JULY 2022
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6
GIRLS MAGAZINE
BLACK GIRL MAGIC
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6, JULY 2022
GIRLS MAGAZINE BLACK GIRL MAGIC Letter from the Editor, Page 3 Meklit Hadero, Page 4 Mia Matthias, Page 9 Alexsandra Mitchell, Page 13 Michon Sanders, Page 18 Delphine Sims, Page 21
GIRLS MISSION STATEMENT GIRLS is a revised portfolio of interviews from a nationwide community of real, strong womxn. It's a magazine that is 100% all womxn, which is beautiful in its rarity - the magazine is a safe space FOR womxn ABOUT womxn. Created by Adrianne Ramsey, it serves as a content destination for millennial womxn. Read on for an engagement of feminist voices and a collaborative community for independent girls to discover, share, and connect. The usage of the terms "girls" and "womxn" refers to gender-expansive people (cis girls, trans girls, non-binary, non-conforming, gender queer, femme centered, and any girlidentified person). Front and Back Cover Image: Meklit by Ioulex for Bulleit Burbon
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR BY ADRIANNE RAMSEY The Black Woman is a God is a reoccurring exhibition series at SOMArts Cultural Center (San Francisco, CA) that I often find myself returning to. Each iteration features a community of Black femme artists whose creative practices embody healing, Black joy, Afrofuturism, and more. The overarching theme of the show is to give ode to the Black woman, who contributions to the art world are often excluded from mainstream conversation due to misogynoir. This series had its fourth showing at SOMArts last winter, and each time I attend the show I notice that I stand before each piece for elongated periods of time. Not only do I want to take in each creative medium, but I also admire the care each artist takes in honoring the Black woman. GIRLS 14: Black Girl Magic is an issue that highlights the practices of Black femme creatives (artists, art administrators, curators, and scholars). I've wanted to do an issue exclusively dedicated to Black womxn for a while now, and GIRLS 11: Erasing The Line, which highlighted Latinx femme creatives, was a good reminder that I needed to create what would end up being GIRLS 14. I am currently working on my MA thesis, which investigates the history of Black run art spaces in Los Angeles. An important touchstone of my research is how the period of the sixties to eighties was a time when being a Black femme creative was considered radical. Black women typically found themselves excluded from the Civil Rights Movement, as most of the recognizable leaders were male – Dr. King, Malcolm X, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, etc., as well as the Black Power Movement, as their memorable image was one of Black masculinity, nationalism, and rampant aggression. Joining the Women’s Liberation Movement also proved to be a lonely experience, as it catered towards middleclass and wealthy white women and didn’t offer much to the working-class Black woman. Beginning in the late sixties, several Black women creatives around the country, such as Linda Goode Bryant, Suzanne Jackson, and Dr. Samella Lewis, founded their own artist collectives, publications, and galleries in order to reject the sexism within political movements that they were excluded from and racism from non-Black communities. I would like to think that I bring this sentiment to not only this issue, but GIRLS Magazine as a whole. Thank you to Meklit, Mia, Alexsandra, Michon, and Delphine for participating in this issue, as well as speaking so passionately about your individual practices and the importance of highlighting BIPOC artists, particularly in exhibitions and programming!
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MEKLIT HADERO
Photo by Kenny Mathieson Meklit Hadero is an award winning Ethio-American vocalist, composer, and cultural strategist. She is known for her electric stage presence and deeply personal Ethio-Jazz songs. Her performances have taken her around the world, from Addis Ababa - where she is a household name - to San Francisco, NYC, Nairobi, Rio, Cairo, Montreal, London, Zurich, Rome, Helsinki and more. Meklit is co-founder and host of Movement, a new radio series, podcast and live show exploring the intersection of global migration and music. Grounded in her experience as a refugee in her youth, Movement aims to inspire narrative change and shift public imagination around immigration and migration. Movement airs regularly to 2.5 million listeners as a special feature of PRX’s The World. Meklit is Chief of Program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as well as a National Geographic Explorer, and a TED Senior Fellow. She has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Andrew Bird, and the late musical legend Pee Wee Ellis. She has been commissioned to create new work by Lincoln Center, Stanford Live, UCLA, Meany Center for the Performing Arts @ UW, MAP Fund and many more. She is the co-Founder of the Nile Project, and a featured voice in UN Women’s theme song. Meklit’s music and projects have been covered by The New York Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, and many more.
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MEKLIT HADERO GM: Your background is predominantly in music as a singer-songwriter. What was your path to this career, and do you still perform? MH: I definitely still do it. I started at YBCA in January of 2020, about six weeks before the pandemic. So I didn’t do much of it in 2020 and 2021, but things are heating up again. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a singer-songwriter. My family and I came to the U.S. as refugees, so they were supportive of music as a hobby, but didn’t take it seriously. So I put it aside. But when I moved to San Francisco in 2004, I became immersed in the creative arts scene in the Mission District. I started working at the Red Poppy Art House and met folks from everywhere in the world, who were working collaboratively to create a foundational practice across disciplines that were relevant to the world around them and had social impact. As soon as I found that, I understood my path; from there, every step I took towards music, music took ten steps towards me. That also meant that I became an organizer at the same time that I became an artist, as those things were very intertwined. I have a recorded EP that I am waiting to release, and I’m working with two Bay Area based organizations, Women’s Audio Mission and the Creative Work Fund, on a project of traditional Ethiopian songs that have been reimagined. I also have a music and migration live show, radio show, and podcast called Movement. GM: You are currently Chief of Program at YBCA. What does this position entail, and what does working at YBCA mean to you? MH: In the past, YBCA was very organized around specific disciplines – visual arts, performing arts, and community engagement – and they were all on very separate paths. Deborah Cullinan brought me in to really think about the program holistically and focus our work on artists who are at the intersections of social justice, community well-being, and their creative practices, and having that be the through line and organizing principle, regardless of the discipline. (Continued)
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Photo by Tessa Shimizu
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MEKLIT HADERO I’ve always found that bringing people together and making space for others is really important in my practice, whether it was working at the Red Poppy Art House, the Nile Project that I co-founded, or any of the community projects that I’ve done over the years. When we make space for others, we make space for ourselves; it’s absolutely a two-way street. YBCA is a place where I get to do that, but on a bigger scale. The pandemic put us in a space where we could do a lot of re-imagining and designing new programs, which has been really powerful. [Some examples are] the YBCA 10 cohort, The Healing Project, and the Artist Power Convenings, as well as work in innovating systems - like the Artist Led Giving Circle. So that’s been a really interesting and challenging journey because of the pandemic; to start a new job and then only a few weeks later find out that you’re basically closed for a year and half. It’s been a big learning experience, and I hope that we’ve been able to create programs that make a real difference for artists.
GM: You touched on this, but as Chief of Program, what are some new initiatives that you’re working on? MH: The idea with the YBCA 10 was that we made a significant investment in artists who work around creative practice and community well-being. The cohort is entirely BIPOC artists who all have a track record of not just powerful work, but creative projects that look at the intersections of racial and climate justice. [The final presentation] was not about a curated exhibition, but what happens when a group of artists like that takes over our spaces. It was a very creative, collaborative process with them, using a very different approach from the way we’ve worked previously. The experiences turned out really beautifully! We’ve also welcomed The Healing Project, which is an initiative of Samora Pinderhughes, a composer and multi-instrumentalist. It was based on 100 interviews with former or currently incarcerated people about their healing and resilience Photo by John Nilsen
practices. It’s an exhibition experience, a digital archive of scored stories, and a series of performances and community engagement activities. But it’s a real constellation. (Continued)
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MEKLIT HADERO The digital archive is online and the exhibition experience is live with us right now. Our gallery experiences are free now, which has been a big change for us as well, we’re making sure that art and creative practice can be accessible. GM: How do you highlight BIPOC in your practice? MH: We are focused on artists from marginalized communities throughout our work. If we’re an organization that’s really working at that intersection of creative practice and social change, it’s really important that we do that. The YBCA 10 is an entirely BIPOC cohort looking at radical practice, racial justice, and climate justice as a center point. But it’s also about looking at healing, repair, and resilience. We are in a place where we want to be artist-led. When we worked with those artists, it was really important for them that [their presented works] not be all about trauma, but joy, healing, rootedness, and connection. So what you’ll find is that YBCA has more of that focus, flavor, approach, perspective, and framing throughout. GM: What you just said really stuck with me. In the last 5-10 years, many Black artists have been commissioned to make works in response to politics and trauma, and it’s really interesting to instead look at artworks that dismantle those stereotypes of what Black art is “supposed” to be. MH: Absolutely – this is part of what happens when it’s the artists themselves who are in the lead, setting the tone, saying what they need, and defining the narratives for themselves and their communities as well.
Photo by John Nilsen
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MEKLIT HADERO
Photo by Ibra Acke, Artistic Direction by Wangechi Mutu GM: What could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics? MH: You know, I had a really interesting conversation with Alice Shepherd, an amazing Afro-British disabled dancer-choreographer who works between the Bay Area and New York. In the conversation with Alice, she said that she doesn’t like the term “inclusion” because it implies that there is an includer and someone who is excluded. For her, it’s all about equity and access. The main thing is that institutions have to be reflective about how power dynamics show up. We have a lot of work to do around institutions in general surrounding anti-racism. We have to guide, push, and invite institutions to directly address history in not only the ways that they program, but also how they structure themselves. We all have a lot of work to do, but I think for us one of the most important things is co-creation as a fundamental principle. So, understanding that institutions don’t have all the answers and that the only way that we’re going to get to spaces of equity is when we’re in a place of sharing power and making sure that the artists that we’re working with – and the communities that those artists are serving – have a voice in what happens in institutions. For me, that’s what the key is – how we listen, become listening organizations, and have humility. But also create structures around that learning so that it’s not just about the leader of an organization at a certain time, but instead making changes permanent and long-term.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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MIA MATTHIAS
Courtesy of Mia Matthias and MoMA
Mia Matthias is a curator and writer. Mia is an Assistant Curator at Glenstone Museum. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mia worked on Jason Moran (2019); Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop (2020); Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself and the accompanying performance commission, Disturbing the View (2021); My Barbarian (2021); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (2022). Mia was a joint Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2018-19. Mia is a graduate of New York University.
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MIA MATTHIAS GM: What was your path to becoming an arts professional? MM: My journey began with internships at small arts nonprofits and taking courses that involved visiting galleries and speaking with artists. Those experiences were very hands-on and changed my understanding of the possibilities of presenting art. Before that, I viewed museums and galleries as quite static spaces. After graduating, I worked at an arts advisory and then an auction house. I had the opportunity to write about specific artists and artworks, and found I enjoyed the in-depth research and wanted to shift toward the more sustained engagement that comes with organizing exhibitions. This led me to the joint fellowship between two museums: MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The fellowship was crucial in my development; it solidified my interest in curatorial work and I was able to work with brilliant scholars, curators, and artists. Importantly, it demystified the process of exhibition-making, which can be purposefully opaque and inaccessible. It was a game changer to have people invested in showing me how to produce thoughtful programming. At MoMA, I worked on a presentation of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures with Paulina Pobocha. The level of care and research that went into every decision -- from plinth sizes to selecting archival materials -- was extremely thorough and set a standard for rigor that I bring to every project. At the Studio Museum, we devoted a significant amount of time and resources to fostering community investment in the institution and collection and building relationships with other cultural centers throughout Harlem. I want to bring that level of audience understanding and specificity to everything I do. Most importantly, through the fellowship I built a community that has been crucial to my ability to sustain myself in this field. I then found myself gravitating to more dynamic and interdisciplinary presentations, which brought me to the Whitney Museum. GM: What was your experience assisting on exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art? MM: I was able to work on a number of incredible shows at the Whitney, all of which were formative in my development as a curator. I had a lot of admiration for Adrienne Edwards’s curatorial practice before I started working with her at the museum. My first experience was working on the formidable Jason Moran (2019) exhibition, which had originated at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis under Adrienne with Danielle A. Jackson, another curator who I admire greatly. (Continued)
Installation view of the exhibition "Constantin Brancusi Sculpture", Museum of Modern Art; July 22, 2018 - February 18, 2019. Photograph by Denis Doorly.
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MIA MATTHIAS
Dave McKenzie, Disturbing the View, 2021. Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 1, 2021. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photograph © Paula Court
The exhibition featured weekly in-gallery performances and taught me an incredible amount about effective activations. I really couldn’t have asked for a better crash course in producing performances within the context of museums, and I’m so grateful to have worked with an incredible team – Raul Zbengheci, Danielle Sheli Levy, and Mik Berry. We were there six days a week working on bespoke mini concerts. Unbeknownst to us, the pandemic was around the corner, so the experience feels even more special because of how unfeasible it would have been even a few months later. I later worked on Dave McKenzie’s durational and site-specific performance commission, Disturbing the View (2021), which required a completely different approach. The performance traveled throughout the building and changed shape with each iteration. With that experience, it was important to understand when to take a more hands-off approach and allow for an unmediated encounter between the artist and audiences. With My Barbarian (2021), the exhibition itself became a performance of sorts, a theatrical display made dynamic through a highly-choreographed display of video, light, and art objects. In addition to their exhibition and incredible performance series, I learned so much from working with them on producing their first monograph. Finally, the 2022 Biennial integrated performance into the exhibition beautifully, in a way that allows for a sense of chance – one can return to the exhibition several times and find that it has transformed. All of these experiences have been incredibly rewarding and each required a bespoke approach to presentation and contextualization. GM: In your opinion, what could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics? MM: Art institutions need to be more willing to undermine their own precedents. There’s too often a desire to bring Black artists into institutions in order to fulfill a specific agenda, then resist when those artists want to shift the existing structures that were created to exclude them. There’s a tension between institutional statements purporting a desire for ambiguous change, versus any willingness to be malleable or open to new ideas or feedback. (Continued)
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MIA MATTHIAS
Installation view of My Barbarian (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 29, 2021–February 27, 2022). On projection screens: Shakuntala Du Bois, 2012. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
That tension partly comes from institutions prioritizing self-preservation above all else, and perceiving radical change as a threat to their existence. In recent conversations with friends and colleagues, we’ve begun to question whether or not traditional institutions are useful contexts for presenting exhibitions and programming. These institutions need to understand that it is a privilege when Black artists are willing to engage with them – not the other way around – and behave accordingly. Either change or become obsolete; either way, self-preservation won’t work. GM: You are currently transitioning to a role as Assistant Curator of Glenstone Museum. What are you looking forward to doing within this position? MM: I’m really excited about working with Glenstone’s incredible collection, and I find their commitment to supporting artists in-depth really inspiring. Oftentimes, institutions sacrifice intimacy as they scale upward, but the team at Glenstone very much prioritizes artist and community relationships, and I am eager to be a part of that conversation. After several years of working at incredible institutions in New York City, I’m also looking forward to working in new contexts and serving an expanded community. I will be building relationships with artists in the collection, realizing exhibitions, and producing rigorous scholarship around their work. Their institutional pace is ideal in that it will allow me to work closely with artists over a long period of time to while also being flexible enough for presentations, programming, and publications that feel current and relevant. It’s also important to me to continue working with artists and writing outside of institutional contexts. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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ALEXSANDRA MITCHELL
Photo by HRDWRKER Alexsandra Mitchell is an arts administrator, scholar, speaker, and creative whose work intersects the field of Africana Studies, the arts, the African Diaspora, spirituality, libraries, and archives. She currently serves as the Manager of Education and Public Programs at the California African American Museum. Alexsandra served as a reference librarian and an archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Prior to joining the staff in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Alexsandra was a lecturer at New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study, and worked with institutions such as National Geographic Television, The Library of Congress, The West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, The New York Historical Society, and The Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, New York. She has appeared on the Travel Channel’s “Mysteries at the Museum”, and NPR. Alexsandra was a visiting professor at Pratt University’s School of Information, where she created her own course: Archiving the Diaspora: Collections, Community, and Culture. She is co-author of Research Techniques and Strategies for the Study of Black Writings, Rowman & Littlefield (forthcoming) and a contributor to Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in Library and Information Science.
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ALEXSANDRA MITCHELL GM: You have a background in library sciences and art administration – what was your path to this career? AM: I went to Howard University and completed an undergraduate degree in African-American Studies, with a minor in Sociology. During my junior year, I looked into summer internship opportunities to continue my research and started at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. I worked on a project with the South African Archival Project, which at the time was run by the History Department at Howard University. That’s where I really began working in archives, and I wanted to continue in that. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture had a six-week summer institute opportunity for undergraduates who were interested in pursuing graduate degrees in the humanities. At that time, the program took five students from HBCU’s and five students from local New York area schools. We had a really robust coursework program with professors from various graduate programs in art history, Africana studies, history, and all subjects relating to the African diaspora, and we also conducted research on what became an online exhibition that Sylviane Diouf curated for the Schomburg Center. During my time there, I wondered if I wanted to go into graduate school immediately or look at job opportunities. After speaking with a number of archivists, a few different professors, and my mentors, I decided to pursue a dual Master’s in Africana Studies at NYU and Library Sciences at Long Island University. So after completing my studies, I worked as an adjunct assistant curator at the Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Archives at NYU, and ultimately returned to the Schomburg Center as a reference librarian, where I managed reference services. I also oversaw the programming for the Manuscript Archive Moore Books Division, where I had a series related to the intersections of arts and archives. There, I worked with a number of artists, such as Firelei Báez and Derrick Adams, on shows that they developed for the Studio Museum in Harlem and the accompanying public programming. I also developed the Schomburg’s Community Archives Project, where we taught community members how to archive and preserve their own personal memories and historical documents, and worked with the Mobile Library Service at Rikers Island. GM: You are currently Manager of Education and Public Programs at CAAM. What does working at a groundbreaking space like CAAM mean to you? AM: CAAM has been a really great opportunity for me to engage in the Black arts community here in Los Angeles and the West Coast more broadly, with CAAM being one of the primary foundational institutions for Black art, history, and culture across the state. I also work with a number of really incredible colleagues here at CAAM; we have really incredible curators. [It’s been great] to develop relations with my peers in that regard, but to also work with a number of really incredible artists for various shows and public programs that we put on. (Continued)
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ALEXSANDRA MITCHELL
Photo by Flo'Ngala We’ve been able to partner with a number of local Black organizations and businesses, and we also work with USC. I get to work with the undergraduate work study students, so I’m very happy to support that. It’s also been an opportunity for me to think about this point in my career – not just where I want to go, but helping the next generation as well. I’m able to do that through working with our gallery guides; it’s very fortunate that some of them are pursuing full-time jobs in curatorial capacities. One of my favorite gallery guides is about to pursue an MA in History at Howard University, and I’m very excited for her. Being able to informally mentor them has been really gratifying for me. I’ve also worked with the Atlanta University Center’s Curatorial Studies program, which is for undergraduate students who want to diversify the field. Beginning last year, we hosted an undergraduate student as a summer intern; this year, the student will work with Essence Harden and Taylor Renee Aldridge. Being able to facilitate the partnership between the AUC and CAAM and support the next generation of students who will possibly go into the field is a wideranging opportunity that’s really been a pleasure. […] I’ve been lucky enough to lead a career where I’ve worked in majority Black spaces. It’s been intentional, but I’ve also been lucky that I started at an HBCU and participated in programs like Africana Studies, where it’s mostly students of color, not all Black artists. Having worked at the Schomburg Center and then CAAM, it’s really been a gift to work in Black spaces.
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ALEXSANDRA MITCHELL GM: What are some new initiatives that you’re working on at CAAM? AM: With this iteration of CAAM’s rebranding mission, which started with Naima Keith’s tenure and has continued under the phenomenal leadership of Cameron Shaw, we initially geared our public programs towards adult audiences. Now, we’re honing in more on supporting families and teens through public programs. I was able to partner with Penguin Random House, LA Public Library, and a number of statewide library systems to do virtual public programing for families during our temporary closure. We’ve been able to extend those programming offerings to things like family yoga for children and caretakers during the day and weekend artmaking workshops on Sundays. I’m overseeing the public programming for partnershiprelated Art + Practice exhibitions, such as the current show, “Deborah Roberts: I’M.” We’ve also expanded our wellness offerings; we traditionally offered yoga on a quarterly basis, but we saw during the pandemic that there was a very large interest in increasing our free virtual and in-person offerings of yoga here at the museum. We have extended that to a monthly offering with our really incredible yoga teacher, Constance Hartwell-Havard. We love having her here; she’s really formed her own community here with the yoga offerings. We also extended our sound bath programming; initially, the idea was that we would have those in partnership with the exhibition “Matthew Thomas: Enlightenment”, which focuses on the Buddhist principles of meditation and spiritual practice. We have a great interest in that via public programming, so we’ll have sound baths here more regularly. There’s a wide range of programming that we’re continuing to build upon with our partnerships, such as LA Philharmonic. I am currently working on a public programming partnership with the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco. With our friends in Northern California, [we want to] have more of a presence across the state. I’ve also been able to work with a number of studios, such as HBO, Array, Netflix, and Amazon Studios on public programming offerings. [I want to] go beyond our traditional conversational series to really engage with different audiences at CAAM and get people in to see art.
Photo by HRDWRKER
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ALEXSANDRA MITCHELL
Photo by HRDWRKER GM: How do you highlight BIPOC in your practice? AM: Having worked in Black institutions and at CAAM, where our focus is to center work created by artists of color, I have the opportunity to solely focus on working with people identifying as BIPOC. I love to center their voices; it’s really a gift in terms of public programming. From time to time, we are outside of those bounds, but we have the opportunity to provide the space for people to highlight their work in ways they don’t get to at major art institutions. GM: What could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics? AM: Do your research! (Laughs) I know it’s a basic answer, but develop trustworthy relationships with artists to see what works are coming. The pandemic is still happening of course, but we’re post pandemic in terms of everything being closed. Get out to shows, engage with people at openings, come to see the shows at CAAM and elsewhere, and really do so with care and positive intention. Support them financially in ways that are respectful to them and their practice, and really work to support the next generation in ways that are going to be positive, not only for you, but also for their careers in ways that can help them expand. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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MICHON SANDERS
Courtesy of Sarah Deragon - Portraits To The People
Michon Sanders is a contemporary fine artist. Having grown up in the South and spending several years in the Bay Area before moving to Los Angeles, her art practice carries heavy influence from the Black communities she’s been a part of, offering insight into Black selfhood across different regions of the country. In addition to winning first place in the 2020 AXA Art Prize national competition, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting & Drawing from California College of the Arts in 2020 and is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Art degree at the University of Southern California. She recently had her first solo exhibition in San Francisco, California.
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MICHON SANDERS GM: What was your path to becoming an artist? MS: It definitely wasn’t direct. I grew up drawing and dreaming of art school, but it was never something that I thought I could pursue professionally. My dad was in the Navy and my mom was a teacher, and while they put an emphasis on education and encouraged my talent, they also wanted me to have a “real job.” So I put it behind me and just lived a “regular” life. It wasn’t until I met my good friend and tattoo artist that I thought about using art as a way to make a living, and we started discussing my apprenticing with her. She had gone to the California College of the Arts (CCA) and majored in painting and drawing, so I figured if I followed that path, I could do the same thing and pick up the technical skills I would need as an artist. I briefly went to community college and then transferred to CCA, ultimately majoring in painting and drawing. About three quarters through the program, I realized that I should have majored in illustration if I wanted those technical skills because I found myself kneedeep in a highly conceptual curriculum. It was hands-down the best mistake I’ve ever made. I was able to dive deep into my subject matter and the reason for making the work, in addition to learning new ways of making. I discovered that being an artist was an integral part of an already complex identity, and I have a responsibility to exercise it. GM: What has been your experience as part of the For Freedoms x Converse Initative, Hear Her Here? MS: Hear Her Here is such a powerful movement. For Freedoms is already at the forefront of public engagement through artistic expression, and for them to utilize their platform, along with Converse, to elevate Black female artists speaks to the ways in which they prioritize uplifting the voices that too often go unheard. I was fortunate to be able to participate in a conversation with the young folks who had been doing their salons. It was so powerful to hear these young Black voices and the hopes and aspirations they have, as well as how they manage it all in today’s climate. Being able to share some my experiences as well was a really invaluable experience.
Michon Sanders, Go Ask Your Daddy, 2022. Oil on canvas
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MICHON SANDERS GM: How do you highlight BIPOC in your artistic practice? MS: Growing up as a Black person in America, specifically in the South, has lent me the opportunity to have a specific set of experiences. In my work I try to think about moments, and what is underneath those moments. I use images of my family to tell our stories as Black people living in this country. Through all the pain and protests, there are all of these pauses, these snapshots of a quick moment in between it all where we are, even if just for a moment, free. There is something special about how we as Black people see each other, and I want to capture that. GM: In your opinion, what could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics? MS: Stop the tokenization. I went to a museum once that had this room that was devoted to the figure. I immediately noticed that every work in the room was by Black artists, all of which were either recent acquisitions or work that been in storage. It felt like walking into the colored section. There was another room on a different floor that did the same thing, but with abstraction. I’d just seen Rothko and Pollack - the usual suspects – and then all of a sudden, there’s a room full of work by Black abstract artists. There was no context provided for this segregation, no explanation. Stop treating Black art and artists like a bandage for all of the much deeper systemic issues that exist in institutions, and have as long as they have existed. We aren’t diversity points.
Michon Sanders, Self Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Skeptic, 2021. Oil on canvas
GM: What are you currently working on? MS: I am entering into my second year of my MFA program at USC, so I’m in full thesis mode for the written paper and my thesis show. I also have some exciting things happening later this year, so I am in the studio as much as possible making work.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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DELPHINE SIMS
Photo by Lewis Watts Delphine Sims is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, where she studies the history of photography in the Americas. Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, geography, and urbanity inform and redefine landscape photography. Currently, Delphine is the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Andrew Wyeth Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Portrait Gallery. In 2019, she was the Mellon Curatorial Intern at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), during which time she helped organize the exhibitions Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the William Goodman and Victoria Belco Collection and About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging. In 2018, she was a curatorial intern at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the photography department. From 2013 to 2016, Delphine was a curatorial assistant in the photography department at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA). She has worked on numerous museum exhibitions and contributed writings to several publications including New Time: Art and Feminisms in the Twenty-first Century (BAMPFA), More Dreamers of the American Dream (Riverside Art Museum), Laurie Brown: Earth Edges (California Museum of Photography), and Looking In, Looking Out, Latin American Photography (SBMA). Her writing can also be found in Matte magazine, The Believer magazine, and Aperture. Delphine has organized and moderated many public programs for museums and art institutions including at San Francisco Camerawork, BAMPFA, and Autograph ABP (London, UK).
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DELPHINE SIMS GM: What was your path towards becoming an arts professional? DS: Born and raised in Riverside, California, I developed a keen sense of home and belonging, as both sides of my family were largely defined by migration and oral storytelling. My mother, the daughter of a Canadian father and Swiss mother, and my father, the son of parents who both arrived in California via the Great Black Migration, instilled in me a profound sense of narrative, community work, and commitment to visual culture. I first bridged these interests in a high school project, which explored imagery of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, a largely ignored history that directly affected my paternal family and their later arrival in Southern California. My family has always visited museums to affordably access new stories and cultures, as well as prompt curiosity to seek out the stories that museums have failed to tell. These historical and personal interests partly led to my undergraduate studies at the University of Southern California, where I majored in Art History and American Studies and worked at the California African American Museum (CAAM). While neither department had specialists in Black visual culture, my research for exhibitions at CAAM led me to focus my seminar papers on Black representation, from lynching photography to Black Medieval iconography, and ultimately an honors thesis on three 20th-century Black women sculptors: Meta Warrick Fuller, Elizabeth Catlett, and Artis Lane. I also sought out other positions related to my budding interests, including internships at LACMA and the USC Fisher Museum, and time as a research assistant to photographer Sharon Lockhart. It was a final seminar paper on Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Black Book that truly solidified my commitment to photography, a passion project which, in tandem with my museum experience, landed me a position as a curatorial assistant in the department of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA). During my three years at SBMA, I grew as a connoisseur of photography under the late curator Karen Sinsheimer, learning the narrow canon of American and European photographers, building relationships with contemporary artists, and beginning to question the medium’s history. But there were limits to my interrogation of the history of photography and the role of the museum in shaping a fraught history of art, particularly as it related to critical race theory, which then led me to apply to graduate school. My path as an arts professional has been traditional in the sense that I have largely worked with and for museums, but nontraditional in terms of the art I am drawn towards and how I contextualize it. In each museum position, I have been eager to absorb the knowledge of my predecessors, while simultaneously interrogating and exposing the enumerable ways that art history as a discipline and the museum as a site has failed. This has become far more legible in my public facing work for institutions like the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Camerawork, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Autography ABP in London.
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DELPHINE SIMS GM: You are currently a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley and the Andrew W. Mellon Art History Fellow at The Met. Can you discuss your studies and what you have been working on through these roles? DS: Over the course of my graduate studies and alongside my work with museums, I have truly embraced my position as a photography historian. In the history of art PhD program at UC Berkeley, I am under the advisory of Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and Dr. Lauren Kroiz, and I work closely with Dr. Leigh Raiford in the African American Studies department. Studying under these incredible scholars has helped me constellate my interventions into the history of art and the history of photography, which is framed by Black feminist scholarship, material history, archive work, and exceptionally close-looking and formal analysis. I arrived at Berkeley knowing I wanted to explore the relationship between Blackness and landscapes in the United States. Over the last few years, I have focused that interest into a dissertation titled: (Re)Surfacing Black Presence: Photography, Black Women’s Bodies, and Geographies. I believe there is an imperative to not only add to the canon of photography, but also disrupt the established canon. I am committed to writing Black women artists into the history of photography as a way to equally instantiate their genius and support their work, so I use their art as a means to articulate the ways in which Blackness – Black life, labor, histories, and memory – is present in canonical American photography produced by white men. My dissertation considers a recent shift in Black aesthetics, wherein Black women artists rely on their own bodies to explore the relationship between Blackness, the land, and their chosen medium: photography. I examine the photographs of Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nona Faustine, and Xaviera Simmons. I argue that through complex photographic self-portraits performed within American Delphine visiting Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle's SECA Exhibition at SFMOMA (January 2020). Courtesy of Delphine Sims
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geographies, these Black women artists model recuperative projects that resurrect and imagine Blackness in physical geographies and landscape photography. (Continued)
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DELPHINE SIMS Together, my project and these artists intervene into the history of photography by insisting on the geographic nature of their artwork, as well as the unexplored Black histories embedded in canonical American landscape photography. To do this work, I look at particular geographic sites that these aforementioned artists have photographed; I use their work to unearth Blackness in well-known photographs by white artists of the same or similar geographic location. My chapter on Carrie Mae Weems focuses on her 2004 series The Louisiana Project; I place her series in dialogue with Walker Evans’s 1935 photographs of vernacular plantation architecture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses the Walker Evans Archive, thus my current fellowship at the Met is to financially support my dissertation research and allow me consistent access to the Evans material. I’ve also been in constant dialogue with Curator Jeff Rosenheim, who oversees the Evans archive. Discussions with Jeff have also helped me link my findings in the Evans archive with Weems’ artwork, all in service of new arguments and analysis of photographs of Louisiana plantation mansions. GM: How do you center BIPOC artists in your practice? DS: My career trajectory began with an expertise in African American art history, then learning an established, white canon of art history. Thus, when I think of artists who engage in certain themes or materials, I impulsively think of Black artists first. Growing up in a city with a majority Latinx population and a more visibly violent relationship to Indigenous people, I think that I am naturally drawn to artists and artworks that negotiate history and representation through their experiences. One of the best jobs of being a curator is the responsibility to see as much art as you possibly can in order to build a personal, internal, rolodex of sorts for a spectrum of artists that produce vastly different artwork. (Continued)
Delphine presenting an overview of her dissertation (Summer 2022). Courtesy of Delphine Sims
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DELPHINE SIMS When the impulse to do so stems from a natural attachment and attraction to BIPOC artists, it’s much easier to curate or program with these artists in mind. That said, nearly all of my writing and public programming engages with Black artists and artists of color. I also make a concerted effort to meet with, listen to, and learn from Black elders who are artists and curators. They are such a wealth of knowledge and have witnessed and lived the same and far more experiences of exclusion and racism then I have. I feel an immense responsibility to archive their stories and do my best to share their work with others in order to celebrate their labor through exhibitions, acquisitions, and programming. I also write about them for art journals and magazines. Three artists I feel particularly committed to right now are Mildred Howard, the late James Oliver Mitchell, and Adgar Cowans. But I also know that part of curating is acknowledging one’s limitations and fully believing in the power of collaboration, so I expand my knowledge through respectful collaboration with incredible colleagues and friends across the field. Through this, I am able to growing as a curator, always expanding my awareness of BIPOC artists, as well as differently abled artists and LBTQIA+ artists. GM: In your opinion, what could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics? DS: This is a huge concern for me and the nexus of the work I do. It’s not just about critiquing museums but pushing myself to be imaginative and strategic in the ways I try to shift how museums work with Black art and artists. My sister is also a museum professional who works in history museums, and together we wrote an article about this question in the wake of most museums’ utter embarrassment and failures in their superficial responses to highlight Blackness and note anti-Blackness during summer 2020. We titled the article Where We At in reference to the incredible Delphine discussing Martin Wong's Silence (1982) in the "Way Bay 2" exhibition at BAMPFA (Summer 2018). Courtesy of Delphine Sims
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collective of Black women and women of color artists who convened in the 1970’s to put pressure on museums to represent and highlight Black artists and artists of color. (Continued)
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DELPHINE SIMS
Delphine standing between two exhibitions that she coorganized for BAMPFA: "Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the Victoria Belco and William Goodman Collection" and "About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging". Dr. Leigh Radford stands taking a picture of her in the background (Spring 2019). Courtesy of Delphine Sims
The whiteness of the institutions has been exposed time and time again, and yet museums continue to fail. Our article referenced some instances where Black folk have discussed the specifics of creating/recreating institutions whose foundations are to care for Black artists and the community. Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA, once said their curation is defined by Black feminist thought. It was a simple statement but an essential and precise summary for my own art history and curation, which is to fundamentally care for people through and with art. If institutions learn with and alongside Black feminist care principles, they might be able to reimagine the tenets of their institutions to be one which supports, nurtures, celebrates, and centers Black folk. In thinking of great examples of this work in Los Angeles, we have The Underground Museum, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, CAAM, Art + Practice, and Summaeverythang, artist Lauren Halsey’s community center. Finally, I want to move away from the survey exhibition and towards thoughtful and intensive thematic exhibitions. The exhibitions “Art of the Dirty South”, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, and “Legacies of the Great Migration”, co-curated by Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan Dennis, are exceptional examples of what it means to be attentive to the specificities of Black art production, themes, and complementary artists who intersect with these themes, rather than enormous, overwhelming survey exhibitions that bring a spectrum of Black art together merely by chronologies. Photography departments are exceptionally behind when it comes to producing survey exhibitions, let alone narrow and insightful thematic exhibitions, which makes me believe even more in the essentialness of my work. If and when I land at the right institution, I hope to implement consistent exhibitions and programs that are more incisive and consistent about the ways curators can exhibit, acquire, engage, and nurture Black artists and their art.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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JULY 2022
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6
GIRLS MAGAZINE
BLACK GIRL MAGIC
