Two Cultures, One Family: Building Family, Finding Home

In light of the Supreme Court case that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade, the homo- and trans-antagonistic policies emerging across the United States, and the environmental injustices that continue to displace Indigenous communities and threaten our access to water, this show ties these issues together in the greater conversation of family. The political moment's relationship to the artwork emerged in talking with friends like Justin Favela and Fawn Douglas or meeting new artists like Lisa Jarrett and Gabriela Muñoz. In some cases, our shared awareness of the United States’s lingering control over Indigenous, Black, and immigrant bodies’ self-determination emerged as moments of connection and solidarity. For many of us, this moment reminded us how frail our civil rights are. Still, for others, these conversations around their work provided an opportunity for us to imagine something hopeful and uplifting, if not an opportunity to share work that honors the families we come from and, in light of normed discrimination, the families we build.

In her statement, Keeva Lough explains, "My closest chosen family is made up almost entirely of fellow Queer trans folks. They are the first audience in my mind. That comes with a lot of responsibility.”1 Lough’s sentiment permeates through the artists’ statements, centering communities and voices so minimally considered in other institutions or spaces. Whether speaking of the families they build, their chosen family, or the people they come from, they take on the responsibility because of their privilege. For example, Jarrett explains, “Weaving and braiding allow me to move my hands as many of my ancestors may have, and this contact point provides a type of protection in the present.”2 Each artist speaks to their motivations as a form of protection for themselves and their communities in ways that foreground the meaning of home, family, and community, that bring into question the valuing of life around policies that undermine people’s rights to define their gender and celebrate their traditions.

1 Lough, Keeva. (2022) Artist statement.

2 Jarrett, Lisa. (2022) Artist statement.

When thinking about how to bridge what, on the surface, may appear to be different struggles for the community, honoring history, and belonging, Nayyirah Waheed’s “Africa’s Lament” contextualizes what is at stake for people seeking to provide refuge and support for their children. The poem’s narrator starts by speaking about how she cut her legs so that her children could return to her. Waheed writes:

where are my legs. i had to give them to my babies so they could swim back home to me. back home to me. back home to me. i rubbed the sun all in their hair. every single birth. i rubbed sun all over their hair. they remembered who they look like.3

3 Waheed, Nayyirah. (2013) “Africa’s Lament.” Salt reprinted in “Poet’s Corner,” Howl, New York. https://www.howlnewyork.com/post/poets-corner-africa-s-lament

Waheed discusses how the mother of the poem aims to preserve her children and sacrifices parts of herself to bring them back, but not all of us can go back. Lough’s Self-Portrait repurposes anti-trans legislation by putting it into a visual conversation with “warm, fleshy, vulnerable” visuals.4 “Africa’s Lament” functions similarly, with the title speaking to what, despite the narrator’s efforts, many of us understand to be difficult, if not impossible. Jarrett’s reclamation of practicing ancestral tradition showcases how those of us whose ancestors have left in resistance to their will or because of the inability for a home to take care of them still carry them home with us. Home becomes more than a place in the traditions we keep and the policies we resist and rewrite to center our humanity and self-determination.

Part of the struggle with home, with the coming and going and seeking, as I discussed with Linda García Merchant in December 2021, lies in having no one home to return to. Even as we recognize the sacrifices the people we come from made in the hopes that we can return, sometimes we lose the legs and the salt; sometimes the way we look arouses suspicion among those who didn’t have to leave. Chronicling growing up and coming of age in Chicago and California, García Merchant’s No Es Facil uses “media, stills, sound, mapping and voice-over that would tell my history using layers of digital mapping, photographs, found footage,” to explain how and why she became an oral historian chronicling the lives and legacies of Chicana feminists from across the United States.5

4 Lough, Keeva. (2022) Artist statement.

5 Garcia Merchant, Linda. (2022) artist statement.

Her narrative responds to Waheed’s narrator’s efforts to bring them back home by highlighting how often the way home requires us to chronicle the work we do to remember and re-member the sacrifices that came before us. Often that chronicling, as I have found in my work, impedes our return home because traveling and storytelling necessitate our nomadism to remember.

My nomadism emerged because of how I grew to challenge what my home and family expected of me to stay. Many of the artists empathized with these challenges in our conversations and email exchanges. We often defied the dreams US schools taught us to dream while simultaneously challenging the expectations set upon us by the people we chose and the people we came from. Amid the sacrifice of the people who want us back and the expectations of the people we come from, Jean Munson’s work grappling with secrecy and silence converses with sacrifices that often ask us to do the same. If/when secrets become the tool of survival, many of us living in Diaspora, like Jean Munson, rewrite and reimagine speaking truth to struggle, joy, and kinship in our work. Munson writes:

“At that moment, I realized my mom held secrets to keep this image of strength in our minds even as she suffered. As a Filipina in today’s world, I am torn between the woman my mom wants me to be and the woman I want to become: a maternal martyr versus explorer of less-traveled paths.” 6

And oftentimes those less-traveled paths allow us to return home and redefine its significance. That’s why I found Muñoz’s Earth Tattoo so powerful. As she explains in her artist's statement, “she combines earth from the Chihuahuan desert with her own breast milk, using printmaking techniques to print directly onto the skin of the women she photographs, alluding to the deep bonds between mother and child, body and land.”7 Using those ingredients to place the combined image of herself and her daughter onto her mother’s body, she intertwines the nurturing we get from land and breast milk to stress that our fullness comes from acknowledging that we carry our past and future in the present. Muñoz shows what society expects of women, people with uteruses, and the land to give unconditionally in secret and silence.

Transformance, the recorded performance designed by Rose B. Simpson, curated by Fawn Douglas, and funded by the Nevada Museum of Art in 2021, complements Earth Tattoo by giving voice to what Muñoz acknowledges is often silenced. Through the collaborative process among Indigenous women from Santa Clara Pueblo, Southern Paiute, and other communities, mothers and daughters, along with local friends, worked together to reclaim land and foster sisterhood among each other. After the performance, when Fawn explained how mothers and daughters worked together, my heart grew full because I recognized the ceremony and prayer behind the journey towards performance. In cutting the plastic barrier in the park, Fawn removes an external obstruction between her and her ancestral lands. In short, the collective of performers was answering Waheed’s narrator’s call to return home, stitching together what colonialism and racism aimed to tear apart.

6 Munson, Jean. (2022) Artist statement

7 Muñoz, Gabriela. (2022) Artist statement