Quilting Portraits: Black Girls' Place-Making

• In Event: Fugitive Text in Educational Research

Abstract

Textile artist Bisa Butler (2019) designed a portrait of four Black women titled “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” In this colorful quilt adapted from an old vintage photograph, Butler uses kente cloth fabrics to add texture, depth and layer to reimagine place and time-space of four Black Women on the steps of the University of Georgia. Theorizing with Maya Angelou’s (1967) autobiographical text “I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing” and Bisa Butler’s creative quilting portrait, the presenter weaves together eight Black girls’ narratives to illustrate how they fugitively navigate the pervasive culture of whiteness at an elite school in New England. Using a framework that is interdisciplinary and drawing from radical Black studies and Black methodologies, this paper illustrates Black girls' ways of being in the world and centralizes their voice as critical to understanding Black girl place-making.

Black girls’ lives are textured and at times layered and complex. McKittrick (2021) asserted that blackness has a sound, a sound which “is a way of being Black and Black being is an aurally aesthetic way of life” (p. 65). This empirical paper illustrates how Black girls’ engagement with arts-based literacies in a Student of Color affinity group (SOC), and their co-creation of collective third spaces, shaped social and academic trajectories within an elite private school and beyond its cages.

Black girls make place within structures that do not protect or value their being. The mapping of spatial histories, particularly Black women’s geographies, emphasize a political and deeply embedded history of social justice. Through the showcasing of various media, Black girls experience life, make decisions, and love themselves, even when the school does not love them back. This form of making place through engagement and connectedness as well as through art and activism illustrated new possibilities of examining art and creative text as fugitive sites for critical response and literacies in Black spaces.

Black women and girls are always in movement and resistance to spaces that racism and anti-blackness reside--like the caged bird. If racism is materialized in and through Black girls’ bodies, then the connections between space, place, and power signify that Black geographies are political, theoretical, and personal. As Black girls move throughout the environment, their homes, communities, and institutions, they are confronted with dominant structures of power that exclude and actively attempt to erase their value and existence. Fugitive place as located within Maya Angelou’s autobiographical text and Bisa Butler’s visual portraits illuminates how racism and power differences uphold notions of who is deemed knowable. Thus, Black girls making space in elite private schools should be closely analyzed to further push theorization of space and place-making as radical possibilities for knowledge production and liberation.

Author

• Alisha Smith, University of Massachusetts - Amherst