To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and performers to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2019.
Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Her creative and scholarly practice are interested interdisciplinary strategies and engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. Gardner participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. She is currently working on a project on Blackness and the Mississippi River as well as a photographic/writing project with her mother that addresses questions of biopolitics, Black memory and indigeneity by looking at the houses that the women in her family lived in the post-bellum South.
Given the last three years of US American politics, it is hard to see 2019 as particularly unique or any more or less significant, or difficult than 2018 or 2017, but this year was marked by some very particular losses and wins that truly made it one that I am still struggling to metabolize.
Reparations and Death catalyzed so many of the memorable of the events, ideas, and people that have marked my year.
I.
THE DEATH OF TONI MORRISON
“You are what fashion tries to be—original endlessly refreshing. Say what they like on Channel X, you are the news of the day. What doesn’t love you has trivialized itself and must answer for that. Anybody who does not know your history doesn’t know their own and must answer for that too.”
—Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margins
I realized some years ago that the Black elders who shape so much of my understanding of the world and myself were not immortal. Year by year, I would age, and they would pass on. The political life of the United States is, for me, tied to the work of artists, writers, and musicians who narrate our world, our present, our pasts, and our futures. The death of Toni Morrison, like the death of Aretha Franklin, was inevitable, but it was a heart shock none the less. So much of the writing that she created or ushered into being through her work at Random House continues to incubate our imaginations. Her death was coupled with so many other losses, like Jessye Norman, John Conyers, Ernest Gaines, John Singleton, Dihann Carroll, and Elijah Cummings that gave us moments to pause. In these moments, these loses, I saw myself reclaiming love and memory as a part of my political humanity.
2.
REPAIR AND REPARATION
“As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
What does it mean to repair? I find myself coming again and again to this question. The legacy of chattel slavery in the United States continues to Black life. To be clear this is not new, from Marcus Garvey to the Nation of Islam to the late John Conyers, reparations has not ceased to be present in Black political consciousness since the end of slavery in the US. But I ask now, thinking about the convergence of economic and the ecologic crises and who bears the burden of these crises, what does it mean to repair?
3.
BLACKNESS, GEOLOGIC TIME, AND CLIMATE
“The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they ahve been in existence.”
—Kathryn Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
I ask again what does it mean to repair? I read Kathryn Yussof’s book on a train, moving through upstate New York. I thought about this landscape, the subject of many thousand paintings of idyllic paintings, and all of the forms of extraction that circulate(d) through this place. I thought about the human technology that was abused to created this place and the others like it. A friend pushed me to think about reparations at every scale across different materials and matter. What would it mean to repair the landscape and all of the relationships that have been broken to produce it?
4.
SUPERHEROES, SUPRAHUMANS:
“THE NUN WITH THE MOTHERF%&$NG GUN”
We got to witness the rewriting of a comic classic on HBO. I am not a comics woman, but I was completely pulled into this series. The entire series was given a different history, a different birth in a way that has some folks elated while others are scandalized. To be sure, I think the series is bringing up a lot of important and provocative questions about policing and white supremacy in the US, but I recently had the privilege to visit Tulsa, Oklahoma. I thought about borrowing such an epic event from a community of folks who have yet to experience the kind of economic restoration that is speculated in the show. What does this show and its creators offer back to the generations of people from whom it adopted its history? I also thought it was about time somebody wrote the story that has been very present in our national politics, that Black women will save the world.
5.
ART, PLACE, ARCHIVE
Him: “Its Time”
Her: “Where Are We Going”
“Him: ‘Wherever We Want'”
—Khalil Joseph, “Belhaven Meridien“
The archive. I didn’t get to see this work in person but have been following Khalil Joseph’s practice for about a decade. The films Joseph made as music videos for musicians like Shabazz Palaces and Flying Lotus elongated out the poetry in their words. I am very interested in the circulation of his work, that he is now bringing his films into contemporary art spaces like the Tate and the Venice Biennale. I am curious to see how or if this shift in platform informs his future work.
6.
SAIDIYA HARTMAN’S
WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS
“By attending to these lives, a very unexpected story of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalism, an aesthetical and riotous history of colored girls and their experiments with freedom—a revolution before Gatsby.”
—Saidiya Hartman Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
7.
“My hope is that the actions taken will result in deeper conversation and more direct action on the part of art institutions to address their complicated relationship with industries of oppression.”
—Brendan Fernandes
8.
THE BLACK ATLANTIC REVISITED
“Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.”
9.
WHAT REMAINS WITH WILL RAWLS
“Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me.”
—Claudia Rankine, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time]”
10.
JENNIFER TAMAYO: I AM UNDAUGHTERED
JENNIFER TAMAYO: LAQUEERADORA
I saw Dora and she was Afro-Latino and an ancestor. JT (aka Jennifer Tamayo) changed my life. ‘Nuf said.
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