WORK

material of migration

  • Material of migration is a print piece exploring the archival material of life in the liminal. Utilizing my family archive, I meditate on the stories held in the objects, papers, and materials and how they animate a world in transition, existing at the threshold of a new life. The tangible remains of the meeting points across and between realms… What gets left behind, what gets brought forward, and what gets transformed? How do relations, practices, and innerworlds shift and take on new meaning? 

  •           I sift through my family’s collections to piece together my personal narrative on collective memory in this tenuous transition of migration. Simultaneously thinking through the vectors of power that are implicated: nation, globalization, mobility… made through checkpoints, demarcations, classifications, and legibility. The memories captured contain the intimate moments that arise not only out of  necessity, but also from deep creativity and invention... carefully laced together, tethering different worlds, and creating new ones altogether.


 

the heart of the archive lives in the body

reading in indigenous archival traditions, spiritual systems, and (re)memory as repair



  • Excerpts:
  • “As people of the global majority, despite the legacies of colonialism and imperialism we’ve endured under this globally extractive capitalist empire, we are still no strangers to returning to knowledges that we’ve been forcefully severed from, and moving towards repair. I think of Audre Lorde’s Erotic, and Gloria Anzaldua’s Conocimiento; how US feminists of color have long utilized ideas of the embodied, intuitive, and the spiritual as central tenets of their work– and as an integral part of our collective work in getting free, despite being largely dismissed and delegitimized in the academy because of it.”

    “In thinking about alternative ways to know, lapses in linear time, and the pulse and energy of creation; I am harkened to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In the possibility of creating a vision of what is possible from the power of our imagination. And how the line between what is possible, what is imagined, and what is willed into reality, is very thin. In mixing archival record and fictional intervention, she venerates a world of the forgotten, reimagines their innermost worlds, and wills their narratives into existence… through her. To me, this is a spiritual act. As artists, we use ourselves as vessels to manifest vision and imagination into existence.”

Read on Substack


etymology of black lesbian gender zine



  • Etymology of Black Lesbian Gender is a 12-page print zine exploring the history and evolution of Lesbian gendered language and terminology, with an emphasis on the histories of Black Lesbian Genders specifically. Using archival material in the form of photos, quotes, and collage, as well as original prose — it considers how intra-communal language takes shape over time, and how these shifts in language can give us a more nuanced perspective on how we collectively create, cement, and define ourselves.

  •              The print edition is fully risograph printed in purple, and self-published in both white and brown paper editions.  The print edition is currently disributed by endless editions and brown recluse zine distro



and into the streets: black queer and trans memory broadsides


  • These posters were designed as a part of Rami George and Philadelphia Mural Arts ‘AND INTO THE STREETS’ art installation, June 28th, 2023 at Louis Kahn Park in Philadelphia, PA. These 12x18” double-sided print editions of 250 were distributed for free at the park as a part of the opening reception. The designs were inspired by the Black queer and trans histories, communities, and creations of Philadelphia, PA; with archival images and material sourced from the John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives at William Way LGBT Center in Philadelphia, PA. 

  1. The photographs on this poster are sourced from COLOURS Magazine, a Philadelphia-based Black LGBT Magazine; "4 the Womyn" 1997 issue, and "Anniversary Issue" 1996, respectively; sourced from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. LGBT Archives. COLOURS began as a Black LGBT Magazine in 1991, and has since transitioned into an advocacy and support organization that serves LGBTQ BIPOC populations in Philadelphia.
  2. A scan of an unpublished manuscript by Anita Cornwell titled "TO A YOUNG BLACK LESBIAN: SURVIVAL IS THE BEST REVENGE" sourced from the Anita Cornwell Papers at the John J. Wilcox, Jr. LGBT Archives. Anita Cornwell (b. 1923) was a black lesbian feminist author. In 1983, she wrote the first collection of essays by an African-American lesbian, Black Lesbian in White America. Born in Greenwood, South Carolina, Anita moved to Philadelphia with her mother at the age of sixteen, graduated from Temple University, and spent the majority of her life in Philadelphia; Anita passed at the age of 99 in 2023.