(Re)Membering the Future: A Gallery Walk With Black Artists of Black Girlhood

• In Event: Worlds That Black Girls Deserve: Working With Black Girls Toward Black Girl Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This paper brings together several pieces of artwork to curate what we theorize as an endarkened gallery of (re)memory. Drawing on the work of Cynthia Dillard (2000), we define this term as the distinct cultural artifacts that honor the minds, bodies, spirits, ancestral literacies, collective wisdoms, and healing practices of Black women across the Diaspora. We bring these images together to (re)claim and (re)position Black art, which has historically been stolen and commodified in white-dominant museum spaces, to (re)write Black girls’ time continuums (past, present, and future), and ask How does Black art that centers Black girls and femmes (re)member and (re)write stories across time and space?

Theoretical framework
Taken together, Brown (2013) and Dillard’s (2021) work (re)frames and speaks to the deeply spiritual nature of Black girls’ knowledge, artistry, creative processes, multiliteracies, and practices of healing. Thus, these frames help us to understand creation as a spiritual and literate practice of Black girlhood, and their arts-based renderings as visual depictions of endarkened (re)memory. While we acknowledge that historically museums have participated in colonial practices of theft, commodification, and dehumanization, Black art curators and artists have long worked to (re)claim our stories and tell them with care and love (hooks, 1995). With this in mind, we also draw on these legacies and understand the work in this piece to exist within an endarkened gallery of (re)memory; one that is decolonial, anti-racist, and grounded in love, compassion, reciprocity, and ritual (Dillard, 2006).

Methods & Data
(Re)calling the work of Black Feminist scholars who engage kitchen table talks, we call artists and scholars in to engage together in a dialogue about art, spirit, futurities, and Black girlhood (Authors, in press; Haddix et al., 2016). Inspired by this work, but given the the arts-based nature of it, we find it necessary to move beyond the kitchen table and engage in a virtual gallery walk alongside the artists, listening to them the stories behind their art. We declare this gallery walk a legitimate method of analysis, as it casts a Black gaze on Black artwork (Campt, 2017; hooks, 1995) recreates the practices of Black folks documenting our own lives and then looking through these images together (hooks, 1995). We draw on six pieces of artwork created by three different artists (two each) whose artwork depicts quotidian practices of Black girlhood and Black life (Campt, 2017).

Significance
Analysis of this work yielded two major findings: (1) art depicts Black girls’ futurity as limitless and able to be shaped by their own imaginations and ancestral dreams; and (2) artists of Black girlhoods understand the future to be Divinely feminine. This work is important as we think about the full humanity and futurity of Black girls and how their stories are told by artists who are modern day griots.

Authors

• Jennifer Danridge Turner, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Autumn A. Griffin, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author