MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19

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Allison Janae Hamilton

Studio Museum

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Tschabalala Self

D Sable Elyse Smith

Artists in Residence 2018–19

The Artist-in-Residence program is at the core of The Studio Museum in Harlem’s mission, and gives the institution its name. Since the Studio Museum’s founding in 1968, more than 100 artists in residence have created and shown their work in the Museum’s studios and galleries. While the Studio Museum constructs a new facility on the site of its longtime home on West 125th Street in Harlem, MoMA PS1 presents the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition. MOOD is the inaugural exhibition of this partnership, and features the work of the Studio Museum’s 2018–19 residents: Allison Janae Hamilton, Tschabalala Self, and Sable Elyse Smith.

MOOD explores site, place, and time as they relate to American identity, popular culture, past and present.

This exhibition resituates the often trending social media hashtag (#mood), which describes moments both profound and banal: Anything can be a #mood. Working across a range of media and materials, each artist manifests their perceptions of the present moment in the United States, while creating passageways to new worlds.

MOOD maps out each artist’s psychic landscape, presenting distinct snapshots that travel through and beyond the fabric of digital culture.

Layering video, haunting sculptural forms, found objects, and photography, Allison Janae Hamilton’s immersive installation explores spirituality and mysticism as tied to the American South. A native Floridian, Hamilton calls on the South’s coastal landscape to navigate the fault lines of wildness and civility. Hamilton’s installation disorients with its sinister undertone, and speaks to the enduring traumas of racial violence and economic exploitation of the South.

Tschabalala Self’s new series, “Street Scenes,” pays homage to the energy of the city, from the frenetic visual culture of bodegas to the communal experience of waiting at a bus stop. These large-scale printed, painted, and collaged works create a cityscape that brings the vibrancy and energy of Harlem into focus. Having grown up nearby and inspired by her return through the residency, Self creates fictional figures rooted in daily rhythms and routines in and around the neighborhood.

Sable Elyse Smith’s conceptual sculptures and two-dimensional works interrogate the instability of economy, language, and power, and the construct of social history. Smith’s work underscores the banality of violence at an institutional scale and how trauma embeds itself in the everyday. Smith roots this collection of work in the visual vernacular of the prison industrial complex—visitor tables, coloring books made available in correctional facilities, and commissary ramen noodles used as a key form of commerce. Smith’s treatment of these ordinary objects raises issues of labor, class, and memory, evoking new associations within the seemingly familiar.

“Street Scenes,” Tschabalala Self’s new series, pays homage to the energy of the city, from the frenetic visual culture of bodegas to the communal experience of waiting at a bus stop. These large-scale, printed, painted, and collaged works create a cityscape that brings the vibrance and energy of Harlem into focus. Having grown up nearby and inspired by her return through the residency, Self creates fictional figures rooted in daily rhythms and routines in and around the neighborhood.

Sable Elyse Smith’s conceptual sculptures and two-dimensional works interrogate the instability of economy, language, power, and the construct of social history.

Smith’s work underscores the banality of violence at an institutional scale and how trauma embeds itself in the everyday. Smith roots this collection of work in the visual vernacular of the prison industrial complex—visitor tables, coloring books made available in correctional facilities, and commissary ramen noodles as a key form of commerce. Through Smith’s treatment of these ordinary objects, she reveals that they are anything but ordinary.

Studio Museum

HALLIE RINGLE AND LEGACY RUSSELL IN CONVERSATION 3 ANCIENT HISTORIES AND NEW WORLDS: ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON

by Farah Jasmine Griffin 8

Artists in

“HARLEM IS THE CAPITAL OF EVERY GHETTO TOWN”— TSCHABALALA SELF’S HARLEM SCENES

by Vivian A. Crockett 14 UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION: SABLE ELYSE SMITH

by Hannah Black 22 EXHIBITION CHECKLIST 28

2018–19

Residence

Left to right: Sable Elyse Smith, Allison Janae Hamilton, and Tschabalala Self

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Hallie Ringle

and

HALLIE RINGLE I’ve been thinking a lot about how the work of Allison [Janae Hamilton], Sable [Elyse Smith], and Tschabalala [Self] has evolved over the past few years, and especially how their practices have changed since being in residence.

Even since Fictions (2017) Allison’s work has moved from solely installation-based to object-focused two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. In 2018–19 Sable’s work has shifted from nonlinear videos of fragmented found footage to conceptual sculptures. And Tschabalala’s wall works grew substantially in size and moved from the bodega to the sidewalk. How have you seen each of the resident’s works change during their time here?

LEGACY RUSSELL It’s been pretty exciting seeing each of these three branch out over the course of their time with us.

In Sable’s case I’ve seen her deepen in her exploration of language, really pushing it to its limit, and even, in the case of the coloring-book works included for this exhibition, breaking language altogether. Sable’s been playing with the structure of the institutionalized coloring book, the violent propaganda of a correctional industrial complex; this is all bound up with questions of power, agency, race, class, and gender. At a larger scale, these works—and the text that accompanies them—become pseudo-scenic tableaux, somewhat cinematic in their captioning.

Legacy Russell

In Conversation

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LR For Allison, I’ve been super jazzed to see her grow in her exploration of film and photography within the context of working more frequently in installation form. More and more she’s applying this material—film, photo—in new ways as she carefully constructs a space, layering in a painterly way, which is striking.

I’ve always found Allison’s work to be very haunting, carrying with it the tense legacy of the American South as a primary underlying fault line. It seems like Allison is always suspended across time and space, and so there’s this eerie atemporality that makes the work

IF WE ALL WORK TOGETHER WE CAN / MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE sings like a Greek chorus across each page, with the repetition of the words becoming mesmeric in refrain. I think of the poetic structure of anaphora deployed here, and how a sort of “chop and screw” is taking place, which brings a sonic frequency into the frame. This sort of beat is something we can see across much of Sable’s work; materials shown in each work that repeat—the ramen, the prison tables—and, in doing so, almost take on a stanza-like quality. On the occasion

Sable Elyse Smith Coloring Book 31 2019

Silkscreen ink and oil sticks on paper 60 × 50 in.

of MOOD, Sable has taken this practice with sound and composition one step further, creating a mixtape of seven tracks in collaboration with Henry Murphy. This link between language and form is monumental, and the works build on themselves like lyric poetry, and as a tool it is all skillfully put to use to challenge social and cultural tyranny toward its dismantling.

point in two directions, both past and present.

This is why the layering of materials—film, video, found objects—becomes super urgent, bringing into center-frame a sense of nostalgia alongside the trauma of displacement.

The objects are displaced from their sites of origin, the video and sound disorient us in our journeying, the photographs more and more are windows into a space that feels both familiar and alien. Not knowing where we are, or where we might land, is fantastic, but also terrifying.

We see in this something that feels uniquely

HR Absolutely. What about for Allison?

And Tschabalala?

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mapped to black narrative and diasporic consciousness. In this work Allison seems to be toeing the line more and more with the natural and supernatural and the sense of horror triggered therein: water to drink or to drown in, branches that can shelter or strike, fabric with the weight of flesh.

With Tschabalala, I’m seeing her move more toward installation. This is very different than in the early stages of her career, when her figures were often held by the frame of the canvas and their site-specificity was often less anchored. Over the course of this

us as audience and Tschabalala’s figures as players on a carefully constructed stage.

With this, she’s challenged our participation within—and across—the works themselves.

HR This is a huge year for the Artist-inResidence program. It’s the first year the residents were in the Museum’s temporary space at 127th Street instead of 125th Street, and it’s the first year the exhibition will take place outside of Harlem. Many works by previous artists in residence have been informed by their immediate surroundings on 125th Street,

Allison Janae Hamilton Floridawater I 2019

Archival pigment print 24 × 36 in.

year Tschabalala’s broken beyond the limits of the canvas, the figures now are much more in motion than ever before, and traverse the cityscape. With this comes greater agency for each figure, and we can perhaps see ourselves within them in their everyday actions going to the store, waiting for the bus, playing dominoes with friends. Tschabalala has also brought her sculptural practice to new heights, thinking about how the figure can live on the same plane as the viewer, which breaks the Brechtian fourth wall between

so it is interesting that each of the artists has found ways to bring new landscapes, ones that extend beyond Harlem, into MoMA PS1.

LR There is definitely a shared sense across all three artists of wanting to explore site, almost as an act of map-making, sharing three very different snapshots of America, of their individual experiences and histories. What does it feel like to have the show take place away from Harlem? How do you see site as a significant “material” for each of the artists?

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HR This year is unique because each of the artists had a significant relationship with Harlem before the residency, and their time in the neighborhood has had varying levels of impact. More than anything, I see the economies of Harlem influencing their practices, especially Tschabalala’s. In the past few years, big-box stores such as Whole Foods or Red Lobster have popped up, displacing many small and locally owned businesses.

The street vendors have responded, in turn, by exploring new sites and products and creating a thriving microeconomy.

as Warhol and Oldenburg, whose practices centered around shifting economies and commercialism. Tschabalala is also looking toward David Hammons as inspiration for engaging everyday objects as materials for works of art. Even though some of the works in the residency involve scenes beyond bodegas, Tschabalala’s work remains interested in economies, as she’s sourced fabric from stores in Harlem that often have racks of clothing on the sidewalk for sale. This material forms the faces and bodies of the figures in her work, making Harlem a literal material.

Fabric, flashe, gouache, acrylic and oil on canvas 84 × 72 in.

Tschabalala Self Window (detail) 2019

LR Yes! What do you think the impact of this has been on the work?

Sable’s work also engages different types of economy, including reference points rooted within and beyond Harlem. At PS1, Sable brings a tile floor, rotating display case, and even paintings referencing coloring books that speak to spaces like bodegas or liquor stores to interrogate violence, language, and social histories. Her recent sculpture, made out of ramen noodles, engages the many contradictory associations of these spaces.

Ramen noodles are, at once, associated with those who are living in food deserts and

HR Tschabalala grew up in Harlem and the neighborhood, particularly the bodegas, have always figured into her practice as subject and setting. She’ll often include repetitive bottles, cans of soup, and other commercial goods in the background to reference the displays of bodegas and markets. In this repetition of consumption Tschabalala is referencing the visual language of artists such

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buying ramen from social and economic need, as well as with college students who are seen as “poor” even though they are experiencing a type of life as a university student that is actually quite privileged, and also with prisons, where ramen is becomes part of tightly controlled economy run and enforced by the correctional system.

Allison and I are both from the South and have had many conversations about the connections between that region and Harlem.

She often references the power and impact of the Great Migration in Harlem as a real influence on her practice, and that’s definitely evident in these mystical landscapes she’s forming during her residency. I’ve always loved the sense of movement I’ve gotten with Allison’s work, whether it’s a sinister form lurking behind a forest of trees or a video of landscapes moving at hyper-speed. Allison also grafts parts of the South onto Harlem; walking into her studio almost transports you to an entirely different place, with her porch chairs, photographs, and animal hides.

them are made only in setting and the narrative arc that is never fully realized. Sable’s paintings are a great example of disjointed narrative as well. Within her coloring-book, photo-based work, and sculptures, the narrative surfaces at some points and slips away in others.

Sable’s work really plays with the tension of the obscured and revealed, keeping any sort of overdetermined narrative at arm’s reach.

HR Can you talk about how this exhibition is a snapshot of a worldview (#mood) that travels through and beyond the fabric of digital culture?

LR There are a lot of moods we’re all experiencing, as Americans, as black Americans, right now. We engage with so much of culture and its #mood[s] via digital interface, and so what each of these artists is doing in this particular exhibition is creating AFK (“Away From Keyboard”) space to consider some of these things we might be seeing online as we tap, scroll, auto-play. I like to think of this exhibition and its different rooms as different “channels” within an extended cultural broadcast. We walk in and out of each of the rooms and are told different stories, we engage with different worldviews, we are prompted to ask different questions. Sable brings to us reflections on power, control, agency, circulation, and labor, underscoring the way works support the agenda of capitalism. Allison notes the relationship between supernatural and natural and pushes us to interrogate the way human beings engage with, and fight against, “wildness.” Tschabalala establishes an entirely new vernacular celebrating a #veryblack quotidian, a sort of ordinary blackness that is most gorgeous, her studies of places, figures, and exchanges deepening our relationship to individual experience while still pointing toward the collective and communal, those fantastic frictions that remind us that we’re alive and full of life as we keep moving through the world.

LR Tschabalala’s, Allison’s, and Sable’s works all incorporate fragmented, fractured narratives that are never fully revealed to the viewer. What role do you think narrative plays in the work of each artist?

HR I find it fascinating that each of the three artists has a strong sense of narrative embedded within her practice. We were just talking about Allison’s work incorporating this transient sense of place and landscape, and that’s deeply connected to the narratives within her work. Allison created these recurring mystical characters that wear masks composed of animal skeletons and hides. They often appear in different landscapes, performing various actions, but their roles are never revealed to the audience. Similarly, Tschabalala’s figures live in an entire world of their own, from the bodega to the bus stop, that’s only exposed in brief vignettes. The connections between

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Floridawater III, 2019 Archival pigment print 24 Ă— 36 in.

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Allison

ANCIENT

HISTORIES AND NEW WORLDS: JANAE HAMILTON

ALLISON

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Janae

Allison Janae Hamilton creates worlds. Her lush and luscious landscapes invite you to wonder as you wander. It is a world of sound and sight, a world of motion, of tall green pine, of waterrooted cypress, a world where masked women walk, skip, dance, or ride on horseback, where reptilian figures inhabit the swamp and pheasant the forest, and we share it all with them.

She at once immerses you in a past both prehistoric and postbellum, while projecting you into a future postapocalyptic and Afrofuturist. Her work is fully imaginative, ethereal, and beautiful, but also grounded in the realities of race, history, land, economic exploitation, and the impact of climate devastation.

The landscape and history that inspire much of Hamilton’s work is the dense pine woods of northern Florida.

As scholar/artist she is a daughter of this earth, and like her forebear, Zora Neale Hurston, she knows it well. In ethnography and fiction, Hurston was one of the first to document and write about this part of the black South, to offer firsthand accounts of the turpentine workers who lived in and traveled through the pine forests, tapping the trees for the pungent, gummy substance. As one of them told her, “Turpentine woods is kind of lonesome.”1 Hamilton builds upon this history to explore the relationship between the people and the land, between the natural world and generations of black peoples, and between the exploitation of labor and nature. One senses, if not the “lonesome,” then the solitude, the singularity of inhabiting this space. While we often place black workers, enslaved and “free,” in the context of plantation slavery or cotton sharecropping, Hamilton expands our sense of the black South, of the types of labor that black people engaged in, and of the myriad cultures they produced. Northern Florida is dense and swampy, populated by a variety of bird and plant species, as well as reptiles—snakes and alligators. In this way it may remind viewers of Louisiana, but it is distinct from that better-known space. Hamilton brings this landscape into the

Hamilton

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Wacissa, 2019 Single-channel video projection, TRT 22:14

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Allison

Janae

realm of the aesthetic, and allows it to give birth to her imaginings, and in so doing makes it a mythopoetic space, much like Jean Toomer did for the red earth and pine forests of rural Georgia in Cane, his genre-bending novel of 1923.

Although she is in dialogue with these literary forms, Hamilton also engages with and builds upon the work of filmmakers, such as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Kasie Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997). Both films show us the deep, magical beauty of very specific locations in South (the Sea Islands and the Louisiana Bayou), and especially of the black women who inhabit them, while also showing the limits of realism and linear narrative. For Dash, Lemmons, and Hamilton, the land is as much a part of the culture as are the food, music, and spiritual traditions that it gives birth to.

Hamilton goes even further. She gives us a story, a deeply immersive one, with characters and narrative threads, but one must work to find and follow them; one cannot be a passive viewer. The more engaged we become, the more the work yields to us over time. Here she also notes the influence of the highly popular Game of Thrones. In this way, each exhibition is almost episodic, building upon the last, taking us deeper into the forest and the psyches of those illusive, sometimes masked, figures who dance, walk, canoe, or ride on horseback. We view a canopy of trees but also encounter actual trunks and scents, and make note of the groomed horse tail that hangs on the wall like a series of carefully curated whips.

She invites us to participate in the magic-making, to join her in the act of creating.

Walking through an installation, or accompanying the artist downriver on a kayak, as the films allow viewers to do, creates an act of surveying. We may not know what has come before, but we have happened upon a landscape after disaster. There is a quiet that is disquieted. There is stillness that is haunted. A fallen tree suggests something traumatic has occurred: a storm or worse. These are ancestral grounds, one feels their presence, evoked by the ethereal figures who appear and then disappear as we wander past a still photograph or as a filmed figure gallops by. Sometimes we stumble upon the unknown, that for which we have no name, like

Hamilton

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Studio View

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Allison

Janae

the pink creatures (2018), flowing and folded ochre blobs, with tufts of horses’ hair and pearl-adorned crowns. They are like new life forms that could have emerged from the ocean’s bottom or grown from the earth like fungi. Animal heads seem to emerge from walls, rather than having been mounted upon them, familiar yet like no animal we have ever seen. We bear witness to a new era of evolution.

In this work, Hamilton sets us in the day after the end of the world, and reminds us that all new worlds sit atop the ruins of old ones. She offers us an invitation to join her as she builds anew, ever mindful of the history that precedes us, ever open to the possibility that awaits our making.

Notes 1 — Zora Neale Hurston, “Turpentine Camp-Cross City,” August 1939, reprinted in Florida Memory: State Library & Archives of Florida,

accessed May 5, 2019, https://www. floridamemory.com/onlineclassroom/zora_hurston/documents/ essay.

Hamilton

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Ol’ Bay, 2019 Painted canvas, fabric, digital rendering on canvas, hand-colored photocopy, photocopy, paper, flashe, gouache and acrylic on canvas 96 × 84 in.

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Tschabalala

“HARLEM

IS THE CAPITAL OF EVERY GHETTO TOWN.”— TSCHABALALA SELF’S HARLEM SCENES Vivian A. Crockett In her “Street Scenes” series, Tschabalala Self presents an immersive portrait of Harlem, in dialogue with the rich city tableaux of William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold. Through mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and spatial interventions, Self transforms the gallery into a dynamic exploration of the neighborhood she calls home. The title for this essay comes from Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street (1973), in which the singer describes the variety of illicit survival tactics of some of the neighborhood’s inhabitants. For Self, the lyric represents Harlem as a microcosm of black urban life, with parallels in a range of black cultural centers throughout the country. Self’s “Street Scenes” present subjects immersed in the city environment, while also showcasing intimate glimpses into her characters’ lives.

In Ol’ Bay (2019), a nude woman stands in her kitchen, her back to us. Her hand, with long manicured nails, rests upon a metonymic counter rendered through the use of a patterned fabric, where a variety of household items are reproduced in miniscule scale. A pattern one might see covering a kitchen surface is now a stand-in for the surface itself. This woman is the same figure we see in Self’s Milk Chocolate (2017), where she also appears in back view, with bent legs defiantly spread. The title Milk Chocolate references both her skin tone and the Hershey’s bar she seems to be offering the viewer from her left hand.

Whereas, like Self’s earlier figures, this woman once inhabited an undefined field of color, she has now transitioned into a home space rich in detail. Behind her are rows and rows of food containers, amassed in a manner not typical for a personal kitchen. There is enough applesauce, Heinz and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and Goya and La Morena cans to stock a small corner store. Ol’ Bay thus represents the fantastical merging of the bodega and the home, a transitional work marking the end of Self’s “Bodega Run” series, in which she has explored the diverse encounters that occur in the sociopolitical sphere of the neighborhood store.

Self

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Red Dog, 2019 Fabric, embroidered patch, newsprint, photo-transfer, gouache, acrylic, flashe, and painted canvas on canvas 96 Ă— 84 in.

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Milk Chocolate, 2017 Acrylic, watercolor, flash, crayon, colored pencil, oil pastel, pencil, hand-colored photocopy, hand-colored canvas on canvas. 96 × 84 in.

Courtesy Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York.

As the figures move from the store to the street, the “Street Scenes” series maps a new set of relationships between the figures and their environment. Much of Self’s previous work teased at the visual exchange between the viewer and the figures depicted. Her subjects are decidedly immune to our gaze yet aware of being watched, visually consumed, or at times surveilled.1 “Street Scenes” similarly profiles the interrelationship of subjects who move through space and engage with each other independent from our voyeuristic gaze. These figures are not constricted to their separate vignettes but are also understood in direct relationship with the other subjects represented throughout the space.

In Red Dog (2019), a muscular man in tight jeans, a white tank-top, and Timberlands occupies the center of the work.

Behind his shadow is the reflected shadow of a woman and her dog. The title is inspired by the work of Bill Traylor, who often

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NYPD, 2019 Painted canvas, fabric, flashe, and gouache on canvas 84 × 72 in.

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rendered human figures and animals as flattened, bold color outlines. Traylor’s own works derived from his observations of passersby moving through the black epicenter of Lawrence and Monroe Streets in Montgomery, Alabama. Just as Traylor was said to draw the people and scenes he witnessed, Self as maker imagines herself as a stationary observer of her figures, capturing a snippet of their movements as they pass before her.

The lower half of a body in Timberland boots stands erect in the space of the gallery, as if the male figure in Red Dog has emerged from the painting. With her sculptural works, Self allows her figures to literally take up space in the area usually designated for the viewer so as to corrupt the typical power dynamic between viewer and static art object. We are existing in the world of the subjects in the works, not the other way around.

Self has described her figures as avatars insofar as they embody and ultimately subvert socially delineated characterizations of blackness to center the complexity and diversity of black subjectivities. In the context of the street, these avatars now also morph into social archetypes as they expand beyond the “hood menagerie” of the bodega—Self’s own term—into the broader context of Harlem’s unique ecosystem. As viewers, we are encouraged to reflect on our imagined experience of navigating this simulated street world and the characters we might expect to encounter.

Doreen St. Félix and Aria Dean have written on the impossibility of the black flâneur, the Baudelairean wanderer of the streets, who observes the crowd and urban scene from afar.

As Dean writes, “The would-be black flâneur can never exist as such, apart from the crowd, because she is always a crowd herself.”2 For raced bodies, and in particular those that are trans, gender-nonconforming, and/or feminized, wandering comes at a price or, at best, requires a number of constant negotiations. If artists such as Pope.L and Adrian Piper had previously probed at the marked presence of the black body in public through performance, Self seeks to affirm both the dangers and pleasures of navigating public space as surveilled, hyper-visible subjects by offering a hypothetical terrain for reflection.

Among the inevitable forces to contend with is the presence of police, often in the form of fellow black people. The police man in NYPD (2019) is not a directly menacing figure. His

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proportions (a large body with small head) recall Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Irony of a Negro Policeman (1981), in which Basquiat’s opinion is clear: Scribbled above the officer’s left foot is the word “pawn.” Self’s rendering is open-ended and ambiguous, more in line with Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Policeman) (2015).

Both works place us at an uncomfortable proximity to this figure whose eyes signal a moment of repose and contemplation rather than vigilance. Still, in NYPD, the officer’s hand is open wide, mere inches away from the weapon at his belt. In Marshall’s image, there is a starry night overhead, in Self’s, a cloud-filled blue sky beyond a brick tableau.

Activities persist in spite of and alongside this reality: A group of elders play dominos, lovers and friends smoke and pass time, passersby converse and flirt. Layers of meaning literally reside in the range of repurposed materials used to render the figures’ bodies and faces. Faces are composed of horizontal stripes or untreated canvas, lips take shape from lush velour, while necks, arms, and legs materialize from pleather or denim. The figure in Ol’ Bay is one reborn from a digital rendering of its sibling-painting, a once-painted surface reproduced digitally and then used once more as a pattern. Threads and stitch lines bind materials together but, more importantly, act as a drawing medium as well.

The textural layering characteristic of Self’s work now extends to the broader environment. Under her intervention, the gallery floors mimic the accrual of gum on cement sidewalks. A simple careless gesture leaves a permanent trace; it is one more way of tracing the residual presence of those who have navigated the streets of Harlem. Self paints the story of the enduring architectural markers of Harlem’s history amidst development, gentrification, and displacement. “Street Scenes” asserts the continual presence of black people within this context, deliberately centering these collective histories. In the same way that Self’s figures resist the white gaze and its oppressive potential, the world Self reconstructs exists in spite of and in defiance to these evolving changes.

Barry Blinderman once referred to Martin Wong’s meticulous and dedicated reproduction of the bricks in the Lower East Side tenement buildings and businesses he painted as “bricklaying.”3 In Self’s virtual Harlem, the individually painted red bricks serve as the common backdrop for the activities she maps, a

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reference to the rowhouses, large housing units, and many buildings erected from this material. Wong, an artist Self admires, used bricks to chronicle the shifts he witnessed in the neighborhood he called home. In Wong’s world, as in Self’s, inhabitants build lives around these structures.Wong liked to quote his friend-occasionallover, the poet Miguel Piñero, whose 1980 book of collected poetry was aptly called La Bodega Sold Dreams.

Self emphasizes that Harlem is a global African diasporic community, comprised of American descendants of enslaved Africans, as well as a range of migrant communities of African descent. In Window (2019), the viewer witnesses another figure in her domestic space as if framed by brick. She occupies almost the entirety of the window frame. Like the woman in Ol’ Bay, this nude figure revels in a moment of solitude. With her arms suspended around her head and a relaxed expression on her face, one might imagine that she is admiring her own reflection in front of the mirror or simply enjoying her temporary refuge from the bustling environment outside. Surrounding her are ornamental S-scroll patterns on a wrought-iron gate. This symbol, so commonly reproduced in gates that assert territorial boundaries, has a deeper, more enduring history. It is the Adinkra symbol for sankofa, or “back to get it,” a reminder that the past carries forward with us into the future.

Notes 1—Jason Parham, “The Hypervisible Black Women of Tschabalala Self’s World,” The Fader, April 20, 2017, https://www.thefader.com/2017/04/20/ tschabalala-self-interview.

2—Aria Dean, “Wandering / WILDING: Blackness on the Internet,” Berfrois, November 23, 2016, https://www. berfrois.com/2016/11/aria-dean-wanderingwilding. See also Doreen St. Félix,

“The Peril of Black Mobility,” Good, March 29, 2016, https://www.good.is/ features/issue-36-flanerie.

3—Barry Blinderman, “The Writing on the Wall (Every Picture Tells a Storey, Don’t It?): Tenement and Storefront Paintings, 1984–1986,” in Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong, ed. Amy Scholder (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 23.

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Spread, 2018 343 packs of chicken flavor ramen and 32 bricks 10 ½ × 30 ½ × 29 ½ in.

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Sable

UNIVERSAL

GRAVITATION: SABLE Hannah Black

ELYSE

SMITH

Language, land, body, prison. The parts are interchangeable and collide into and fold around each other. I won’t distinguish language, land, body, and prison.

—Sable Elyse Smith, artist’s talk, Aperture Foundation, March 2018 … in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between … products, the labor-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature.

In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him.

—Karl Marx, Capital, 1867

In Sable Elyse Smith’s 2017 video Men Who Swallow Themselves In Mirrors, a figure falls through the sky above a city. We have just seen a brief excerpt from the famous Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten (1968), in which the perspective moves exponentially upward into the cosmic. The falling man is magnetized by gravity and moves the other way, toward the land, but we never see him hit the ground.

What’s gravity, anyway? It’s because of gravity that each dollar in the stack of bills in Smith’s sculpture Weight (2019) weighs a gram, but the value of the paper is guaranteed not by gravity but by the intertwined workings of capital and the state. Money is not exactly a thing, not exactly the stack of bills—money is the performance of labor, standardized hours of work coagulated into a commodity. Money expresses time, does time, incarcerates value.

Money also is transactional, of course; we conduct commerce through its circulation. Smith’s sculpture Spread (2018) uses a pun on “chicken” as a neologism for money. The sculpture, reminiscent of 1960s Minimalist sculpture, consists of packets of chicken-flavored ramen stacked and set on a low plinth of concrete blocks. The ramen is quite literally being held up by the material of a prison cell. Thus the relationship between money, food, and space within the context of the prison industrial complex is tense, precarious. In creating this work, Smith thought of

Smith

Elyse

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swear it closed, closes it, 2018 * Powder coated aluminum 172 × 144 × 68 in.

*Reference image for Cornering (2019)

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the way that food can convey an individual selfdom, the varied ways that incarcerated people add prison-available ingredients to their ramen to make it new again, to mark it as special, to distinguish a form of originality. Money and gravity may conspire against people, but people stay particular, stay themselves.

The state and capital structure money, food, space, and time. Together they have the power to compel a person toward fixity, to stay in place and loop through routine continuously— and maybe even die. Smith’s sculpture Cornering (2019) is based on the design of tables provided in prison visiting rooms, welded together into a shape reminiscent of an atom. The tables are awkwardly knee-high, deliberately designed so that two hands cannot easily touch underneath. In this way the state protects itself against the exchange of contraband, not only of objects, but also of intimacy. Everything ordinary that might happen at a table—talking, eating, holding hands—is regulated and hyper-surveilled in the visiting room, which is a zone of indifference, between freedom and unfreedom, where the two blur and distort each other. At the tables of Smith’s Cornering, no one can be seated. What can be exchanged? Freed? Unfreedom is the ground that freedom falls toward.

Smith’s works work language, put language to work, challenge its labor. Landscape III (2017) consists of eight lines of carefully punctuated neon text with a blue neon strip underneath.

Semantically, the text of this work compares two gestures performed with the hands: a prison guard patting down a visitor, and a person (“i”) having sex. The prison guard’s hands are heavily punctuated, grammatically fragmented by periods, so that, on the strictest possible technical reading, we never exactly find out what these hands are like. By the time we get to the lowercase “i,” standing for I, we slowly lose our grip, like an unclenching fist, on grammar, as the text slides towards the form of a poem, and then ends in the final punctuation of a thin blue line.

According to the cop-approved iconography of the thin blue line, it represents the police’s function as a bulwark between deathly black chaos and courageous order. This line appears on flagpoles and car bumpers all over, brightly penetrating a black and white rendering of the U.S. flag. According to the flag manufacturer Flags Unlimited, “The Line is what police officers protect, the barrier between anarchy and a civilized society, between

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Coloring Book 31, 2019 Silkscreen ink and oil sticks on paper (2 parts) 60 Ă— 50 in. each

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order and chaos, between respect for decency and lawlessness.

Together they symbolize the camaraderie law enforcement officers all share, a brotherhood like none other.” This camaraderie among licensed murderers is a thin, distorted echo of the social solidarities the police exist to oppose. Among the wild things Smith says about the blue line of Landscape III is that it signifies “a blue-black slippage between night and people and refusal.”

To be clear: It’s not that prison subtends language. The situation is far weirder and more serious. While prison exists, language cannot be distinguished from it. “The line becomes like caution tape,” Smith explains. By extension the text is caution tape, too, prison/language, and so are the black lines that form these letters. Text is a police-made border around a crime scene, with its echo in the walls of the prison, with its echo in the perimeter of the gated community.

Smith’s work is an action of intimacy, flaring in the face of its contraband status. This is the value, the capital, the law, the collapse, the absolute crush. The state’s pseudo-benevolence is not the basis of this love’s extraordinary continuity—the meanspirited meting out of highly surveilled and limited visits does little more than emphasize a general condition of contempt for black intimacies, including family and childhood. This is what Smith’s gestural paintings, consisting of scribbles within and across the bounds of a coloring book, suggest. The coloring book is not for the child, who knows very well what a prison is, but for the adult handing it over. For the adult who supplies it, the book, with its figures blank of color, is a prop for the performance of faith in the law’s terrible gravity.

As solace for what has been irrevocably taken, I reach again back into history and forward into the future. I reach for the figure of mass, of the masses, not as a homogenization but as the radicalization of singularity. Freed of gravity and police by the mass exercising of the ordinary will to live, this world, counterfeit and real, might one day circulate more wildly. Until then, Smith reminds us, we maintain the small insurgency of love.

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Exhibition Allison

Blackwater Creature I, 2019 Wood, chain, rope, horse hair, resin, and miscellaneous objects 36 × 48 in.

Blackwater Creature II, 2019 Bird skull, metal, fabric, hair, and resin 84 × 120 in.

Floridawater I, 2019 Archival pigment print 24 × 36 in.

Janae

Floridawater III, 2019 Archival pigment print 24 × 36 in.

Sisters,Wakulla County, FL, 2019 Archival pigment print 24 × 36 in.

Three girls in sabal palm forest II, 2019 Archival pigment print 24 × 36 in.

Wacissa, 2019 Single-channel video projection TRT 22:14 Wakulla Cathedral, 2019 Single-channel video on monitor TRT 03:26

Hamilton

Checklist

Credits This publication was organized on the occasion of the exhibition MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19 at MoMA PS1, June 9–September 8, 2019.

MOOD is presented as part of a multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1. Building on the institutions’ existing affiliations and shared values, this wide-ranging collaboration encompasses exhibitions and programming at both The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 while the Studio Museum constructs its new home.

MOOD is organized by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, the Studio Museum, and Hallie Ringle, former Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum (now Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art) with Josephine Graf, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA PS1.

The exhibition at MoMA PS1 is made possible by generous support from John L. Thomson.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artistin-Residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Robert Lehman Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This publication was produced by Alexandra Adams, Curatorial Fellow; SaVonne Anderson, Designer and Digital Coordinator; and Amanda Thomas, Communications Coordinator.

Designed by ELLA Copyedited by Samir S. Patel Printed by Cosmos Communications Front Cover: Allison Janae Hamilton, Sisters, Wakulla County, FL, 2019. Inside front panel: Sable Elyse Smith, 7666 Days, 2017. Digital print on Fujiflex, suede, and artist frame, 40 × 48 in. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Adam Reich.

Back Cover: Tschabalala Self, Window, 2019 Photo credits: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich p 2; Adam Reich pp 4, 12, 22, 27; Christopher Burke, (courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery pp 14, 16, 18); Zachary Balber p 17; Myrica von Haselberg p 24.

Contributors HANNAH BLACK is an artist and writer.

She lives in New York.

VIVIAN CROCKETT is an independent researcher, scholar, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her work focuses largely on art of African diasporas, (Afro) Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Columbia University, and holds a BA in Art History from Stanford University, and an MA and M.Phil. in Art History from Columbia. Vivian has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a research assistant in the museum’s Painting and Sculpture department, and currently works independently with various institutions. Vivian was the 2017–18 Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is presently a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is the inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, and is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Jazz Studies. Griffin is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends : Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford Connecticut, 1854–1868 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery : In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), and Clawing At the Limits of Cool : Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (co-author with Salim Washington, Thomas Dunne, 2008). Her most recent book is Harlem Nocturne : Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II, published by Basic Books in 2013.

HALLIE RINGLE is the former Assistant Curator at the The Studio Museum in Harlem and now Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art LEGACY RUSSELL is Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Tschabalala

NYPD, 2019 Painted canvas, fabric, flashe, and gouache on canvas 84 × 72 in.

Ol’ Bay, 2019 Painted canvas, fabric, digital rendering on canvas, hand-colored photocopy, photocopy, paper, flashe, gouache, and acrylic on canvas 96 × 84 in.

Piss, 2019 Painted canvas, fabric, oil, acrylic, flashe, and gouache on canvas 68 × 50 in.

Red Dog, 2019 Fabric, embroidered patch, newsprint, photo-transfer, gouache, acrylic, flashe, and painted canvas on canvas 96 × 84 in.

Window, 2019 Painted canvas, fabric, flashe, gouache, acrylic, and oil on canvas 96 × 96 in.

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8093 Days, 2019 Digital chromogenic print, suede, artist frame 48 × 40 in.

8095 Days, 2019 Digital chromogenic print, suede, artist frame 48 × 40 in.

Coloring Book 31, 2019 Silkscreen ink and oil sticks on paper (2 parts) 60 × 50 in. each Coloring Book 34, 2019 Silkscreen ink and oil sticks on paper (2 parts) 60 × 50 in. each

Cornering, 2019 Powder coated aluminum 172 × 144 × 68 in. (nigga) nomenclature*, 2019 Rotating display case, Hennessy, Tanqueray, pills, plastic palm tree, custom floor, video monitors, video dimensions variable

Spread, 2018 343 packs of chicken flavor ramen and 32 bricks 10 ½ × 30 ½ × 29 ½ in.

Weight, 2018 Digital scale, bank issued stack of 100 $1 bills dimensions variable Sable Elyse Smith and Henry Murphy Itinerant Hustle/American Stylist, 2019 Seven audio tracks, TRT 25:29

All works courtesy the artist. Checklist in formation as of May 24, 2019

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