be in conversation with the Studio Museum/MoMA PS1 show, but there’s so many ways that you can explore embodiment, and this work is a slower way of exploring that.

GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics?

EJ: The problem really becomes whose [work] do they accept, who do they give permission to try things, and who gets to make sense in a certain way. For example, in Stephanie Jameson’s practice, she works in performance and does these really beautiful works. She just won an award and gave an interview where she talked about talking about it being so weird that she won because for so long people weren’t processing what she was trying to do. I’ ve definitely experienced that; it’s not that people aren’t down for performance and media, but it’s definitely hard to get them to let you experiment. And that’s why I think the Studio Museum exhibition was so great, because I could do whatever I wanted and people trusted me. I worked with Legacy Russell and Yelena Keller, and I just felt like me and my ideas were so held. And even when a show opens, having to explain it to the public and realizing there are certain people in the art world that wonder how the work makes sense and ask what I’m talking about. Lynn Hershman Leeson talked about making work for twenty years without people understanding what she was doing.

Co-directing a music video "I + II" (2020), Selfie diptych in still life installation, including two lightbox prints, fabric, etched glass vase, dried flowers, pearls, gemstones, bows, and wood MHYSA, Brand Nu/Sanaa Lathan (2020) Music video credit: Co-directed, edited, and lit by Lane Stewart; assistance from Ty Hampton and chukwumaa; styled by Becky Akinyode; makeup by Jesse Genao; with funding from Hyperdub Records. Installation view in "This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20" , MoMA PS1, December 10, 2020 – March 14, 2021. Photo by Kris Graves