Earlier today, I had the honour of speaking with curator Jacqueline Mabey and Bennington College students in a course Mabey is co-teaching with Robert Ransick on feminist praxis. The pop-up module is part of Mabey’s Utopia Is No Place, Utopia Is Process show at Usdan Gallery. The show, featuring works by artists like Lorraine Grady, Nicole Killian, Hannah Black, Ann Hirsch, Ella Dawn McGeough and more explores the notion of failed utopias from a contemporary feminist perspective. The course is running alongside the show as a way of opening the gallery up to explore the basic principles of feminist organizing. (It’s worth noting Mabey is one of the artists behind the Art+Feminism campaign to expand Wikipedia’s coverage of women in the arts.)
For a week that began with Lemonade, I appreciated having the opportunity to discuss Sheroes, a limited run event series I organized from 2011-2012 in Toronto exploring the iconography and cultures of fandom surrounding the “League of Legendary Ladies”. Every month, a different female artist, like Nina Simone, Erykah Badu, Joni Mitchell, or Yoko Ono, were honoured with on and offline performances, sounds, installations and visuals. The series was a hub for a myriad of Canadian and international artists, all of whom were active participants in celebrating female pop superstars, who, throughout their careers, have pushed boundaries and persevered with goddess-like strength. (Yes, I evoked “goddess” — our tagline was “herstory done right.” The “campy 1970s feminist speak” overload was intentional.)
The project’s early exhibition of GIF art curated by Lorna Mills has often been discussed, but less its basis in the collaborative processes of fandom culture. We talked about fandom as a culture made not only by its producers or consumers, but by the collaborations that occur between them. Fandom, especially for the ways in which it looks at culture from the outside in, digs up b-sides and obscure histories. (If you’re interested, this essay by author and critic David Balzer — commissioned by Whippersnapper Gallery, who co-presented the final event, Virtual Seasons — does a bang-on job parsing this esoteric fandom territory further.)
Re-visiting this Sheroes #12: Nina Simone GIF from the Mexico City-based artist and curator Gaby Cepeda — heads Up: she’s next week’s guest speaker! — feels somewhat timely. Here, a black and white multiple of Nina Simone and her daughter frame a rapidly-cycling religious-like portrait of Beyonce and child, followed by Rihanna and even Kim Kardashian. All the women wear their hair in cornrows. The shooting neon lasers of Simone’s daughter and the wide anime eyes of Beyonce, Rihanna and Kim suggest a literal crossing of sight lines over protective and functional tightly-woven braids so connected to the crown. It’s a style so versatile and creative, yet deeply personal in the self-identity transmitted, a declarative liberation from dominant modes of seeing. This feels urgent, especially at a time when the failures of the most recent Nina Simone biopic, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, affirms how we still live in a world still not ready for this story to be told with its proper due.
I can’t help but think again about the conversations Lemonade has initiated on the south, marriage, motherhood, and the inner-lives of black girls and black girl femmes. (Not to mention the album’s possible reality-based fiction of marriage infidelities.) In a recent MTV piece, writer Doreen St Felix takes in Beyonce’s cornrows and Yeezy wear in the angry visuals for “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, and the flash of bold white text: “God is God and I am not”. At that moment, “the biggest rock star on Earth takes our delirious fandom seriously enough to admonish us,” St Felix writes. “We call her God. She wants to remind us that she is not, that she is human and has problems, and that no matter how hard she works, she, too, can lose her faith in things.” But the testimony, nonetheless, is reliant on charged fandom worship. It’s meaning is derived from the “fanon” — the collectively re-written narratives by fans regarding real and virtual selfhoods that ultimately challenge objectified image-based assessments.
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