2021 USA Fellowship
2021 USA Fellowship
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/d7b9d30a-d681-46f9-8b0a-3b8b2ed8476b/ThembyIshmaelHouston-Jones.png?crop=3415%2C1921%2C0%2C18&width=1000)
Video work samples by Ishmael Houston-Jones: THEM (revival), 2010; 13 Love Songs: dot dot dot, 2014; Unsafe / Unsuited, 1995. 20 minutes.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5ef5a7b8-ccad-4cb0-a623-8038276f0743/AllTogetherNowbyMazzSwift.png?crop=3488%2C1962%2C18%2C0&width=1000)
All Together Now by Mazz Swift. Improvisation for electronics, processed voice, and processed 5-string violin, 2020.
![A woman in sunglasses stands in tall grass, her face partially turned to the camera. Out-of-focus blades of grass in the foreground partially obscure another person to her left.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5f04077c-c7fb-4fe5-839b-56ae065a7e19/maing-stephen-work-sample1.jpg?crop=1920%2C1080%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Crime + Punishment by Stephen Maing, 2018.
![An assemblage of found objects in a triangular composition with a spindly stool at its base. Objects include a number of straight and curved rods, ropes, bags, and a black boot.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/dbac9a26-a363-4e03-b6aa-4fc73321dea0/lind-ramos-daniel-work-sample2-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C1828%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Vencedor #2 (1797) by Daniel Lind-Ramos, 2020. Wood, ropes, steel, textiles, found objects, objects created by the artist, 70 × 70 × 33 inches.
Photo by Raquel Pérez Puig.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/fba9dd0a-a409-4f7d-908d-d900017a7733/AmelioratebyJanpiSTar.png?crop=3431%2C1930%2C0%2C6&width=1000)
Ameliorate by JanpiSTar, 2019. Queering Dance Festival. 8 minutes. Waterfront Theater, Berkeley.
Video by Andy Mogg.
Excerpt
People don’t often know their blind spots until they do a simple audit of their bookshelf. When I go to literary parties at editors’ homes, I experience the shelves upon shelves of white writers like a rebuke. Most of what has survived to us thus far is literature written by white male writers. The last three decades especially have seen a struggle to revive the books we’ve lost—books by women, people of color, and queer writers—and to then try and write out of that recuperation a new tradition. But most of us writing now were not educated by that expanded canon.
I teach roughly seven writing workshops a year, and have since 1996. For the 24 years I’ve been teaching creative writing, the stories I see have predominantly been about white people, or characters that mysteriously don’t have any declared ethnicity or race at all. This is true no matter the number of students of color in the class, and no matter the amount of writing I assign by writers of color, and even, to my surprise, no matter the declared radical politics of the students. In general, the beginner fiction that writers produce is what they think a story looks like. Those stories are often not really stories—they are ways of performing their relationship to power. They are stories that let them feel connected to the dominant culture. There was one day last year when two queer Korean-American students both submitted stories about queer Korean-American characters, and it felt like the dawn of a new era.
This brings me to the flip side of this question of how to write about the other, a question for the rest of us who aren’t white men: How do we write our own literature? I am thinking of when I interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin and she told me she had to teach herself to write as a woman. Or my own first stories, when I did much the same as these students. In the 1980s, I had to learn how to write myself and people like me onto the page. My own life on the page felt impossible to explain in any detail when I was a student writer. I had to ask myself why I was embarrassed to mention that I was Asian-American, much less to center it in a story. Strangely, it took finding writers like Mavis Gallant and Gregor Von Rezzori, whose works described characters who had lived among several cultures, as they were writing about Europeans. Reading about someone who was of Austrian and French heritage may not feel like a mix of cultures, but I unexpectedly found permission there—white writers teaching me how to write mixed-race Asian-American characters like me.
“How to Unlearn Everything” by Alexander Chee. Originally published in New York Magazine, 2019.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/aebbf4e5-a60f-4a72-b30f-d50e41491702/Virago-ManDembyCynthiaOliver.png?crop=3472%2C1953%2C0%2C4&width=1000)
Sample from Virago-Man Dem by Cynthia Oliver, 2017. Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.
![A mink fur coat is draped over a body of quilt. The red, blue and patterned quilt hangs within the confines of the coat and extends below the bottom of the coat’s length.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/591e89dc-5325-4526-92a5-f84fa534fc6f/kincaid-basil-work-sample2.jpg?crop=804%2C1200%2C0%2C0&width=804)
Self Portrait: At First You Wanted to Be Cool, Now You Want to Be Free by Basil Kincaid, 2019–2020. Mink fur, clothes from the artist, clothes from the artist's brother and father, preserved charred wood from local house fire, found objects on Wood Panel, 70 × 36 × 11 inches.
Photo courtesy Basil Kincaid Studio.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/09bdae55-499f-4bed-8651-b5dcf30fb184/PhysicalTacticsforDigitalColonialismbyMorehshinAllahyari.png?crop=3296%2C1854%2C0%2C44&width=1000)
Documentation of performance Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism by Morehshin Allahyari, 2019. The New Museum, New York.
my poems are fed up & getting violent.
i whisper to them tender tender bridge bridge but they say bitch ain’t no time, make me a weapon!
i hold a poem to a judge’s neck until he’s not a judge anymore.
i tuck a poem next to my dick, sneak it on the plane.
a poem goes off in the capitol, i raise a glass in unison.
i mail a poem to 3/4ths of the senate, they choke off the scent.
my mentor said once a poem can be whatever you want it to be.
so i bury the poem in the river & the body in the fire.
i poem a nazi i went to college with in the jaw until his face hangs a bone tambourine.
i poem ten police a day.
i poem the mayor with my bare hands.
i poem the hands off the men who did what they know they did.
i poem a racist woman into a whistle & feel only a little bad.
i poem the president on live TV, his head raised above my head, i say Baldwin said.
i call my loves & ask for their lists.
i poem them all. i poem them all with a grin, bitch.
poemed in the chair, handless, volts ready to run me, when they ask me what i regret
i poem multitudes multitudes multitudes.
poems by Danez Smith, 2019.
![A Black woman with an afro, green lipstick, geometric face paint, and sleek black outfit crouches in a dance-like pose in a field of towering cotton plants.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5d9437bf-076a-456d-b0bb-6d0d7cb91983/dinkins-stephanie-work-sample1.png?crop=3600%2C2434%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Secret Garden by Stephanie Dinkins. Immersive web experience and installation with audio.
![Mother Cyborg, a Latin woman with cyclops glasses and neon armbands on is surrounded by glowing streams of colorful light that she seems to be manipulating.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/f65a4639-d794-412f-be8c-fe716e1029a9/mother-cyborg-work-sample1-scaled.jpeg?crop=3854%2C3307%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Portrait of Mother Cyborg.
Photo by Ara Howrani.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/48629b04-1b2c-4252-9887-cb8e51a30cc3/ArtManifestobyCarmelitaTropicana.png?crop=3470%2C1952%2C15%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation excerpt of Performance Art Manifesto by Carmelita Tropicana, 2014.
![A green figure rendered in variegated stripes reclines on the back of a white horse mid-gallop against a red sky. The ground is composed of alternating red and green interpenetrating blocks of color.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/903d0b8e-329d-4bd5-be85-f979d660e6c8/brackens-diedrick-work-sample3-scaled.jpg?crop=2625%2C2837%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
when no softness came by Diedrick Brackens, 2019. Woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 96 × 96 inches.
Image courtesy of Various Small Fires, Los Angeles and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/d985880e-865f-4b2a-9ca3-7bf19e2715ec/TalkaboutTheAgeofPhillisbyHonoreeFanonneJeffers.png?crop=3416%2C1922%2C15%2C0&width=1000)
Video documentation of virtual program, Phillis Wheatley Peters and African Lineage and Kinship in The Age of Phillis with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, 2020.
![A Black African woman poses regally in printed draped attire, gazing forward, and seated with a white baby in her lap. In the backgound, other pregnant women and armed United Nations soldiers stand among cylinder huts with peaked thatched roofs. The image is cradled by an arch of large reddish-yellow flowers.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/0184b365-c9d0-4a32-bc5a-743d7ace7446/mazloomi-carolyn-work-sample2.jpg?crop=1200%2C978%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
The Peacekeeper’s Gift by Carolyn Mazloomi, 2019. Cotton, cotton batting, acrylic paint, paint sticks, and ink printed, stenciled, hand painted, and machine quilted, 63 × 73 inches.
Photo by Jay Yocis.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/72fae66f-ba46-4d33-9f14-85208638e012/SandraDelgadoLaHavanaMadridopening,2017..png?crop=2620%2C1474%2C109%2C0&width=1000)
Opening of La Havana Madrid by Sandra Delgado, 2017. Teatro Vista/Goodman Theatre, Chicago.
![In an outdoor crowd dressed in coats and hats stands a large orange cut-out of a person shouting into a megaphone. News cameras also appear in the crowd, and someone's sign reads BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/bed07019-03a9-4813-9745-4e963456b17b/jeyifous-olalekan-work-sample2-scaled.jpg?crop=4500%2C3000%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Protest by Olalekan Jeyifous, 2017. Water-jet cut ¾-inch aluminum, 10 × 7 × 6 inches.
Photo by Bob Perkoski.
![View of an installation in gallery with bed, nightstands, carpet, lights, all in white. On the left is a white pedestal with small purple sculptures set on top of it.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/3ce93f50-b858-4152-bf43-5038b4e40177/mccarthy-lauren-lee-work-sample1.jpg?crop=1924%2C1320%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Exhibition view of LAUREN by Lauren Lee McCarthy, 2017–2020. Performance, software, installation, film.
Photo by Franz Wamhof.
![Square booklets and a transparent CD on display against a white background. The booklets feature a range of pink, yellow, and teal imagery.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/58258650-bbe7-4e9c-b5d6-52ec0d5039ef/gaspar-maria-work-sample3-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C1707%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
FEEDBACK by Maria Gaspar, 2019. Screen-printed poster booklets with 7-inch vinyl record inside hard case, art and printing by Sonnenzimmer, 7 × 7 × ¾ inches.
Photo by Clare Britt.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/b7300bd1-28d1-4270-a158-7a55c291b86c/ToroAyotzinapabyQuetzal,MarthaGonzalez.png?crop=3256%2C1832%2C133%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation of “El Toro De Ayotzinapa,” by Quetzal, 2016. Performance, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Washington, DC.
Video by David Barnes, Charlie Weber, Helen Lehrer, W.N. McNair, Gary Francis, Andrea Curran, and Caleb Hamilton.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/6d88897f-438f-4e35-bae4-80a855e74466/WadadaLeoSmithperformswithhisGoldenQuartet,2016.DiscoverJazzseries,VermontPBS.png?crop=3456%2C1944%2C23%2C0&width=1000)
Wadada Leo Smith performs with his Golden Quartet, 2016. “Discover Jazz” series, Vermont PBS.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/b3f73c05-0dd9-4c0e-a8f6-664ca56366b2/LibertybyFarenHumes.png?crop=3408%2C1917%2C0%2C82&width=1000)
Liberty by Faren Humes, 2019. Video. 18:30 minutes.
![<em>building: a simulacrum of power</em> by rafa esparza, 2014. Bowtie Project, Clockshop, Los Angeles.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/c15b3fd7-7694-45cb-bf3a-12de00776a85/esparza-rafa2.jpg?crop=2000%2C1335%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
building: a simulacrum of power by rafa esparza, 2014. Bowtie Project, Clockshop, Los Angeles.
Photo by Dylan Schwartz; courtesy Commonwealth and Council.
![In a room extending across a diptych, a pensive Black woman sits at a table surrounded by surfaces patterened with portratist of Black people. The woman has short hair and wears a yellow dress and heels.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/db1d3d2f-7a38-4203-8a08-41c729a36e3a/akunyili-crosby-njideka-work-sample3.jpg?crop=1980%2C839%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Portals by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, 2016. Acrylic, transfers, colored pencil, collage and commemorative fabric on paper, 84 × 105 inches.
Photo by Bill Orcutt; courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/d3d8e8d3-bb1c-451c-a411-03c1c03d2d0a/WeLive-FutureAncestralTechnologiesEntryLogbyCannupaHanskaLuger..png?crop=3306%2C1860%2C80%2C0&width=1000)
Future Ancestral Technologies-Entry Log: We Live by Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2019. Single-channel video, regalia, poetry, and sound composition. 02:57 minutes.
Video by Dylan McLaughlin.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/7b2a5a12-b5e2-4bcd-89f1-81922bb6b62c/AKiddJordanBiopic.png?crop=3431%2C1930%2C0%2C5&width=1000)
Trailer of "Bringing on the Hallelujah: A Kidd Jordan Biopic", 2020.
Edited and filmed by Michael Lucio Sternbach, with additional archival footage.
![Photo of a brightly colored basket, with rainbow stripes woven through intricate patterns of black strips. A tiny woven bird rests on one edge of the basket lid.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/80650e00-4a6a-40cf-a060-ed0ef45c6ced/neptune-geo-soctomah-work-sample1-scaled.jpeg?crop=1920%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Ceremony of the Singing Stars by Geo Soctomah Neptune, 2017. Black ash, sweetgrass, birchbark, commercial dyes, 10 × 12 inches.
Photo courtesy the artist.
![At night, someone photographs another person posing in front of a precise arrangement of towering equidistant trees with large trucks and full tops. Lights run along the ground, illuminating the trees.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/ab712ccc-0bc5-4166-815d-704e1112a6e4/hood-walter-work-sample1.jpg?crop=2283%2C1283%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
The Broad Museum Plaza by Walter Hood, 2015. 2 Acres.
Photo by Mark Boster; courtesy of Hood Design Studio.
![A rectangular wall sculpture entirely composed of and exploding with small, densely packed flowers, leaves, balls, and various botanicals sculpted from light brown opaque glass. Concave at its center, the sculpture cradles a shell holding a hen and overflowing with tiny balls.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5e3e3482-2e42-44da-a1f0-89b7ebbfd07d/cowan-amber-work-sample1-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C2011%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Hen Collecting All Her Ova by Amber Cowan, 2020. Glass and mixed media, 18 × 20 × 9.5 inches.
Photo by Constance Mensh.
![A home interior with a vaulted, jagged ceiling and powder blue flooring. All of the walls and roof surfaces have a soft wood finish. A model looks out of a window wearing a bubblegum pink dress that matches a plush loveseat nearby.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/b9643bc7-403e-4ba7-af43-46b8afae5940/bonner-jennifer-work-sample3-scaled.jpg?crop=2556%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Interior view of Haus Gables by Jennifer Bonner, 2018. Atlanta.
Photo by NAARO.
![A bright, brick-walled industrial space with an elaborate array of performers, stage hands, and equipment scattered around. An audience sits along the bottom of the image watching.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/dab92b51-2abe-4c46-b5a1-4f6b37a7f0a3/hayes-sharon-work-sample2.jpg?crop=1240%2C807%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation of Time Passes by Sharon Hayes, 2019. Collaboration with Brooke O'Harra. Performance. Neighborhood Theater, Philadelphia.
![Projected onto a concrete industrial wall, Lex Brown, a Black woman in a costume dog nose and dog ears, sticks her tongue out. A person stands below the projection and watches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/8d85acee-0e93-41d0-9a6e-433ee0ccee09/brown-lex-work-sample2-scaled.jpg?crop=2603%2C1616%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation of Lip Gloss Alurt by Lex Brown, 2017. Video projection. 4 minutes. Video Narcissism, the High Line, New York City.
Video by Timothy Schenk.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5e8ddff8-9def-4063-bf10-d3f8f112666e/TheGreenTailedMonkeyStorybyKarenZacarias.png?crop=%2C%2C%2C&width=1000)
Documentation of The Green Tailed Monkey Story by Karen Zacarías, 2019.
TEDxBroadway.
![Mia Katigbak stands with one hand to her chin as she gazes concernedly. She has short, styled black hair and wears a long white shirt with rolled sleeves.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/41c006b5-0f02-464f-a514-70a833cccbac/katigbak-mia-work-sample2.jpeg?crop=501%2C600%2C0%2C0&width=501)
Scenes from a Marriage by Mia Katigbak, 2014. New York Theatre Workshop.
![In a dim performance space, a nonbinary trans artist squats close to the ground on the toes of one foot with the other leg extended long behind them. In their mouth they hold a neon rope that emits a cool white light](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/56715ff9-e61b-4d04-879f-fd6fdbdbb239/whitson-ni-ja-work-sample1-scaled.jpg?crop=2738%2C1825%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation of Dark Matter Ni’Ja Whitson, 2019. Cypher-Watermill Arts Center, New York.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/43642b55-5773-41d4-85a3-dfad7c8896e9/WrongHappyHourbyAkiSasamoto.png?crop=3431%2C1930%2C11%2C0&width=1000)
Wrong Happy Hour by Aki Sasamoto, 2015. Movie based on performance/installation, shot without the audience, 32:22.
![On top of a circular gold base, a totem-like ceramic sculpture depicts different versions of a prickly green cactus and human face stacked on top of each other. At the very top is an eagle with its white wings outstretched. Each wing supports a small snake. On the walls of the gallery behind the sculpture are six additional white and black versions of this eagle and snake.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/f1926eb4-b4b6-4d6c-b7a0-66d155c41fa9/jimenez-flores-salvador-work-sample1-scaled.jpeg?crop=5631%2C4000%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
An Imaginary World of Rascuache-Futurism / Un mundo imaginario del futurismo-rascuache by Salvador Jiménez-Flores, 2017. Terra-cotta, porcelain, underglazes, gold luster, and terra-cotta slip, 96 × 96 × 96 inches.
Photo courtesy the artist.
![Nathan P Jackson stands below a towering totem pole on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The totem features Kaats who is at the bottom being held by the mama bear, his wife. Going up the pole, the three bear cubs are shown.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/8b407ded-26b4-4b51-bed5-2ac77ac8f667/jackson-nathan-work-sample1-scaled.jpg?crop=1920%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Kaats Pole by Nathan P Jackson, 2004. Western red cedar, latex exterior house paint, 20 × 2 feet.
Photo by Cynthia Frankenburg.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/bd9af18d-3133-4c37-8762-1ee440ef0dcf/EveL.EwingonTheDailyShow.png?crop=3274%2C1842%2C129%2C0&width=1000)
Trevor Noah interviews Eve L. Ewing on The Daily Show, 2018.
![Group of people wearing Delina's White creations stand in a stairwell for a photo.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/4ad03d7d-3414-4cfa-adde-96a207de7fde/white-delina2.jpg?crop=2500%2C1667%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
SWAIA Fashion Show, 2019. Santa Fe Indian Market.
Photo by Nedahness Rose Greene.
![Hanging on a wall is a wool tapestry depicting a pale nude figure with tattoos in bed with a mirror behind them revealing their backside.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/7c157007-da37-4bf4-9cd9-142d9b363dab/riley-erin-work-sample1-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C2094%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Reflections by Erin M. Riley, 2019. Hand-woven wool tapestry on cotton warp, 100 × 78 inches.
![An African American woman sits back in a sleeved Victorian dress with black flowers in her hair, backdropped by a red geometric pattern. She gazes concernedly, her skin depicted with magenta, purple, teal, and yellow and her attire with vibrant, clashing patterns](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/0b875d35-369d-480d-ac18-819691bcc811/butler-bisa-work-sample1.jpeg?crop=1333%2C2000%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Asantewa by Bisa Butler, 2020. Cotton, silk, wool, and velvet quilted and appliquéd, 52 × 88 inches.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5e44e4b2-f716-4678-9af5-2bd0652e308d/TheHeadlandsbyChristopherChen.png?crop=3320%2C1868%2C28%2C0&width=1000)
Montage of The Headlands by Christopher Chen, 2020.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/91cc25a3-ae21-4608-b451-59b4362d8e3a/ShorebyEmilyJohnson.png?crop=3306%2C1860%2C1%2C103&width=1000)
Documentary of Shore by Emily Johnson, 2014. Multi-day performance installation of dance, story, volunteerism, and feasting.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/29b93d5c-ccdc-4f02-95f9-2546de76e131/JuniusPaulandTomekaReid.png?crop=3509%2C1974%2C9%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation of "Jazz Postcards: Junius Paul and Tomeka Reid", 2020. Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Jackson Park, Chicago.
“My work extends beyond adorning landscapes and museum interiors; it’s about translating ideas of adornment to positively impact my community. My focus is to nurture and preserve space in Detroit.”
![Tiff, a young Black woman, is heavily adorned by the jewelry she created and rocking a du-rag, gold beads, and a floral dress. She holds her glasses as she gazes into the camera.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/133b6bff-d122-4fdc-a0b3-dcec869898e2/massey-tiff-headshot.jpg?crop=1920%2C1919%2C0%2C5&width=1000)
Tiff Massey
Interdisciplinary Artist
![The words “Bitch Don't Touch My Hair” in Tiff Massey’s handwriting are rendered in pink neon and mounted on the wall.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/f939cae2-97bc-4e77-8c4c-f9cdf93bbc26/massey-tiff-work-sample1.jpg?crop=2400%2C2400%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Bitch Don’t Touch My Hair!! by Tiff Massey, 2019. Neon, 60 × 60 inches.
Excerpt
I am a child of Chatham.
I grew up in black segregated Chicago. Not in a neighborhood decimated by the 1968 riots, blight, poverty, white flight and boarded-up buildings. My South Side black cocoon was a solid black middle-class neighborhood. Judges, teachers, lawyers, doctors, city, postal and social workers live in Chatham. The neighborhood has an assorted housing stock: ranches, Georgians, sturdy bungalows, bi-level chic mid-century moderns. An unusual showstopper mansion, modeled after the White House and built with Robin’s egg blue bricks imported from Italy, stood on display around the corner where I grew up. Our family of five lived in a four-bedroom brick Cape Cod with an unfinished basement prone to flooding. The lower level had dark wood paneling, a bar and milk crates crammed with dusty records from my parents’ era – from a Redd Foxx comedy album to the Ohio Players to Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
When we were growing up, ice cream trucks jingled in the summertime. We girls jumped double-dutch rope – despite my occasional double-handed turns – on the sidewalks in front of our homes. We rode our 10-speed bikes to buy Jay’s Salt N Vinegar potato chips, Now and Laters candy and dill pickles at the nearby Amoco gas station. We rotated having crushes on David, who lived around the corner and rode his bike incessantly up and down the streets. Pajama parties meant Jason and Freddy horror flicks on loop. We avoided the loose Doberman pinschers that would escape the gate of that big blue mansion. We jumped through lawn sprinklers in our swimsuits in backyards while our parents barbecued. We played makeshift baseball in the alley with tennis racquets. We blew out candles on pound cakes at our birthday parties. We had the kind of dramatic childhood fights that resulted in the silent treatment or smack talking. Posters of Michael Jackson, bedecked in the yellow “Human Nature” sweater, decorated our bedroom walls. We walked the track and swung on swings at Nat “King” Cole Park, named after the Chicago-born crooner. The park’s basketball courts hosted some of the city’s best street players in the 1970s and 1980s. Former Illinois U.S. Senator Roland Burris lived around the corner from our house (in gospel powerhouse Mahalia Jackson’s former residence) and he exemplified the cliché “it takes a village” by cajoling my parents to let me attend his alma mater, Howard University.
In our backyard, before the term “organic” entered mainstream culinary lexicon, my dad harvested vegetables. On Saturday mornings, my younger brother, sister and I pulled weeds to clear the way for him to plant cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, bell peppers, collard greens, eggplant, tomatoes and radishes. Every year he gently reminded me that Chicago weather wouldn’t allow him to grow my favorites – watermelon and strawberries. My mother drove a red Camaro for the better part of the 1980s. Not fire-engine or candy-apple red. More like the color of smeared red lipstick.
It would be years before I realized that I grew up in kind of a cozy racial cocoon of black middle-class vivacity in a city otherwise torn by racial division.
Excerpt from “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation” by Natalie Y. Moore, 2016.
![NEA and Ofelia Esparza](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/5705984b-7b6c-4478-8540-5ecc5d6a4666/NEAandOfeliaEsparza.png?crop=3288%2C1850%2C120%2C0&width=1000)
Video tribute for NEA Fellows, “NEA National Heritage Tribute: Ofelia Esparza”, 2019.
Video by Sara Aguilar.
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Music video of Jayá by Macha Colón, 2012.
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Documentation of performance I Was in a Hurry by Dunya Mikhail, 2018. National Arab Orchestra, music by M. Ibrahim. Detroit Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, Detroit.
Excerpt
What beach this was, Louis wasn’t certain. Rock and sand, a harbor town, and everywhere the sort of broken pottery he’d combed for as a boy in the 1940s. Let his brothers fill their pockets with sticks and shells, ordinary sea glass: he knew how to look for the curved ridge on the underside of a slice of saucer. Flip it over and find the blue flowers of Holland or China, a century ago or more. Once, on the beach outside their summer cottage down the Cape, he had found two entire clay pipes, 18th century, while his six older brothers sharked and sealed and barked in the water; beyond them he could see, almost, the ghosts of the colonists who had used the harbor as a dump, casting their broken pottery out so he could find it in his own era and put it in his own pockets. But this wasn’t the Cape, or even Massachusetts. His brothers were mostly dead. That is, they were all of them dead but in his head only mostly: they washed up alive every now and then, and Louis would have to ask himself: is Phillip alive? Is Julius, Sidney?
Study the beach. Here, half-buried: a tiny terra-cotta cow with its head missing, otherwise intact, plaything for a child dead before the industrial revolution. The sea-worn bottom of a bottle that read Edinbu before the fracture. Lots of bits of plate, interesting glaze, violet and coppery brown. All his outgrown fixations had returned to him now that he was old. On an ordinary day in his bedroom at home he might hesitate to reach down for fear of falling over. Not here. He found the pottery and snatched it up. A teapot spout. A cocked handle from just where it had met cup. A round brown crockery seal with a crown and the word FIREPROOF. He thought: that which is fireproof is also waterproof, but he wasn’t sure whether that were true. Good picking anyhow. Some boy was calling far off for his father, Dad! Dad! He looked up. He was that father. There was his boy. Boy: a full-grown man, shouldering a plaid bag, standing on the steps that led from the storefronts of the harbor town down to the little beach. On the street above a man in a kilt passed by. A Lady from Hell. What they called the Black Watch. They were in Scotland. His son had brought him here, to this island.
“We’ll miss the boat,” his son said.
“Let’s not,” Louis answered, and put the treasure in his pockets.
Excerpt from “Proof,” a short story, from The Souvenir Museum, forthcoming.
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Vat Do You Vahnt For Bwefas? by Jibz Cameron, 2017.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/f6fc56e3-58d4-4ba1-8c03-531ebd760a59/Black14byDariusClarkMonroe.png?crop=3260%2C1834%2C115%2C0&width=1000)
Black 14 by Darius Clark Monroe, 2018. Video. 15 minutes.
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The NAME Game: How Idris Became Eddie, and Why It Matters by Idris Goodwin, 2019.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/7db49020-4102-45f8-a673-6c6b5fe3a007/PiuPiubyNaimaRamos-Chapman.png?crop=2592%2C1458%2C478%2C0&width=1000)
Trailer of PIU PIU by Naima Ramos-Chapman, 2019.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/61c8139e-5808-411f-a742-3a195751860a/SkinbyJenniferReeder.png?crop=2631%2C1480%2C461%2C0&width=1000)
Trailer for Knives and Skin by Jennifer Reeder, 2019.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/90cd7614-0816-4cef-a582-070caec653ef/InterviewwithAmanpourCompanyinterviewsOceanvong,2019.png?crop=3214%2C1808%2C163%2C0&width=1000)
Documentation of Amanpour & Company interviewing Ocean Vuong, 2019. PBS.
![Standing on black rocks and backdropped by mountainous trees, a model with tan skin and long curly black hair models a royal blue ball gown circled with rows of long greyish green feathers.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/6df64500-85b6-4ba2-9ab3-29f812af0971/lum-nelmida-kawika-work-sample1-rotated.jpeg?crop=3024%2C4032%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Blue ball gown with rooster tails and handheld kahili (feather standard) by Kawika Lum-Nelmida, 2018.
![An hourglass with both sides completely filled with gray dust is hung on the wall. The glass is set between a dark wooden base and cap with two visible wooden spindles. Inside the glass the gray dust forms cracks and layers.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/b742fa6b-c461-4454-a1e8-9a34432254a6/lazard-carolyn-work-sample1-scaled.jpg?crop=1707%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Free Radicals by Carolyn Lazard, 2020. Hourglass, granite dust from McCoy Quarry, Glasgow Inc., King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, 12.5 × 6.25 × 6.25 inches.