#Steffani Jemison

[mentaltimetraveller]

Steffani Jemison Kai Matsumiya, New York May 5 – June 28, 2019

[brooklynmuseum]

Get the artists’ perspective on the society-shifting, culture-creating impact of the Great Migration. 

The Virtual Member Coffee Chat on April 19 will make space for conversation surrounding community, connection, and radical hope inspired by A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. Stick around for a live Q&A with the moderator and artists, including: 

Akea Brionne: Interdisciplinary researcher and artist

Steffani Jemison: artist and fellow Brooklynite 

Indira A. Abiskaroon: Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art

Register for free as a Member (or become a Member) here: http://bit.ly/414Wvf5

📷 Brooklyn Museum. (Photo: Andrew Brincka) → Akea Brionne, 2023 → Steffani Jemison. © Nottingham Contemporary 2017

[notchainedtotrauma]

I don’t want to participate in the ageist notions that Black don’t crack, or that Black people of a certain age being stunning means they have somehow managed to prolonge their youth. Steffani Jemison is an artist and a writer, who has made and still produces thoughtful, gorgeous, and interesting work.

And she is 41 and looks like this and I need someone to help me understand because at this point this is not of the earth.

[slack-wise]

Steffani Jemison

[pictureit-jpg]

plage des eaux vives + steffani jemison @ centre d’art contemporain

[jacobwren]

“I used to think that time is just one thing, the way a ruler is always the same length, twelve inches or twenty-four inches or even a yard. Then I started to run and learned that time is only like distance if we measure distance with taffy or rubber bands or chewing gum or pleats, anything that can expand wide like an accordion or shrink small enough to swallow. I found that the twenty or thirty minutes of a run could feel like the longest twenty minutes of your life. The final block, the final leg, the final lap, the final half mile – they could feel like the longest hundred feet in the world. Even when I ran every day, when I felt I could never imagine being more accustomed to something than I was accustomed to running, even then, I sometimes felt I would never reach the end. There are things you do because they’re easy and there are other things you do.” – Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street 

[onpyre]

it’s probably obvious, but i’m doing the same thing i did last black history month, which is highlight a black artist a day

so far:

Belkis Ayón

Naudline Pierre

Bill Traylor

Betye Saar

Diedrick Brackens

Kara Walker

Jordan Casteel

Ted Joans

Alison Saar

Ming Smith

David Hammons

Tau Lewis

Renée Stout

Carrie Mae Weems

Kerry James Marshall

Lorna Simpson

Steffani Jemison

Amy Sherald

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Doreen Garner

Lisa Corinne Davis

Juliana Huxtable

Kehinde Wiley

Janiva Ellis

Wangechi Mutu

Simone Leigh

Troy Michie

Philemona Williamson

[longlistshort]

(image above- Robert Pruitt, "A Song for Travelers")

Brooklyn Museum's exhibition, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, is an opportunity to learn about an important period of American history, and see it interpreted through the eyes of twelve contemporary artists.

From the museum's website-

Between 1915 and 1970, in the wake of racial terror during the post-Reconstruction period, millions of Black Americans fled from their homes to other areas within the South and to other parts of the country. This remarkable movement of people, known as the Great Migration, caused a radical shift in the demographic, economic, and sociopolitical makeup of the United States. A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration brings together twelve contemporary artists to consider the complex impact of this period on their lives, as well as on social and cultural life, with newly commissioned works ranging from large-scale installation, immersive film, and tapestry to photography, painting, and mixed media. Featured artists are Akea Brionne, Mark Bradford, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems. A Movement in Every Direction presents a departure from traditional accounts of the Great Migration, which are often understood through a lens of trauma, and reconceptualizes them through stories of self-possession, self-determination, and self-examination. While the South did lose generations of courageous, creative, and productive Black Americans due to racial and social inequities, the exhibition expands the narrative by introducing people who stayed in, or returned to, the region during this time. Additionally, the Brooklyn Museum’s presentation centers Brooklyn as another important site in the Great Migration, highlighting historical and contemporary census data about the borough’s migration patterns. Visitors are encouraged to share their own personal and familial stories of migration through an oral history “pod” available in the exhibition galleries.

About Robert Pruitt's work, pictured above, from the museum's wall information plaque-

“A Song for Travelers” celebrates the individual and Black collective experiences that have shaped the histories of rural East Texas and Houston's Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards. In this drawing-based on an early 1970’s photograph of a reunion of the artist's family in Dobbin, Texas -sixteen people gather around a seated central figure about to embark on a journey. During the creation of this work, the masked traveler became a stand-in for Pruitt, who had recently left his hometown of Houston.

Pruitt often draws inspiration from his and others' family photographs while examining historical events that have impacted Houston's Black communities. Wearing costumes and adorned with items that reference various aspects of Black culture found in schools, social clubs, and religious spaces, the figures in the work reflect the numerous networks that remained and flourished in the South. Merging the Great Migration period with the present, Pruitt centers the Black neighborhoods across the southern region that served as safe havens and rich sites of cultural expression for migrants during the twentieth century. This link extends to today as many Black Americans leave the northern and western cities that once attracted their elders and return to the South.

Allison Janae Hamilton's A House Called Florida, below, takes the viewer on a journey through part of northern Florida's natural beauty.

From the museum's information plaque about the video installation-

Allison Janae Hamilton produced the three-channel film installation A House Called Florida in her hometown region of northern Florida. The breathtaking landscapes of Apalachicola Bay and the swampy Blackwater Lakes of Florida's Big Bend frame musicians, dancers, motorists, a Victorian house, and a slow resounding rhythm. The artist references French Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar's 1946 short story "Casa Tomada." ("House Taken Over") about ghosts that slowly take over a home and eventually push out its owners, room by room. Hamilton echoes the story's theme of displacement with two regally dressed, spirit-like protagonists who move about the house engaging in mark-making and ritual performances. Hamilton's film pays tribute to the Black Floridians who remained in the Red Hills and the Forgotten Coast regions, despite the racial violence and environmental precariousness they faced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Carrie Mae Weems' personal and moving contribution is in two parts- a series of photographs and a unique digital video installation.

The museum's description of the work-

Carrie Mae Weems explores a painful family story: the disappearance of her grandfather Frank Weems, a tenant farmer and union activist who was attacked by a white mob in Earle Arkansas, in 1936. Presumed dead, he narrowly escaped and made his way to Chicago on foot, never again reuniting with his family. Frank Weems may have followed the North Star to Chicago. Weems's series of seven prints, The North Star, makes an apt metaphor for Frank's life. In Leave! Leave Now! Weems conjures the figure of her grandfather with a Pepper's Ghost, a late nineteenth-century form of illusion first used in theater. By weaving historical events with fragmented family stories, photographs, poetry, music, and interviews, the artist reveals the tragedy of her grandfather's disappearance and the aftermath.

This exhibition will close on Sunday, June 25th, 2023.

[mentaltimetraveller]

Steffani Jemison, In Succession (2019), 2019 (still). HD video, black and white, sound, 18:19

[brooklynmuseum]

Language, movement, and Black expression. 🎥

The three intertwine in Steffani Jemison’s film A*ray, made in collaboration with shapeshifter and TikTok performer Lakia Black, a lifelong resident of Uniontown, Alabama. 

Over several months, Jemison and Black worked with acting coach Marishka S. Phillips on a series of filmed acting exercises. Alternating between footage of Uniontown and Black performing three different characters inspired by TikTok personalities, Jemison looks at migration as a process of radical hope and transformation.

See Jemison’s film, which evokes a sentiment of migrants from the past: to desire new possibilities of life outside one’s origin, as part of #GreatMigrationBkM through June 25.

🔗 https://bit.ly/GreatMigrationBkM

[notchainedtotrauma]

The epigraph of this poem is the following: for those at the other end of the whip in the pageantry of race play. Indeed, this poem is my personal attempt to grapple with the jouissance that some Black people derive from race play, and to pry open my terror and defiance.

William Pope.L, Real Kitsch #5

David Hammons, Untitled

Steffani Jemison, Same Time

The works of art above best visually describe the poem. Here are some excerpts:

For a labyrinth of scars, bristled voices. Rinsing a tongue hysteric: negative only to itself.

Muscles crinkle against low pitched meat; an avocado pit between spotty hips.

and

Those are bodies you cannot find burning with absence, the dampness of the crease.

Plangent throats are made to work; the friction between frothy paint and puckered liver. 

and

Young Black women in petite breath and a rusted gun. Down the leg, cinnamon bark.

They buckle against the splintered glass, a snow fleck of smoke. Someone wants it bad.

[charlesbryan]

Steffani Jemison at Centre d'Art Contemporain

http://dlvr.it/TCsTXj

[worldsandemanations]

Steffani Jemison Kai Matsumiya, New York

[mikunziv]

5 Art Novels to Read This Summer - ARTnews.com

Titles by Brandon Taylor, Lucy Ives, Steffani Jemison, Johanna Hedva, and Catherine Lacey make the best summer reads.