Some archives exist on a fault line. Ledgers chronicling the African American experience are wrought with inconsistencies, omissions, and mythology. The precarity of documented history has led to widespread cultural amnesia that trivializes how my ancestors arrived on the North American continent. These lacunae also obliterate the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on present-day America’s inequitable social order. The term exnomination was coined by Roland Barthes to describe the phenomenon in which an oppressive class conceals itself by refusing to be named. In doing so, the oppressed class is unable to implicate the actors culpable for their subordination. Over time, this makes the origin of their subjugation nearly impossible to date, locate, or reckon with. 

When I began to investigate the many names people ascribe to the source of their engineered misfortune through a series of exhaustive interviews, superstition was a motif. Insurmountable debt, home foreclosure, and medical malpractice were among the statistical realities Americans misattributed to “bad luck.” When I turned my focus to Black Americans in particular, I found that many had mistaken the widespread effects of state sponsored oppression for the biblical concept of “generational curses” in which descendants reap the punishment for their ancestors’ moral failings. 

Sleep Under Ladders is a multimedia exhibition concerned and intrigued with the fungibility, i.e interchangeability, of Black historical images and their contemporary recontextualization. The work sets out to animate “luck” as a psychosocial trap and mediate the circulation of prolific Black images.

  The sculpture Underbelly contains hazardous hanging objects (knives, wires, jagged metal) suspended above a pile of prescription pill bottles, each containing bullets. Underbelly seeks to illustrate the predatory design of the systems presiding over us and the danger we unsuspectingly place ourselves in to obtain ephemeral comfort. 

The collage series Diasporic Anachronisms  is a historical corrective that intervenes upon widely circulated images of Black people whose bodies have been desecrated by racial violence. By clothing and censoring the most vulnerable regions of the source photographs (disfigured corpses, lacerations, forced nudity, etc.) I attempt to retire the images’ subjects from the posthumous political labor their photographs have [dis]served. The history of lynching imagery is a complicated one; early African Americans strategically deployed horrific images of their deceased to advance the abolitionist movement and later, the civil rights movement. The collage Gordon, Retired from Diasporic Anachronisms redresses the notorious photograph of Gordon, an escaped slave shown sitting with his lacerated back to the camera. Purportedly, the photographer’s subject consented to having his picture taken as a testament to slavery’s brutality. Now, over two centuries since the photo’s publication, we have drawn ample knowledge of chattel slavery’s malignancy from the robust archive of historic, ethnographic, and anecdotal materials citing human rights abuses in the United States. Even so, descendants of the enslaved remain statistically disadvantaged. How then does the continued dissemination of such graphic images advance contemporary demands for justice? The collage Delia, Dignified interrogates similar questions to its counterpart, Gordon, Retired. By superimposing clothing from Karl Van Vechten’s 1953 portrait of Joyce Bryant onto an image from the Agassiz daguerreotypes depicting a naked enslaved woman, Delia, Dignified declares robing as a gesture of ancestral veneration. Themes of collective memory and archive fungibility are explored further in the collages Error 312 and Psalms 23 ½, which employ glitching to censor images of lynching victims Emmet Till and George Floyd, respectively.    

Advancement of film and video technologies in the 21st century led the archive of modern lynchings to metastasize. Police body-camera footage and civilian cell phone footage depicting police murders have become increasingly common online. I call this canon of Black death aesthetics “arresting images.” Though many of these arresting images were preserved as evidentiary visuals of historical and contemporary lynchings, they have come to form an emergent sub-genre of horror entertainment, especially for those who derive voyeuristic pleasure from such violence. The ubiquitous recirculation of arresting images in gallery and museum space (including in the work of prolific Black contemporary artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa, Kara Walker, etc.) points to a broader culture of curatorial violence that is rarely contested in popular discourse. 

  I’ve Missed You For Longer Than I’ve Known You  or Another Name for Grief  takes an additive stance toward the archive by identifying roadside memorials and street lamps as culturally relevant symbols within Black American ghettos. Protruding from the sculpture’s floral arrangement are pages from The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. The Negro Family—more widely known as the Moynihan Report—was a policy document published in 1965 under the Johnson Administration positing that “ghetto culture” and single motherhood were the primary drivers of African Americans’ economic disadvantage. Laid beneath the hand welded sculpture are various objects associated with death and luck in African American culture such as lottery tickets, white lighters, and 40 oz bottles of malt liquor. 

Research into legacies of America’s racial violence will quickly prove that Black Americans’ plight is neither supernatural, nor self-imposed but rather systemically engineered. Because our unadulterated history is virtually impossible to access (and increasingly corrupted by the tide of technology), Black Americans remain prone to the psychology that they are inexplicably and inevitably helpless. Meanwhile, the matrix of domination sustaining racial inequality remains obscured and stealthily lethal. 

If walking under a ladder is bad luck, then unknowingly existing in a system designed for your demise is to be asleep under one.

Sleep Under Ladders was shown at The Carpenter Center Gallery in Cambridge, MA from May 1st, 2022 through June 10th, 2022 as part of Harvard’s Art, Film and Visual Studies’ Senior Thesis Exhibition. Selected works from the exhibition are displayed on this site.