Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope
2020
This book examines Janet's continuation of her quest for control as heard in her sixth album, The Velvet Rope. Engaging with the album, the promotion, the tour, and its accompanying music videos, this study unpacks how Janet uses Black cultural production as an emancipatory act of self-creation that allows her to reconcile with and, potentially, heal from trauma, pain, and feelings of alienation. The Velvet Rope's arc moves audiences to imagine the possibility of what emancipation from oppression--from sexual, to internal, to societal--could look like for the singer and for others. The sexually charged content and themes of abuse, including self-harm and domestic violence, were dismissed as “selling points” for Janet at the time of its release. The album stands out as a revelatory expression of emotional vulnerability by the singer, one that many other artists have followed in the 20-plus years since its release.
Rebellious Inventions: Abstraction in the Black Diaspora
2020
This book by Dr. Ayanna Dozier accompanies the exhibition Abstraction in the Black Diaspora co-curated by Dozier and Tariku Shiferaw at FALSE FLAG, on view from October 24 until December 20, 2020.
The essay by Dr. Dozier centers artistic praxis to emphasize technique and embodiment as equally important aspects of art-making. This focus on praxis frames Black abstraction as an aesthetics of doing, rather than an aesthetics of representational meaning, restoring affirmative ontological, creative thought and action to abstraction’s relationship with Blackness in an era defined by anti-Black racism.
The book features illustrations of works by Adebunmi Gbadebo, Alteronce Gumby, Ashanté Kindle, and Tariku Shiferaw.
Screen Slate Articles
2020-present
Landing page for articles and reviews on film published on Screen Slate
Most recent piece is on The Short Films of Andrea Arnold
Risk and the Senses
screengrab from Chasing the Moon (1991) directed by Dawn Suggs
Risks and the Senses: Black Women in Experimental Shorts is a program of experimental shorts by Black women that draw out film and video’s ability to generate affect, the labor our body does to make sense of itself through the senses and emotions. This shift toward the senses parallels the emotive tensions of the films and thus asks audiences to consider how we can shift our way of knowing to one of feeling, to bear witness to more ambiguous forms of embodiment centering Black women …
Pathe-ways in Time, Bodies, and Aesthetics: Onyeka Igwe's Specialised Technique
2020
NON-FICTION 02 - NETWORK, piece is available to read in the second issue of Non-Fiction, available for purchase via the link and can be read online in issue 2 of Field Notes
Begone With the Wind: How Hollywood Rewrites Slavery
2020
This article published in Fantasy
Issue #87 Bitch Magazine, Summer"Since their creation, narrative films have been altering the imaginary landscape of our past, our current lives, the future, and what we even imagine as possible. Consciously or not, cinema largely shapes our perception of historical events, so even our understanding of slavery is influenced directly by a filmmaker’s fantasy …"
Sound Garden
2020
Feature for Artforum, February 3rd: Ayanna Dozier on Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (2019)
"THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT IS A NOISY FILM, full of music, yelling, screaming, crying, scratching, wailing, and laughter. But the most deafening moments unfold in silence, when viewers are left to assess what is missing, what cannot be represented …"
Betye Saar Conjures a New Mythology at MoMA
2019
Review for The Art Newspaper, December 18th: The artist’s prints and assemblage works use symbolism to ascribe meaning to Black women’s place in the world
"A Black face pressed against the window peers out; her gaze through glued-on recycled eyes confronts and troubles us. Above the silhouette of her head with tight curls is a series of vignettes laid out behind the window frame: a lion eating the sun, a brown head and brain riddled with symbols in colour-coded blocking, a daguerreotype, and in the center a pair of skeletons, one white and one black. Betye Saar uses such symbolism in her work, Black Girl’s Window (1969)…"
#Crucial21DbW: Mahogany Too Directed By Akosua Adoma Owusu
2019
Mahogany Too (2018) by Akosua Adoma Owusu is an experimental “sequel” to the 1975 Berry Gordy film, Mahogany.
The Music Video’s Counter-Poetics of Rhythm: Black Cultural Production in Lemonade
2019
Chapter 20 in The Routledge Companion to Global Television edited by Shawn Shimpach
Heartbreak/Who Gets to Be Remembered: Black Women in and Around the Archives
2019
Feature examining heartbreak as a methodological practice in archives on Black women
Wayward Travels: Racial Uplift, Black Women, and the Pursuit of Love and Travel in Torchy in Heartbeats by Jackie Ormes
Fucking Whiteness: Orientations, Desire, and Race in Camille Billops's Docu-Fantasy The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks
Structures de sentiment: La mélancolie, le mouvement, et l'espace publique
2017
Feature on colonial melancholy as expressed in social spaces like the movie theater (French)
Un article sur la mélancolie coloniale et l’affect dans le théâtre dans Montréal
Black Women and the Edit of Shame
2017
Analysis of Alile Sharon Larkin's experimental short film The Kitchen (1975) for cléo journal, available for purchase in The cléo Reader (2019)
No happy Returns, Aesthetics, Labor, and Affect in Julie Dash's Experimental Short Film Four Women (1975)
2017
Screengrab from Julie Dash's Four Women (1975)
Peer-reviewed academic article for Feminist Media Studies JournalAffect and the Fluidity of the Black Gendered Body in Water Ritual #1 and Cycles
2015
Essay on Barbara McCullough's Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) and Zeinabu irene Davis's Cycles (1989) featured in the fifth issue of Liquid Blackness: Passing Through Film
There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed
2015
Performa review for Juliana Huxtable's There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed performance at Performa 15
