Family Meaning Making
Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination by ISBN: 9781137584984Publication Date: 2016An entry into thinking about the construction and meaning-making of black queer families. The “how” and the “what” and even how the “who” can be a deliberate commitment.
Journal: Black Women, Gender, and FamiliesA series of volumes spanning from 2009 to 2012 from a journal that focuses on publishing critical scholarship that employ analytical frameworks central to Black and Women & Gender Studies.
Black Interiority
- Rowe, K. D. (2019). “Nothing else mattered after that wig came off”: Black women, unstyled hair, and scenes of interiority. The Journal of American Culture, 42(1), 21-36This article may be useful for thinking about visual culture’s exploration of the public-private and Black womanhood.
- Cervenak, S. J. (2006). Against traffic: De/formations of race and freedom in the art of adrian piper. Discourse, 28(2), 114-129,233.Cervenak examines here performance, blackness, and specifically, Adrian Piper as a creative that explores larger ideas of Black interiorities.
- Smith, S. S. (2018). Surface play: Rewriting black interiorities through camouflage and abstraction in mickalene thomas's oeuvre. Women & Performance, 28(1), 46-64.A comparatively more dense text, Smith similarly hones on a specific creative to think about Black interiority, but also while thinking about the Black queer gaze.
On Creative Genealogies of Imagination & Making
- Hood, Yolanda. “The Culture of Resistance: African American Art Quilts and Self-Defining.” Uncoverings 22 (October 2001): 141–69.Hood’s article offers quilting as another site and mode to consider as a channel for self-definition by analyzing with a Black Feminist theoretical framework interviews with four African American women quilters from the Midwest.
- Bridget R. Cooks (2014) The Gee's Bend Effect, TEXTILE, 12:3, 346-363, DOI: 10.2752/175183514X14156359537060This article engages ideas such as cultures of resistance, space-making, and meaning-making more generally.
Embodied Avatars: genealogies of black feminist art and performance by ISBN: 9781479802111Publication Date: 2015-11-04This may be useful for a historical contextualization of Black Feminist art and performance and its innovative relationship to ideas like embodiment. Other questions also arise in relation: What is the body but a home? What of art if not experience making? What of performance as architectural building? How is the virtual experienced as a physical reality?
Creating Their Own Image: the history of African-American women artists by ISBN: 019516721XPublication Date: 2004A comprehensive history of art made by African-American women in the “U.S.” that challenges quintessential anti-black racist narratives reasserting African-American women artists as active creators of the expression of their own lives.
The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black lesbian literature and irresolution by ISBN: 9780814212226Publication Date: 2013A book that brings to the forefront how Black lesbian texts have explored memory, and lost spaces in historical memories.
Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag: twenty-first century acts of self-definition by ISBN: 9780816539536Publication Date: 2019A collection of essays that touches on everything from self-definition and spirituality, to multigenerational transnational identity formation.
June Jordan's Poetry for the People by ISBN: 0415911680Publication Date: 1995As important as it is to read about histories and genealogies, it is as important, if not more so, to put the knowledge that’s been treasured and refined and obscured and refocused into actual practice. Homemade, with Love: More Living Room does more than just talk about Black girl design and livelihood; it creates and furthers and is Black girl homemade love.
In a similar vein, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People offers another way to be and express that living.
All About Love: New Visions by ISBN: 0688168442Publication Date: 2000At the heart of the exhibition is love. That much is self-evident. What can that mean and encompass and our choices in all that creation-- bell hooks helps us to sit with it all.
The Book of Delights by ISBN: 9781616207922Publication Date: 2019In close connection to the homemade space is the everyday routine and the everyday reaching toward our centers of attention. What does that look like when joy is centered? When we listen deeply to our sense of delight and practice care toward the everyday worlds that we inhabit? What are the architectures of feeling that we build our daily lives inside?
Black Feminism
Hear Our Truths: the Creative Potential of Black Girlhood by ISBN: 1306220319Publication Date: 2013-01-01A book on SOLHOT itself, their work, and as the title succinctly puts it: the creative potential of Black Girlhood.
Black Feminist Thought by ISBN: 0415924847Publication Date: 1999A primer for locating Black feminist thought in our socio-economic political transnational context and the everyday.
Sister Outsider by ISBN: 0895941414Publication Date: 1984A seminal text for thinking about race, class, gender and the politics and hope of it all.
Art on My Mind by ISBN: 9781565842632Publication Date: 1995An immediately relevant text by another hugely influential thinker, hooks expounds on visual politics specifically as it relates to Black identity and power. Interviews with Carrie Mae Weems and Margo Humphrey whose work will be exhibited might be of further interest.
- On Black/Brown Girlhood, Black Feminism, and the Arts: A Conversation with Aimee Meredith Cox and Ruth Nicole Brown: Part IIA detailed transcript of a conversation between Dr. Ruth Nicole of SOLHOT and Dr. Aimee Cox of the project BlackLight on the impact of their collective work that is, essentially, Black Feminism in practice.
- Huey Copeland, “Making Black Feminist Art Histories.” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 27–29. doi:10.1086/694053.Specifically discussing Renée Ater’s article “Making History” and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s sculpture “Ethiopia,” Copeland writes about Black feminism, the Harlem Renaissance, and cultural nationalism.
- Combahee River Collective StatementThe Combahee River Collective’s statement had a huge impact on Black feminist thought as a whole, and also, directly informs the work of SOLHOT as a collective practice.
- Malaklou, M.S., & Willoughby-Herard, T. (2018). Notes from the Kitchen, the Crossroads, and Everywhere Else, too: Ruptures of Thought, Word, and Deed from the "Arbiters of Blackness Itself". Theory & Event 21(1), 2-67.A resource for thinking about the “arbiters of blackness” and the implications of the intimate relationship between them and how Black women’s bodies have been codified.
- Green, K.M., Taylor, J.N., Williams, P.I., & Roberts, C. (2018). #BlackHealingMatters in the Time of #BlackLivesMatter. Biography 41(4), 909-941. doi:10.1353/bio.2018.0085.This article reframes the conversation to be about Black healing and love as a Black politic.
Black Imagination
- Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures by Natasha Marin.
A collection of works by a diverse range of Black Voices on Black Futures as whole and endlessly possible gathered into a book alongside a Teaching Companion.
We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions by ISBN: 9783837646016Publication Date: 2019Another book of various voices on Black visions of our possible futures and how we might come to get there.
The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative by ISBN: 9781433112416Publication Date: 2011A critical anthology of essays on science fiction in multimedia forms and Afro-futurism.
