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crib swingers
In baby commercials, peace is depicted as a baby lying asleep in a crib with toy mobiles hanging overhead. However, whenever I think about cribs and toy mobiles, or as I call them crib swingers, I think about two things: lynching and mass incarceration; black bodies hanging from above and black bodies behind jail bars. This imagery to me reveals an embodiment, one of historical and racial violence in a cultural understanding of something universal, which caused me to inquire more into our visual form of communication. I think there's a theory there for explaining how and why black people's peace of mind and mental health gets destroyed and disrupted. By examining the different ways such as stereotypes, linguistic injury, and environmental discrimination, I am able to show the impact of our bodies beyond relation with other bodies but too our communiy, our environments and relationship with language. Amidst Covid-19 outbreak, I could no longer make this design of an actual wooden crib with a hanging mobile attached to it in the design center shop so I made it digitally. I do plan to make it one day though.
When brainstorming this piece, I used felt material and cardboard to experiment. So here's the vision: I used the colors pink, black and blue to symbolize the binaries of race and gender we are taught to accept in adolescence in relation to lynching. In addition, I want people to question how these continuous oppressive systems of violence are manifested externally. We are all entangled in this toxic system and we are all searching for justice. But let it not just be for us, the world needs healing too. Similarly to the first exhibition, we need to reflect on our systems of learnings, especially the objects we are using universally to communicate and regulate our societal ethics and behaviors (such as the three way traffic signal which are used in schools to control behavior). To challenge our visual culture of childhood and how we develop our sense of being is critical. In my own personal experience, I’ve noticed how quickly the violence and suffering of black bodies is forgotten. Black bodies were used by white people to teach and show their kids how to treat black people and that the only "freedom" acceptable for us is our death. This should not be forgotten and needs to be acknowledged in order for any progress to be made in the social justice fight for black liberation and for the liberation of all. White people hung other white people who advocated for the civil rights of black people. Black women were also lynched, another often forgotten fact but Sandra Bland’s death was a reminder.
Our visual culture is reflective of what we learn to be acceptable in our society. Historically, lynching a black person was seen and known for being a social celebration for white people. Our brutal death was a photogenic family opportunity worthy of smiling for. This belief is still apparent in our institutional systems. The racial violence and death of black people has been and still is appreciated and normalized through our current police system and prison industrial complex. While actively trying to dismantle the school to prison pipeline, to which statistics have shown black and brown communities especially of poverty are significantly higher in probability of being incarcerated, black people continue to embody and suffer from the trauma of the historical violences committed against our ancestors and our people by white terrorists. Not only is this still present in our prison system but also in our visual communications of learning, hence the word-play.
The "bodies shouldn't hang" piece(s) developed from when I thought about what it would be like to hang up my work on the wall. I thought about the concept of hanging itself and I again thought about lynching, but too, about trees, about Jesus and later flags. I compared hanging my art to the feeling of selling myself, as if my work were being displayed for auction. I thought about that connection to slavery and to "slave" auctions. too, about postcards which were sold showing dead black bodies being lynched.
To watch in appreciation of people being strung up, to choke and float and swing lifelessly "easily and feely" is fucking horrific and disgusting. It is more than just a hate crime of humanity, but a crime against nature too. Nature has been used involuntarily as a weapon of our oppression, not just as with trees but also with the ocean and with air pollution. Coming to college and being around so many trees here continuously brought up environmental racism in my mind. The niceness of looking at the trees provoked in my head images of black people hanging dead on trees. And the trees, they talk to me and tell me to remember these things.
Black people are more than the value of entertainment, more than some garland to be hung for decoration. We are builders of celebration, of knowledge, of inventions, of communities and of color. It is time to dismantle the crib and end the foundations we have been taught are normal and right. Everything I hang in the future will be for the liberation of black people and especially for nature, whose vitality plays a huge role in our process of healing. The lynching of women is often very overlooked but has presently made a comeback with the numerous cases of black women mysteriously dying in jail cells. It can be historically inferred that these women are being killed by racist white people in the policing system, which actively contributes to the violent treatment and body policing of black folks in America.
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