In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, We Made Armor
For the exhibition In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, We Made Armor, artist and curator Mahari Chabwera creates a sanctuary site for Black womxn artists to honor their ancestors and honor and care for themselves, a safe place to make and show work, to be vulnerable, to be glorious, to heal, to grow, to dream. Mahari has gathered a group of 6 Black womxn artists who are each exploring the tension between protection and vulnerability, who are embracing the opportunity to be seen as artists in this cultural moment while also being thoughtful about what is seen and who will control those images. In the show, there are hat tips to commercial art and advertising in the works of photographer Ricky Weaver and artist Taylor Simone, for example. Both artists invoke the styles and methods of pop culture and advertising, areas that have made use of images of Black women for their own purposes, to push back on that history and assert control over their personal identities and histories. Brooklyn-based artist Christa Pratt uses the ideas and iconography of Afrofuturism to create expressly Queer, Womanist vignettes of an intimate world that celebrates black, femme spirituality, liberation, and autonomy. And Pratt and others, including Nastassja Swift and Abigail Lucien, use intimate, everyday materials and imagery to convey strength, pride, and power. In this freedom-sharing, sanctuary-making exhibition, Mahari Chabwera shows that art as liberatory, magic medicine-making is a way to mend trauma and replace it with something that is rooted in freedom and an ethic of love. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, We Made Armor is on view now through December 8th at Sediments Arts.
Banner image: Nastassja Swift, from the collaborative project, “Remembering Her Homecoming”, photographs by Marlon Turner. 2018.
Image below: "I'll fly away", by Ricky Weaver. Series Title: "Shrine and Saint: Receiving my Anointing". Archival Pigment Print. 2019.
“Alice Walker has a collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and there is a particular essay that also holds that title that was the impetus for this show. In it she discusses this tradition of what I call liberatory magic-making - the art of tapping into our creative powers with whatever resources we have, generations back, for black women and black families. We Made Armor came in as an acknowledgement of the shielding and protection that we have to do when it comes to being able to make this work, to be able to be vulnerable in the world, to tap into how this work comes about.”
Paige hosts the LookSEE podcast and is a freelance audio producer, an art lover, and a lifelong Richmonder. Her favorite place to be is in a museum. A close second is a bookstore.
