"Black Queer Vernacular Art and the Beauty of rod jones ii" by Logan Cryer

Writer: Logan Cryer
Essay Mentor: Serubiri Moses

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition this must be the place to be by rod jones ii, with mentorship from Didier William and on view at CUE Art Foundation November 3rd, 2022 – January 7th, 2023. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

unttld, 2022. Resourced fabric, polyfil, waxed linen thread, leather. Approx. dimensions 60 x 60 x 42 in. Photo courtesy the artist.

“The Lord told me to let it go.” – Wendy Jones

rod jones ii is not sure why his mother, Wendy Jones, sold her beauty salon in the summer of 2009. To this day, the only explanation she ever gave was an affirmation of her faith in the Lord. The salon was located on 67th and Broadway, just south of jones’s hometown of Gary, Indiana, a Rust Belt city with a population just under 70,000. Gary is one of the many Black hubs in the Midwest. A beauty salon is a hub within a hub, a place where Black hair and conversation are warmly accepted. jones grew up in his mother’s salon. He spent time there after school, answering the telephone: “Mark of Excellence, how may I help you?” He was made aware that whenever he went outside, there could always be a stranger who knew his mother. He had best act right, just in case. 

The connection between the beauty salon and this must be the place to be, jones’s solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, is apparent from a material standpoint. His sculptures are constructed using Kanekalon hair, ABS nails, and plastic hair beads. Although he never learned to do hair himself at his mother’s salon, jones possesses the same patience needed to work with such fussy items; he braids, threads, and decorates with meticulous detail. jones’s pieces show off the labor of their creation the same way Black hair does: through evident repetition, thriftiness, abundance, and style.

The largest piece in the exhibition is made from dental floss and is loosely laced together to form a wide netting that billows within the gallery space. Hair beads rest in the nodes of the floss netting. These acrylic beads were chosen by color and texture, and they are threaded onto the floss in groups of only two or three, leaving the net nearly transparent. The teal color of the manufactured floss represents a hypothetical freshness. It is complemented by the cool tone of the beads that jones selected. 

Photo courtesy the artist.

jones looks back on his childhood memories of his mother’s salon with both an intense familiarity and an alienated curiosity. this must be the place to be began as an examination of the beauty salon as both a social space and a proxy for his relationship with his mother. jones’s investigations consist of material research and experimental socio-spatial constructions. The sculptures, videos, and textiles that he creates are continuations of his anomalistic practice—that is to say, a practice filled with creature creation and walls that come alive. 

The “homies” represent an ongoing body of work that jones has developed over the length of his practice. These soft sculptures are made in various sizes and materials with pieces of scrap fabric that jones has found and sewn together. Their ambiguous forms slide between the humanoid and the insectile, and they possess the fierce vitality of dolls that have been sewn by self-taught hands. The homies’ presence in the gallery can be interpreted through a number of lenses: as divine guardians; as representations of Blackness; as jones himself embodied in various forms; as the “other.” jones has intended for the homies to live in and occupy the gallery; visitors enter their world and bear witness to their space. 

Photos by taylor manigoult.

this must be the place to be plays with the humility embedded in entering an unfamiliar cultural space. Generally, an artist has the ability to invert the viewer’s sense of who belongs and who does not by imbuing the white cube with cultural signifiers. Many Black artists deploy an inversion in order to speak to Black audiences even within a white context. As a consequence, non-Black audiences experience a positive transgression, an unusual sense of belonging amidst Blackness, when entering these inverted realms. By centering the homies, jones experiments with cultural signifiers that go beyond the racial to incorporate an ontological division as well. The net effect of this strategy is that no one is fully accepted into the exhibition because there is no way for human audiences to access a non-human experience. 

This is not to say that the ultimate goal of jones’s work is to antagonize his audience. He has orchestrated a set of circumstances that make it impossible for the audience to conflate aesthetic appreciation and intellectual control. His practice draws upon the legacies of Black American artists such as Adrian Piper, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennifer Packer, Ulysess Jenkins, and Rodney McMillian in that it brings the viewer into their own self-awareness of who they are in relation to objects of art. 

jones’s artwork has inspired me to create a term that contextualizes his practice as a new genre of artmaking: Black Queer Vernacular Craft (BQVC). I utilize this new term to describe an artist whose practice shows the following qualities: (1) an abundant collection of materials and resources sourced through scavenging, purchasing, archival research, etc.; (2) the explicit relationship of some of these collected materials to Blackness. (Blackness is a process); (3) an awareness on behalf of the artist of the spiritual and metaphysical qualities present within their sourced materials and/or completed works; and (4) a queerness within the work that is not displayed through didactic symbolism. (Queerness is a process). 

BQVC is, to my observation, quite influential within Philadelphia, the city in which jones has resided since 2017. Notable artists whose practice can be described to live in and around this new genre of BQVC include: Vitche-Boul Ra, Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism), and Jordan Deal. I would posit that the prevalence of BQVC in Philadelphia is due, in part, to the small number of commercial galleries within the city, which has led to the formation of communities of artists who are motivated by aesthetic experimentation over marketability. The effect of this creative ecosystem is apparent in jones’s exhibition at CUE Art Foundation. Most of the artworks in this must be the place to be remain unnamed, and the gestures that jones introduces into the gallery (expressively painting the walls; sculpting “arms” that carry the homies) do not form discrete pieces or distinct “artworks” in the eyes of the artist. 

Photo courtesy the artist.

At this moment, jones’s exposure as an artist has not reached far beyond the city of Philadelphia. jones attended college with the intention to become a professional football player, and only became focused on visual art after a serious injury ended his football prospects. He graduated from Truman State University’s modest undergraduate Studio Art program in 2016, along with only one other student. When jones enrolled as a graduate student at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the following year, it was the first time he experienced working in his own studio. jones struggled to contextualize his artistic impulses within pre-established art spaces and art histories. In this must be the place to be, jones’s experience of moving through belonging and unfamiliarity led him to create an empathetic world of uncommon folk. His prolific practice is just at the start.

All citations by the artist are drawn from interviews with the author of this essay. 

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About the Writer
Logan Cryer is a writer, artist, music lover, and curator living and learning in Philadelphia. They are a graduate of Moore College of Art and Design, where they majored in Fine Arts, and an alum of Headlong Performance Institute. They have a soft spot for awkwardness and revel in the boldness that young, queer, and/or poc artists bring to the world.

About the Mentor
Serubiri Moses is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He has delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, and The New School. He has also lectured at the basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL) and The University of the Arts Helsinki (FI). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author.

"PLAY WITH FORM AND TIME IN ALISHA WORMSLEY’S REMNANTS OF AN ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY" by Amanda Dibando Awanjo

Writer: Amanda Dibando Awanjo
Essay Mentor: Kemi Adeyemi

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Remnants of an Advanced Technology by Alisha Wormsley with mentorship from Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels and on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 15 – October 22, 2022 The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

As a child, I sat at the feet of my mother and foremothers. Listening to their stories, I was moved to silence and awe by a grace that felt as vast as space. Ancestral by nature, this form of knowledge plays time for a fool, eschewing linearity for something more. There are not enough words, spaces, and worlds dedicated to the richness of Black women. Alisha Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology (CUE Art Foundation, 2022) draws from a deep well of matriarchal history, imbuing it with techno-archival methods to position Black women as ever-expanding creators of their own worlds. Featuring video, text, sound, immersive installation, and sculpture, the exhibition opens up the potential for new ways of knowing ourselves, our past, and our worlds by connecting us to the radical power of Black women’s sovereign creation through time.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Wormsley works fluidly through various materials, combining and enmeshing them to play with their physical and spiritual potential. The works in Remnants of an Advanced Technology draw from Children of NAN, a material and theoretical archive that Wormsley has constructed over the years; an assemblage of objects and ideas grounded in Black women’s wisdom, magic, and dreaming. The archive serves as a poetic survival guide that flows and grows through time, and that informs all of Wormsley’s work.

Remnants of an Advanced Technology by Alisha B Wormsley, mentored by Joeonna Belladoro-Samuels. Presented by CUE Art Foundation, 2022. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

In Remnants of an Advanced Technology, Wormsley presents a series of twenty-six photo-based quilts that prompt a consideration of the complex roadways of Black women’s futurity. The quilts use as their source material African textiles, repurposed photographic wallpaper from Wormsley’s previous exhibitions, embroidery, and other types of mark making. Varying in size and shape, they are suspended from the ceiling, making it possible to walk around—but not through—them. Their backings are embroidered with maps and messages from Children of NAN. To the artist, these photo-based quilts serve as maps themselves, as the embedded instruction of their embroidery intersects with the long dreamed-of future that the photographs they carry embody. 

Interplay of form and time is a key theme of the exhibition, as Wormsley’s work moves seamlessly between the ancient and the contemporary. In her tapestries, Wormsley has physically woven together natural fibers that are dyed a muted color palette of beige, brown, and black. They stand in close conversation with, but also in stark contrast to, the bursts of color and exuberant patterns of the quilts. Each one anchored by a curved branch, the tapestries utilize simple shapes like triangles and circles, with their fibers breaking from the weaving at certain points to hang below. The rustic fabric and the weathered smoothness of the wood call forward the timelessness of the earth, while the metal circuit boards and plates woven into them speak a distinctly technological language. The small metal plates are embossed with text such as: “It is right that a black woman should lead. A womb is what God made in the beginning. And in the womb was born time and all that fills up space. So says the beautiful spirit.” This quotation is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1920s anthropological study, “Mother Catherine.” Into it, Wormsley inserts the word “black,” further emphasizing Black women’s spiritual practice and survival ethos. The tapestries pull at the intersection of craft and code, asking viewers to question the lineages of contemporary technologies, while also imagining new modes of making and putting forth the role of Black women as technologists within their own right. 

Alisha B Wormsley, So Says The Beautiful Spirit: Daughter, 2020; cotton and wool, motherboards, and vinyl text. Photo courtesy the artist.

Remnants of an Advanced Technology features many moments of stillness and ponderance, especially expressed in Wormsley’s sixteen works with glass, made in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Glass Center. These glass vessels, stained in warm and jewel tones, are each filled with plants, candles, herbs, books, and ephemera. They are decorated with collaged images from the Children of NAN archive, as well as with images of Black women from Wormsley’s previous projects. The inlaid images, some embossed with gold leaf, form a catalogue of otherworldly Black womanhood that evokes the imagery of Afrofuturism and science fiction. The vessels are arranged on a large wooden platform and together create an altar, an honored and holy space filled with tokens of gratitude and homage. Gold-accented candles, some of which are molded into women’s bodies, are interspersed throughout. Working in tandem with the quilts and the tapestries, the vessels underscore Black women’s spirituality, creativity, and persistence, centering their ability to survive and thrive with joy, love, and community. 

The works exhibited in Remnants of an Advanced Technology call to mind Toni Morrison’s narration of healing methodology in her 1987 novel Beloved. In the book, she writes: 

“They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning there was sound and they all knew what that sound sounded like…the voices of the women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.” (Morrison, 308)

This moment in the narrative of Beloved represents the birth of a new timeline, the creation of a new world for the women and their progeny. The characters’ migration “back to the beginning,” is crucially multidisciplinary; they seek to use all possible tools and technologies to build a new future on the back of an ancient bubbling pain. Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology similarly embeds the notion of healing as a multidisciplinary venture by connecting technologies of survival across time to Black women’s methodological ethic of care and liberation. 

Wormsley’s growing archive boldly asserts that Black women are worlds unto themselves. I first came into contact with her work in 2019, when I encountered it in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, in the form of a billboard that read: “There are Black People in the Future.” Radical in its simplicity and assuredness, this statement affirms the lingering truth of Black survival in our violently anti-Black world. The billboard was also evidence, to me, of the potential of Black women to radically hold public space, both in the present and in the future. Wormsley continues these legacies in Remnants of an Advanced Technology by manifesting her radical dreamwork—and that of many others, past, present, and future—into a varied, dynamic, and inspiring presentation of work that holds plainly the truth of Black women’s power.

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About the Writer
Amanda Dibando Awanjo is a Cameroonian American researcher, historian, and artist. She holds a PhD in Critical Cultural Studies in Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Inspired by W.E.B Du Bois’ 1927 question, “What will people in a hundred years say of Black Americans?,” her research explores the role of Black women creators in the evolution of Afrofuturism. Through fellowships with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the University of Pittsburgh's University Art Gallery, her research has expanded to explorations of the visual culture surrounding Black girlhood in the 20th century.

About the Writing Mentor
Kemi Adeyemi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of FeelsRight: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the volume Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Kemi founded and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary black art. She currently serves as dramaturg for Will Rawls’ project [SICCER]. She has recently curated solo shows by Katherine Simóne Reynolds (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 2021) and Amina Ross (Ditch Projects, 2019), as well as co-curated a group show called unstable objects at the Alice Gallery (2017)

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Learn more about the program here. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.

“MONEY METAPHYSIC$” by Meghana Karnik

Writer: Meghana Karnik
Essay Mentor: Sara Reisman

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Money Has No Smell, curated by ACOMPI with mentorship from Rosario Güiraldes and on view at CUE Art Foundation from July 21 – September 9, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

“[D]ollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of [the paper], or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality — it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind…Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

—Yuval Noah Harari¹

The Latin phrase pecunia non olet, or “money has no smell” traces back to the policy of collecting tax on urine in ancient Rome. Urine was taken from public toilets and distributed to businesses like tanners and launderers, who paid tax to make use of its ammonia content. The phrase in its original meaning proposes that the source of money does not taint its value.² In a debate on how money works, a postmodernist might say that money can’t be morally neutral; a pragmatist that money is just a medium; and a manifestation coach that money depends on your ability to move from a scarcity to an abundance mindset.

Even if money has no smell, it generates sticky feelings and assumptions. Unexamined beliefs about money can feed paranoia about rigged systems and scams, and paradoxically, give profiteering from uncertainty a network and platform. It reminds me of conspirituality, a portmanteau that captures the shared mistrust of institutions held by both right-wing conspiracy theorists and progressive New Age utopianists.³ The phenomenon of conspirituality—which is visible in vaccine hesitancy and debates about masking since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—seems to arise from conditions of imperfect private and public infrastructures, mass neglect and the triaging of care, and the myth of personal responsibility. The compounded global crises of COVID-19 (wage loss, supply chain disruptions, food shortages, access to healthcare, a shadow mental health epidemic, rising inflation, widening economic inequality) exemplify how money entangles the personal with the structural, disproportionately impacting anyone unable to buy their own survival.⁴

Perhaps “money has no smell” refers to how senseless we are to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar, and how overvalued U.S. interests and ideas are—not merely in global markets, but in global politics and culture. In times of crisis, it's common for messianic visions about money to abound, both in stories spun by large institutions and interpersonally. Yet this social behavior presents a risk of negationism, often erasing and bypassing the very real ways in which neo-imperialist extraction operates through global financial institutions. Maybe “money has no smell” implies a desired paradigm shift, though it’s ambiguous what kind: democratically-regulated central banks, decentralized cryptocurrency utopias, in reparations policies that seek to amend colonial theft and economic marginalization, or solidarity economies that work to redistribute wealth?

Organized by the curatorial duo ACOMPI (Jack Radley and Constanza Valenzuela), the group exhibition Money Has No Smell gathers recent and newly commissioned works on the topic of money and its belief systems by three artists—Mariana Parisca, Ignacio Gatica, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer. Within this uneasy zeitgeist, the artists channel a sense of disillusionment and a search for spiritual meaning that bring us back to basic questions of what equality, prosperity, sovereignty, and interdependence might look like.

Recurrent in Mariana Parisca’s practice is the hyperinflation of the Venezuelan bolívar, which reached over 1,000,000% in 2018—so devalued that bricks of cash could be exchanged for household items. The currency has had more value as a craft material for streetside souvenirs than at its exchange rate in neighboring Colombia. Parisca concisely relates spiritual belief to money in an altarpiece made by weaving bolívares and palm leaves, using a technique she learned from Venezuelan artisans in Santa Marta, Colombia. The altar functions as a topographic map of Laguna de Maracaibo, where oil was discovered in Venezuela. It recalls the country’s oil-driven economic growth from the 1950s to the 80s and its more recent oil-backed cryptocurrency, the petro, developed to resurrect the economy and circumvent U.S. financial sanctions.⁵ In her practice, Parisca asks, “Is it really unlimited wealth, modernity and nationality that we wanted, or was it sovereignty—freedom from these systems themselves?”⁶

Mariana Parisca, Viscous Illusion Incorporation (detail), 2022; Venezuelan bolívares, United States dollars, palm leaves; dimensions variable.

In recent years, Ignacio Gatica has been investigating neoliberal ideology—its language, signs, and signifiers—informed by the neoliberal policies of the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-1990 and the intersection of US interventionism and experimentation in Chile.⁷ Gatica presents two works that function together as an assemblage: a ticker and security box. Traditionally, a ticker displays “ticks” that mark the rise and fall of financial value, continuously reporting live during stock trading. The earliest version of a ticker, made in 1867 in New York City, printed stock quotes onto paper tape, but recent electronic tickers wind around public billboards and on news screens. There is a common misconception that ticker data is universal and accurate; when in fact, tickers are often privately owned and moderated. From Gatica’s perspective, tickers have been ritualized into acceptance as a neutral way to read the economy, even though their technology is rather politically and ideologically-charged. Gatica and collaborating programmer Esteban Serrano propose a different kind of ticker, one that forecasts the annual debt through 2025 of countries the World Bank categorizes as middle or low income. Recasting countries as companies, the work nods to the predatory policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are historically US and European-led (and whose leaders are not elected). The work also seems to ask if there are more accessible ways to make economic decisions, without relying on prophetic financial technology. Gatica’s accompanying security box, found in a Bronx-based 99 cent store, has a unique placard congratulating broker Gerald M. Golkin for 42 years working at the AMEX building. A micro-monument to an erstwhile career and to the former stock exchange building (which was absorbed by the NYSE in 2009), it stands in for lost experiences, memories, and transmissions of finance.⁸

Ignacio Gatica, Stones Above Diamonds (detail); stock ticker, live financial data, printed credit cards, card reader, aluminum shelves; dimensions variable.

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s ongoing series Mine Your Own Business typically consist of objects of everyday consumption (disposable coffee cups, credit cards, and cigarette boxes) along with a microcontroller display (MCU) that presents various information from the Internet, ranging from the current market value of a commodity to the artist’s personal data. As a “real-time networked installation,” Torres-Ferrer’s work interrupts any lasting perception that the virtual is separate from lived experience, or that technology is waste-free. One of their newest works in the series, Untitled (What A Crypton)—with its MCU processing crypto-mining data on a plantain bunch, decaying in real time—specifically focuses on the capitalist-colonial dynamics of the US and its “unincorporated territory,” Puerto Rico. They write, “The first pieces from the series started as cryptocurrency miners, questioning the post-hurricane [Maria] utopian/speculative wave of crypto businesses that seem to take advantage of places in crisis. Are these the best places to deploy decentralized technologies? [The work] also stands in defiance of the huge amounts of energy and computational power bitcoin mining requires; using the minimum energy and computational power scattered into found objects.”⁹

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Untitled (What a Crypton), 2022, from the series Mine Your Own Business; plantains, live cryptocurrency displays; overall dimensions vary with installation, ideal overall dimensions: 30 × 35 × 50 inches. Collection of Mima & César Reyes, photo courtesy of the artist and Embajada, San Juan, PR.

Even as social spheres become politically polarized and individuals more isolated, money continues to order a consensus reality. Yes, money can turn piss into profit, but maybe what makes it feel so transcendental and profound is what Yuval Noah Harari identifies as our mass, depersonalized cooperation with it.¹⁰ Money is based on trust, and humans believe in it more than they do in each other. In that sense, money is spiritual.

Every sincerely held belief system has gatekeepers that facilitate the spiritual integrity of its practices. Lately, gatekeeping has a pejorative valence of disguising a power differential, of relationships that aren’t transparent, which are extractive and non-consensual. The language of finance, debt, and its institutions are indeed esoteric; their argot makes it difficult to access their underlying epistemologies, and importantly, to audit them. Money connects us all, and yet many of us do not understand it because of our discomfort with discussing personal precarity, despite—and perhaps because—of the U.S.’s influential place in world affairs. In forecasting a shared future and in seeking new beliefs, we are each responsible for sorting emotionally manipulative affect from evidence-based information; for making sense of how money mobilizes both structural abuse and our collusion with it.

The artists in Money Has No Smell tell stories about how we collectively understand the value of money in a global context where the U.S. dollar dominates. Is it possible to think deeply about money metaphysics through an American capitalist framework of productivity—with a psychological inclination to prioritize everything on the basis of what it costs us? When it comes to how helpless and hopeless money makes us feel, what else will loosen the earth than accepting that some of us are unprepared to understand money in our own spheres, let alone internalize the scope of our privilege in the balance of global economic justice?

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Endnotes

[1] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015). Chapter 10: “The Scent of Money.” 241.

[2] The Oxford English Dictionary of Proverbs, 6th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 211.

[3] Charlotte Ward and David Voas, "The Emergence of Conspirituality," Journal of Contemporary Religion 26, no. 1 (January 2011): 103–121.

[4] Disability justice advocate, Beatrice Adler-Boulton: “Under capitalism, you’re only entitled to the survival you can buy.” Beatrice Adler-Boulton and Matthew Remski, “Eugenic Pandemic with Beatrice Adler-Boulton,” Conspirituality, podcast audio, April 28, 2022, [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/101-eugenic-pandemic-w-beatrice-adler-bolton/id1515827446?i=1000558965675]. 

[5] Rachelle Krygier, “Venezuela launches the ‘petro,’ its cryptocurrency,” The Washington Post, February 20, 2018, [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/20/venezuela-launches-the-petro-its-cryptocurrency/]. 

[6] Mariana Parisca, “MegaMillions (Infinite Loop),” description from artist website, [https://marianaparisca.com/MegaMillions]. 

[7] Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship experimented with neoliberal economic policy but was violently oppressive of dissent. He was charged with human rights abuses in the 1990s. Pascale Bonnefoy, “Documenting US Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile,” The New York Times, October 14, 2017, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/world/americas/chile-coup-cia-museum.html].

[8] Ignacio Gatica, interview, June 22, 2022.

[9] Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Mine Your Own Business, description from artist website, [http://gabriellatorr.es/myob/]. 

[10] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015).

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About the Writer
Meghana Karnik explores paradoxes between art and social change, spirituality and technology, lived experience and institutional process. Her research plays out across modalities as curator, arts administrator, writer, artist, and more. Karnik has an M.A. in Arts Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University; a B.A. in Political Science and Art History from Case Western Reserve University; and completed a non-degree BFA exhibition and thesis in Drawing as a cross-registered student of The Cleveland Institute of Art. [https://storefrontpsychic.com/]

About the Writing Mentor
Sara Reisman served as a mentor for this essay. Reisman is Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design. A curator, educator, and writer, she most recently served as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014-2021), Director of NYC’s Percent for Art Program (2008-2014), Associate Dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union (2008-2009), and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum (2008). Reisman has recently curated exhibitions at the National Arts Club (2022), PS122 Gallery (2022), the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery (2021), and Futura Gallery in Prague (2020). She has been awarded residencies by Art Omi, Foundation for a Civil Society, Artis, CEC Artslink, Futura, and the Montello Foundation. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Master’s Program.

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays on the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please click here or visit www.aicausa.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.

"The Contours of Self-Making in Fereidoun Ghaffari's Practice" by Sinclair Spratley

Writer: Sinclair Spratley
Essay Mentor: Sara Reisman

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition In the Shadows by Fereidoun Ghaffari, mentored by Phong Bui and on view at CUE Art Foundation from June 9 – July 9, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

Fereidoun Ghaffari
Self portrait, 2015-2017
Oil on canvas
14 x 17 inches

Gazing into one of several canvases, you are confronted with an intense stare. Your gaze is returned by a singular middle-aged man with a scruffy jawline and attentive eyes. Each figure is rendered against an abstract backdrop that bears no visible markers. Standing, sitting, or kneeling before the viewer, the figure in the work demands that whoever looks must adjust to, or accept, his stark presence. Fereidoun Ghaffari’s self-portraits challenge the vulnerable relationship between artist, subject matter, and viewer. The intimacy of Ghaffari’s self-representations prompts a consideration of why and how we look at art. In this series of self-portraits, he presents a myriad of perspectives on his own corporeality. Ghaffari depicts himself in the nude, intensifying the genre of the artist’s self-portrait by laying himself bare to both the materiality of paint on canvas and the realm of representation.

At first glance, Ghaffari’s portraits follow the seemingly formulaic conventions of the artist’s portrait: the artist-as-subject, alone and denuded in an indeterminate, sparsely lit setting. With no markers for time and place, the paintings feel sealed off, existing outside of time. Ghaffari creates an aura of enigma in his atmospheric treatment of paint, resulting in a distance between viewer and art object that has largely diminished in other forms. He tests out a spectrum of poses: full and frontal presentations that are belied by a slight contrapposto, intricate and tense kneeling poses that recall the body language for rituals of solemnity and deference, and seated poses in which the artist is at his most contemplative. Ghaffari tends towards the classical in his depictions of himself, though instead of valorizing the male body, he becomes the mature statesman through whose depiction we are able to access the psychic pressures of the body’s fallibility.

Ghaffari’s vacuum-like spaces give way to a sensual, almost haptic presence as one delves into the subtle and unobtrusive variations between the portraits. The surfaces of the canvases are built up by a tactile impasto, transmuting contours created by light into physical welts and peaks. The mottled, rugged surfaces invite the viewer into each painting materially rather than symbolically. The appearance of Ghaffari’s hand at work acts as the imprint of the continuous labor and care that goes into each painting. Roughened areas of canvas denote spaces where the artist has chosen to refashion a limb as he continues to work on and rework the paintings, never fully determining their completion. Places where Ghaffari has chosen to leave some appendages unfinished signify the limitations of self-representation, and the barriers to fully realizing the totality of one’s being.

These self-portraits, made exclusively in Ghaffari’s home studio, are captured in an enigmatic, dimmed light that emphasizes dramatic, shadowed contours on the face, and ridges of the body, made more pronounced by the angularity of some of the artist’s poses. This lighting, along with the life-sized scale of the portraits, transform the works from paintings hanging on the wall to portals that allow for glimpses into what seems like a distant and secret place. The beholder thus turns from viewer into voyeur, as the psychological aspects of the work intermingle with the material qualities of the paint. From this intimate yet complicated and disquieting vantage point, one may not know how to position oneself in front of such confrontational work. Do you spend a long time contemplating its formal qualities, admiring Ghaffari’s brush strokes and adept use of lighting? Do you glance only briefly, taking in the work only so much as to respect the sheer power of its presence? How do you take stock of the intimacy and empathy that the portraits demand? While Ghaffari’s project is an intense and rigorous study of the self, it also demands that viewers contemplate their own relationship to the work. It is through this conundrum that even a viewer with the most assured sense of self can begin to explore and reconsider how their own identities and self-image are constructed.

Fereidoun Ghaffari
Self portrait, 2019-2022
64 x 36 inches
Oil on canvas

Ghaffari’s intimate painted world is one aspect of his overall body of work. Initially trained at the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, he first began as a teacher and working artist, creating still-lifes and portraits of family members through quiet, soft, and deft applications of paint. In 2006, he expatriated from Iran to the United States. While completing a second MFA at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, his practice transformed from outward facing to the introspective and self-reflexive self-portraits that he mainly produces today. One could imagine that this shift was prompted in part by Ghaffari’s transition to a new cultural context, one that is highly individualistic and politically divisive, as well by his alienation from his homeland and a resulting need to redefine (and perhaps resist) what it means to be an Iranian artist in this unfamiliar setting.

Ghaffari’s series of self-portraits thus began in 2006 with smaller, bust-length paintings, then expanding in 2016 to a focus primarily on full-body portraits. His atelier training is clear in the progression of his work and in his attentiveness to line, contour, and tension. The formal challenges presented by the truncated self-portraits, located in the multiplicitous and deceptive nature of perception, become inexorable mysteries that Ghaffari works through again and again, subsuming a formalist approach to painting into his introspective and enigmatic exploration of himself.

The sense of timelessness in these works connects them to a longer tradition of artistic self exploration that can be located in the ever fascinating and elusive genre of artist’s self-portraits. From Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait that collapses self-representation into an icon, to the standard bearer found in the self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn, artists’ exploration of selfhood through painting has always opened up the possibility that painting operates at registers beyond the symbolic, revealing both the conceit and the specific properties of the medium. By stripping away all adornments and trappings, the use of nudity, like in Ghaffari’s work, scrambles the somber reflexiveness of the self-portrait into a vulnerable and confrontational encounter with the work’s creator. Ghaffari’s nude self-portraits operate similarly to those of Lucian Freud, usurping the artist-model formula in order to understand the emotional weight of transforming from subject to object. These self-portraits do not undo the binary nature of subject-object, but rather complicate it so much that an awareness of the artist’s own objectification is thwarted by the viewer’s sympathy with the subject. Through this, the artist’s self-portrait – and the nude in particular – carries an enormous psychic weight that cannot be avoided or diminished.

Ghaffari’s numerous self-portraits serve as a reminder of the oppositional operations of painting, a medium that acts at once as a mirror that can represent a spectrum of human internal life, and as a boundary between symbolic and physical worlds. In portraying the same subject repeatedly, Ghaffari’s paintings reveal that the project of self-making is ever developing and changing; what seems like a stable self-image one day can look like a distorted, incorrect projection the next. In this way, Ghaffari refuses to be lockstep with other painting practices that permit easy access to the work’s content or internal logic, rather challenging the viewer to sit uncomfortably with confrontation. An encounter with such rawness and vulnerability brings the self-making project of the work into fuller view; while one may not “see” themself in the work, they might begin to understand that they, too, are an iterative conglomeration of dozens of views, perspectives, and poses that might, one day, add up to a singular project.

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About the Writer
Sinclair Spratley is an art historian and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where she studies American art and visual culture of the 20th century. She received an MA in Art History from the Williams College/Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in Art History in 2020, and a BA in Art History from Fordham University. Sinclair’s writing has been featured in various publications such as Art in America and Hyperallergic. She has served as a research assistant intern for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Catalogue Raisonné project and as a curatorial intern at the Williams College Museum of Art. Since 2020, she has been an instructor and curriculum developer for the Prep for Prep/Sotheby’s Summer Art Academy, an arts enrichment program for high school students in New York City. Researching and teaching art history drives her passion to create a more inclusive and equitable art world for everyone. 

About the Writing Mentor
Sara Reisman served as a mentor for this essay. Reisman is Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design. A curator, educator, and writer, she most recently served as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014-2021), Director of NYC’s Percent for Art Program (2008-2014), Associate Dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union (2008-2009), and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum (2008). Reisman has recently curated exhibitions at the National Arts Club (2022), PS122 Gallery (2022), the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery (2021), and Futura Gallery in Prague (2020). She has been awarded residencies by Art Omi, Foundation for a Civil Society, Artis, CEC Artslink, Futura, and the Montello Foundation. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Master’s Program.

About the Art Critic Mentoring Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays on the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.

"Beloved Gestures" by Zoë Hopkins

Writer: Zoë Hopkins
Essay Mentor: Terence Trouillot

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Memory Foam by Zachary Fabri, mentored by American Artist and on view at CUE Art Foundation from April 9 – May 14, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound

[Image Description: A black and white image of the artist, a Black man, dressed in dark clothing, crouching underneath a bike rack on a sidewalk, his arms extended out in front of him.]

“I need to find a place to be 

the air is heavy I am not dead” 

—Toni Morrison, Beloved [1]

To tell American history is to tell a ghost story. And to speak of the American present is to speak of a landscape haunted by the afterlives of violence, from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow laws. Perhaps no author has better understood this than Toni Morrison, whose neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987) is animated by ghosts, in particular the malevolent spirit of a child who was killed by her then enslaved mother, Sethe, to free her from the horrors of plantation life. Aching with these painful memories, Beloved offers testimony to the reality that for Black people, living is an experience of encountering, remembering, and listening to the dead.

When I visited multi-disciplinary artist Zachary Fabri’s studio in December of 2021, Morrison’s novel lay alone on a shelf, perched in dignified solitude like a monument on its plinth. For Fabri, Beloved is not only a powerful negotiation of what it means to reckon with the memory of slavery, but it is also an aesthetic beacon of the inscrutable grammars of Black mourning and resistance. Fabri’s current exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation is in many ways a meditation on the text and the themes that ignite its pages. The show, titled Memory Foam, brings together video work, photography, and sculpture from 2017 to the present, and takes stock of what it means to mourn an event “when the event has yet to end,” as theorist Saidiya Hartman writes in her essay “The Time of Slavery” (2002). [2] Foregrounding his own body as a site at which to unravel this seemingly unanswerable question, Fabri’s works are provoked by the psychic and corporeal tangles of haunted life. They are dense with the labor of remembrance, of living among afterlives. 

Fabri’s video Mourning Stutter (2017-2022) sits as the show’s centerpiece. The piece follows the artist on a circuitous journey through the streets of Philadelphia, in which Fabri was followed by a group of live spectators and a cameraman. Shot in black and white, Fabri’s photographs infuse the city streets with the texture of collective memory. Throughout the video, Fabri activates several predetermined locations including alleyways, street corners, and ledges with a series of intensely vulnerable, but simultaneously cryptic performances. Fabri selected these sites—most of which are noticeably off the beaten path—by deferring to an intuitive sense of how his body might interact with the space, more specifically how his body might resist it. Each encounter is difficult, even contrived. We catch Fabri crouching underneath bike racks or balancing on a curved rod, arms akimbo to maintain uprightness. Movement is cut with tension and struggle as Fabri oscillates between speed and slowness, bold action and quiet gesture. As viewers, we not only bear witness to the difficulty of Fabri’s performances, but we also become ensnared in it. The activations evade the ease of interpretation, fleeing from the hard edges of determined meaning. They are articulated through a vocabulary of abstraction that refuses to grant the viewer unfettered access to the Black body and its infinite significations. Like memory, the performances refuse transparency. Like grief, they require work. Each action, each fraught encounter between body and space, thus becomes a ritual in mourning.

The object of Fabri’s mourning is too heavy, too historically massive and complex to be limited to any one place or time: Yes, he is mourning those dead from the violence of white supremacy, but he is also mourning the precarity of his own living body as it moves through an urban landscape in which Black bodies are surveilled, policed, and killed. (As of the time of writing this essay, there are at least four unresolved cases involving a police officer fatally shooting a Black man in Philadelphia.) [3] As Fabri dances, runs, and writhes in the streets of Philadelphia, he moves with ghosts, within a temporal continuum wherein the contemporary urban landscape is shot through with an old, familiar violence that recurs over and over again. As Morrison writes, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay.” [4]

Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound

[Image Description: A video still with a red filter shows the artist, a Black man, crouched down and peeking out from a bush. The man is surrounded by leaves and small branches.]

Like Morrison’s novel, in which scenes of remembrance are layered into the fabric of the present, the rhythms of Fabri’s video resound with a chaotically recursive temporality. Though the performance itself was a durational project that Fabri recorded over the course of a day, the video is only eight minutes long: condensed, spliced, and rearranged into a non-linear unfolding. This disjointed narrative structure takes sonic form as the sound accompanying the video oscillates between a non-diegetic score and the urban sounds of the Philadelphia cityscape. Throughout the video, random flashes of red further disrupt and disjoint the timeline of the video. Here Beloved becomes a direct aesthetic presence: the color red is borrowed not only from its associations with violence and passion, but also from a decisive scene in the novel in which the ghost-child announces herself in “a pool of red and undulating light.” [5]

For Fabri, a disordered, indeterminate sense of time is vital to an aesthetic representation of Black ontology. It refers to the uncontrollably and impossibly repetitive reality of Black mourning, which is so full of bends, folds, and asymmetries; it is a practice of recollecting the past and the things we have since forgotten, the act of “re-memory,” as Morrison calls it. The unremitting pace of anti-Black violence takes sculptural form in The Memory Foam of George Floyd (2022), a work that bears the imprint of George Floyd’s body. Fabri approximated the shape Floyd would leave behind on a memory foam after determining the measurements of his body using research based in court and medical documents related to Floyd’s murder and the trial of officer Derek Chauvin—archives that are heavy with their own brutality. Unlike normal memory foam, Fabri’s sculpture does not return to its original shape: the memory of Floyd’s body assumes permanent form. It is a monumental statement of presence. But Floyd’s corporeality is of course indexed in what is not there. Loss becomes materiality as negative space is both laden with the weight of absence and filled with the ache of memory.

Re-memory also animates Duppy (2017-2022), a series of photographs in which Fabri pictures himself as a sort of phantom. To create the series, Fabri revisited a number of the locations where he performed in Mourning Stutter, and captured himself in chance moments of suspension, movement, and stillness. The photographs have a unique hushed attention to minor details in the urban landscape, to the neglected registers of space that feel eerie in their quietude. In turn, Fabri’s body and its surrounding landscapes emerge as sites of quiet haunting. Fabri’s return to these urban sites is itself a gesture of re-memory, of going back to architectures that are haunting his creative imagination. Fabri haunts these spaces in return. The nooks, glassy facades, and fenced in lots pictured in Duppy are uncannily still, fixed above time, but the evanescent blur of Fabri’s figure cuts through the silence of the landscape, sometimes like a shout and sometimes like a whisper. In three of these photographs, the artist’s body is not included in the frame, leaving behind noiseless architectural facades that are haunted with the memory of his body. In turn, we register Fabri’s figure as a fleeting, spectral absence: While Fabri himself eludes the moment of capture, the surrounding architecture echoes with his fugitive presence as it lingers outside the frame.

Video stills from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound

[Image Description: A black and white image of the artist, a Black man, turning the corner from an alleyway on his right. The man is dressed in dark clothing and is looking down at his shoes. He turns onto a cracked sidewalk against a cracked brick building.]

The transience of Fabri’s presence makes Blackness legible as a site of recalcitrant fugitivity, but also of precarity. Duppy and Mourning Stutter reverberate with corporeal anxiety and vulnerability. Fabri’s body affects an intensely fraught relationship to the spaces he is meeting, assuming unlikely positions that eschew any pretense of regularity. He negotiates space in a decisively, defiantly performative manner: Balancing on the tip of a rock, randomly hiding in and reemerging from enclosed spaces, or walking at furiously agitated pace. At times he seems resolutely sure of his movements, and at others, they wither with hesitancy and trepidation. His movements are awkward and restless—a helpless stutter. These discomfiting confrontations between body and world are touched with the tension of the unknown, born of a world in which Blackness is viciously denied certainty of existence. Fabri’s exaggerated, bewildering movements reveal Blackness as a condition of moving through space with a heightened awareness of one’s own body and the certain-but-uncertain atmosphere of anti-Black violence that it is shrouded in. It is a condition in which, forced to constantly anticipate this vulnerability, one must also anticipate mourning. 

But Fabri does not position himself as trapped within grief. Though he moves within it, he also dances to escape from it. Rather than enabling the cityscape to curtail his body, he seizes our conventional ideas of how to interact with public space and obliterates them, delighting in strange and unexpected ways in which the body can free itself. While his performances call attention to the relentless regulation of Black bodies in what we call public space, in moving so insistently outside of normative expectations of the body, he also performs a kind of Black movement that is abundant, uncontainable, and unconcerned with anything beyond its own freedom. In Duppy, Fabri dons a silk garment that catches and suspends itself in the air, expanding his presence across space and time. This same errant and transient material adorns the walls at CUE in a new sculpture titled We Need Some Kind of Tomorrow (2022). The title, which appears in bold lettering on the silk itself, is borrowed directly from the penultimate page of Beloved, a moment that is ablaze with the tender reflections and aspirations of Morrison’s characters. Like Morrison, Fabri insists that Black futures are not only possible but necessary. And so I’ll end by letting the words resound once more. “We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” [6]

[1] Toni Morrison. 2004. Beloved. Vol. 1st Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage. pp. 251.

[2] Hartman, Saidiya. 2002. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): pp. 758

[3] Moselle, Aaron. “4 Black Men Killed by Philly Police and the Officers Who Haven’t Yet Faced a Jury.” WHYY. WHYY, April 22, 2021. https://whyy.org/articles/4-black-men-killed-by-philly-police-and-the-officers-who-havent-yet-faced-a-jury/.

[4] Morrison, Beloved, pp. 43.

[5] Morrison, Beloved, pp. 9.

[6] Morrison, Beloved. pp. 323.

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About the Writer
Zoë Hopkins is a writer originally from New York City. She currently lives between New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studies Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her writing and criticism have appeared in Artforum International Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.

About the Writing Mentor
Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.