Every three months, Mn Artists—the Walker’s platform for local artists—welcomes a new guest editor to the helm of its arts writing program. Each guest editor defines the vision and topics of investigation for the platform, stemming from their own multidisciplinary creative practices. This spring, Junauda Petrus and Erin Sharkey, who make up the artistic partnership of Free Black Dirt, commissioned a suite of pieces from Minnesota-based writers, highlighted below. Concluding their tenure, free Black Dirt shared their approach to commissioning writing for Mn Artists:
Free Black Dirt’s curatorial vision focused on multidimensional, engaged, and interactive writings within themes of Black joy, Afrofuturism, and transformation. The writers we selected are people who are saturated in whimsical imaginings and obsessed with revolutionary magic. They look at craft and artistic process as ritual and subject matter.
As writers and activists, we see the importance of Afrofuturism in social justice struggles, specifically (but not limited to) prison abolition and the policing of Blackness. As writers we are investigating themes of healing, queerness, wildness, and joy within Blackness, and how these become compasses when we are confronted with experiences of Black destruction and demise. What does a black liberation future look like? How can we imagine blackness flourishing through expression and celebration? Telling our stories, being in our bodies, looking to the stars—what are the bounds of our possibility?
Writings Commissioned by Free Black Dirt for Mn Artists
Imagination Blueprint, Liberation Technologies:
A Conversation with Free Black Dirt
Mn Artists welcomes Free Black Dirt as the guest editors of our editorial platform.
Senah Yeboah-Sampong delivers a fresh reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through a contemporary Afrofuturist lens, considering how bodies come to be read as monsters out of fragility and fear.
When the Problematic Fuels Your Creative Drive
Writer S.D. Chrismon considers how to relate to problematic media representations of Black characters—from Black Mirror to Gone with the Wind—and asks how to reenvision pop culture lineages in order to craft new Afrofuturist narratives.
Maya Beck charts a lineage of black trailblazers, from John Coltrane to Kid Cudi to her own father, examining the particular loneliness that arises when cultural innovators reach the outer limits of expectation, convention, and community knowledge.
What Does a Black Liberation Future Look Like?
To catalyze their editorial work with Mn Artists, Free Black Dirt hosted a dinner and curated conversation on the topics of Afrofuturism, healing, prison abolition and transformation. A video by Adja Gildersleve captures the highlights.
Some of the most important dialogues we engage in as artists are the ones we have with those we love. In this piece, developed through Penumbra Theatre’s My America project, Wendy Thompson Taiwo addresses her daughter in a tender dialogue on the challenge of engaging with whiteness as someone with black identity in America.
Poet and essayist Michael Kleber-Diggs offers an episodic meditation on black joy, conjuring memories of family, food, drink, the barbershop, the city, the museum, and the future.
Writer and ethnographer Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara responds to the event Mn Artists Presents: Jovan C. Speller, Choosing Home: A Right, A Privilege or an Act of Trespass, which took place at the Walker Art Center in May 2018.
Spoken word artist Fatima Camara ruminates on her relationship to her mother, her mother’s roots in Gambia, and how reimagining the conversation with her mother also shifted her relationship to creative practice.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)