Dear White People
Spring 2019
A 3 part duration performance piece. Details about each piece below:
A 3 part duration performance piece. Details about each piece below:
Bound Black Labor, 2019
6 hours of monotonous emotional labor, 720 repetitions, ink, paper
Collective Black Labor, 2019
80 friends, family, and peers solicited for their Blackness and emotional labor,
80 sticky notes, ink, lead, sharpie
Fuck Black Labor, do it yourself!*, 2019
Ink, paper, the internet
*the third volume in this series is not pictured. The third podium displayed a piece of printer paper with a url link to an amazon listing for a book titled "How to be less Stupid about Race."
Reflections:
I don't like endurance work (and I consider this endurance because the idea of Black labor being compiled for white folx to unwrap their whiteness or understand anti-Blackness is laborious). In my opinion, endurance work, specifically for a Black person, feels like an unnecessary way to attempt to make a point. When we are already being harmed by the state, why should we cause more pain and harm upon ourselves to show that harm is being done? I made this in the Spring of 2019 as a class where we were tasked with making duration or endurance pieces.
I presented all the Black labor in books because academia values knowledge when it's presented in specific forms that is acceptable and "reputable." This was intended as a critique. By putting these personal experiences into a book as part of a performance piece, would they be valued more? Because I displayed them on a pedestal in a white gallery space would they be valued more? I wanted the viewers to consider all this.
Finally, the TA and I got into an argument about this piece because the third book was linked via Amazon, and she felt I was disingenuous for suggesting folx support such a terrible corporation and that it disrupted the intent of my piece. To this, I implored those looking at the piece considered the fact that on that day we were all standing in a building on the campus of Northwestern University, each of us part of an institution that has been harmful in the same ways, has upheld systems of oppression, and has invested in private prisons and oil among many other atrocities.
We were and are complicit in many institutions that are harmful, and my piece was seeking an accessible way for white folx to counteract their whiteness without leaning on the free labor of Black folx by monetarily supporting a Black author who has already put labor into writing a book for this very purpose of educating The critique from her tuned into an argument and the professor had to stop us so we could move on with the class, I understand her point but I can't tell if she understood mine
Finally, the TA and I got into an argument about this piece because the third book was linked via Amazon, and she felt I was disingenuous for suggesting folx support such a terrible corporation and that it disrupted the intent of my piece. To this, I implored those looking at the piece considered the fact that on that day we were all standing in a building on the campus of Northwestern University, each of us part of an institution that has been harmful in the same ways, has upheld systems of oppression, and has invested in private prisons and oil among many other atrocities.
We were and are complicit in many institutions that are harmful, and my piece was seeking an accessible way for white folx to counteract their whiteness without leaning on the free labor of Black folx by monetarily supporting a Black author who has already put labor into writing a book for this very purpose of educating The critique from her tuned into an argument and the professor had to stop us so we could move on with the class, I understand her point but I can't tell if she understood mine
