Some gatherings feel like inheritances—spaces where legacy is not just acknowledged but lived, embodied, and carried forward. For nearly eight hours on February 7, the top floor of Northeastern University’s East Village became an incubator of Black feminist worldmaking in honor of the late scholar, writer, and teacher bell hooks, bringing a buzz of students, professors, community members, and artists alike to a convening of minds and hearts. Soft music flowed from the speakers as empty seats quickly began to fill up beside me. At every turn, a Black woman exclaimed at the sight of a familiar colleague or a former student, creating rows of smiling faces in the crowd.
“Black Feminism, Black Art” was the fifth iteration of the Africana Studies Program’s annual bell hooks symposium, a day-long event honoring hooks’s legacy and celebrating the impact of Black feminism and art in all its forms. The symposium actively engaged attendees in a Black feminist artistic legacy that is not static; it is ongoing, evolving, and expansive.
Multimedia portraits of Black femme subjects, intricately outlined against vibrant colorways, decorative patterns, and stitched detailing by printmaker Delita Martin flashed on a large screen at the front of the room as attendees settled in. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, dean’s professor of culture and social justice and professor of Africana studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern, opened the event to ground the audience in hooks’s influence. The goal, she said, was to “break the binary between theory and praxis … between the academy and the world.”
Dzidzor Azaglo’s interactive opening session elicits joyful responses from the audience.
Led by performer Dzidzor Azaglo, we began with a seated exercise of embodied movement. Instructed to close our eyes, Azaglo’s voice guided us gracefully into meditation. She started, “If we must begin, let us begin with breath … If we must begin, let us begin with grace imagined.” She continued, “Let us begin with imagining what is possible.” Azaglo concluded the session by asking us to say the names of those who allowed us to be there that day. I heard scatters of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and many others in the Black feminist tradition. I decided to speak life to the name of my maternal grandmother, Christine. Audible sighs of relief—or maybe comfort, or maybe connection—resounded as we breathed as one, moving our bodies to release any tension holding back our ability to dream. As the imitable bell hooks observed, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”
The three panels that filled nearly five hours of the symposium spanned generations, disciplines, and creative mediums, with a singular idea woven through every discussion: Black feminist art is an ongoing practice of legacy, an inheritance passed through hands, voices, and visions. The panelists urged the audience to consider Black feminist art as synonymous to social justice work that creates forward-thinking Black feminist artmaking wholly informed by the past. Black feminist art operates within its own lineage of liberation.
(left to right) Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Delita Martin, and Terri Lyne Carrington during the keynote conversation, “Talking Art,” at Northeastern University’s fifth annual bell hooks symposium.
The keynote conversation, “Talking Art,” engaged two practicing artists, Martin, whose works had just filled the screen at the front of the room, and jazz musician Terri Lyne Carrington, in a talkback across form and genre. They delved deep into how Black feminism has not only informed their respective work but has been inherent to their processes. Conversations of legacy and lineage underscored their memories of artmaking: Martin’s grandmother taught her about quiltmaking which she carries on today to “piece together the women in her work.” Carrington recounted being brought to jazz clubs with her father as a child, taking her on a journey of navigating the male-dominated soundscapes to becoming the founder of Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Both women understood their Black womanhood as central to their work, a driving factor for creative collaboration across disciplines and an artistic dynamism making their work a call to action: “This is precisely the time when the artist must go to work,” Carrington said.
Following the keynote, the first panel, “Art on My Mind,” moderated by undergraduate student Alana Fields, unfolded as an exploration of Black feminist thought and artistic practice across media. While the presentations varied in scope and approach, they all engaged with the politics of looking—how Black women are positioned as viewers and subjects, occupying multidimensional space. Concordia University associate professor Nathalie Batraville examined the infamous reality TV show Love Island through the lens of hooks’s “oppositional gaze,” questioning how Black women navigate what Batraville described as “ocular-centric constructions of the truth.” Batraville underscored how Black women’s visibility is often shaped by structures that render them hypervisible yet undervalued. However, Black women can use art to see and be seen on their own terms.
(left to right) Nathalie Batraville, Grisha Coleman, and L’Merchie Frazier during their panel, “Art on My Mind.”
Grisha Coleman, an artist working in areas of choreography, performance, experiential technology, and sound composition expanded this inquiry into the corporeal, presented a video of a movement-based performance that merged Blackness, technology, and ecological systems played behind her. Highlighting the body as both a site of resistance and a conduit for knowledge, Coleman made clear the kinesthetic experience of ritual, binding somatic Black culture to the land and environmental justice.
L’Merchie Frazier, multimedia visual activist, public artist, and historian, educator, and poet, traced a historical lineage of Black feminist art, mapping how Black women have imprinted Black feminist thought in historical domains. From considerations of the trauma of the Black Atlantic to Western beauty standards, Frazier reiterated that “the pressing down of the image of us delays action.” Amidst the threat of this delay, a roll call of women embodying Black feminist thought beyond the framework ensued:
Saidiya Hartman. Phillis Wheatley. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Edmonia Lewis. Augusta Savage. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Betye Saar. María Magdalena Campos Pons. Simone Leigh. Grada Kilomba. Ericka Huggins. Zipporah Potter Atkins. Ntozake Shange.
Their names echoed through the conference room, disrupting any act of what Batraville pointed out as passive spectatorship. We broke for lunch pondering a broader question: How have Black women, across time and medium, reclaimed the act of looking—at themselves, at each other, at the worlds they create?
We excitedly lined up with full plates from Sanon’s Kitchen, home to Haitian-American cuisine, expressing gratitude for the day so far. Exclaims of “Is that plantain?!” followed by a chorus of deep mm-hmm’s brought a feeling of home to the room as an array of brown hands served food with love and a side of wisdom. For those not leaving with a plate, Frugal Bookstore and Black Owned Bos. manned tables lined with books by Black women authors, greeting cards, accessories, and more.
Corralling us back to our seats, undergraduate student Sophia Idrissou moderated the next panel, “Art Moves Us,” between Nikki Greene, Taliyah Williams, and Scheherazade Tillet. Each panelist’s presentation explored Black feminist art as a mobilizing force to bring different communities together. Greene, an associate professor of art history at Wellesley College, articulated her Black feminist pedagogical and curatorial approach. In her curation of Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O’Grady ‘55, she said, “I wanted as many Black performers in as many spaces as possible.” The performance featured six multidisciplinary artists—Dominique Duroseau, Ayana Evans, Eleanor Kipping, M Lamar, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Nyugen E. Smith—to accompany the exhibition “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Students of color and unassuming university affiliates got to engage with O’Grady’s work beyond limitation, recovering their own interests and possibilities.
A fourth-year health science student and master of public health candidate at Northeastern, panelist Williams presented her relationship with Black feminist art as a sort of homecoming, centering the memories she shared with her grandmother, who spearheaded Women’s History Month film festivals in Newark, New Jersey for decades. Williams’s hometown ultimately shaped her inextricably personal engagement with art, and she spoke life into the Black women artists pivotal to her childhood experiences: Kara Walker and Gladys Barker Grauer. “Black feminism, innovation, and curation are not just passions,” she said. “They’re inheritances.”
Scheherazade Tillet presents during a panel discussion titled “Art Moves Us.”
The current Africana Studies artist in residence, photographer, curator, and feminist activist Tillet presented her photographic and moveable artwork that is at all times tied to Black feminist survival: the Black Girlhood Altar project. Whether honoring her own sister, missing and murdered women of color in Chicago, or the life of Breonna Taylor, Tillet’s work brought her community of mothers and daughters together in an effort of both social justice organizing and collective dreaming. Inspired by the City of Newark’s removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in Washington Park on June 26, 2020, a public installation of Tillet’s work asked young Black girls to be her monument instead. Taking up a four-story building, the public art installation featured a photograph of a young Black girl who celebrated her eighth birthday in Washington Park that night, as well as reflective typography and acrylic mirrors to reflect Newark’s diverse community. Black girls were also encouraged to create their own altars as reflections of their beauty, community, and homeplaces. “You are the altar,” Tillet explained.
During the subsequent Q&A, an audience member posed a question that left everyone in the room pondering what art meant to them: What are the possibilities in thinking about Black creativity as inheritance and legacy? In response, the panelists reflected on how Black feminist scholars, artists, and perhaps most importantly, family members, continue to expand an inheritance in ways that are both intimate and transformative.
We broke for what N. Fadeke Castor, Black feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, called “a kitchen table moment” in the tradition of the kitchen as “a central portal of knowledge and worldmaking.” From Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic Kitchen Table Series to Paule Marshall’s essay “Poets in the Kitchen” and the iconic Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, we understood this room transformed as deeply intimate, where Castor “remember[ed] the kitchen table as a space—as a women’s space, as a femme space, as a queer space, as a conjure space.”
Castor asked us to get up, move our bodies, and pair up with another attendee to share with each other something we saw, heard, or felt that touched us and how it could be connected to our day-to-day lives. We moved slowly out of our seats, traveling across the room or turning to the person next to us. For what seemed like ages, no one wanted to stop sharing. Undoubtedly, the day had moved our spirits.
(left to right) Tchaiko Omawale, Bimbola Akinbola, and Aja Burrell Wood during their panel, “Art Matters.”
For the last panel, “Art Matters,” student Marli Mason moderated a vulnerable conversation between Tchaiko Omawale, Bimbola Akinbola, and Aja Burrell Wood. Their respective presentations spoke to the deeply laborious forces at play in pursuing Black feminist art and how to navigate those feelings in unity. Writer and director Omawale shared a film sketch, centering her experiences navigating infertility. Audio of her journals, diaries, medical records, and doctor’s visits backgrounded experimental footage of Omawale’s nude body in a practice of what she called “radical vulnerability.” After several miscarriages, the bright laughter and voice of her young son was a beautiful reminder of healing.
Akinbola, Chicago-based artist and scholar and an assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern University, explored how performance art can help us engage in the messy tendencies of fear, uncertainty, and grief. She called on the fearless practices of Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Kemi Adeyemi, and Zina Saro-Wiwa. In her piece, You Gotta Know It, Akinbola performed the Electric Slide for seven hours with three other Black women. Investigating Blackness, belonging, and affect, the Electric Slide in the middle of a white-dominated art institution was a sustaining of Black queer joy. Her later work was informed by her own grief and unintentionally invited viewers to grieve together.
Wood, the managing director for Berklee’s Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, closed the panel with a peek into the origins, programs, and future of the institute, grounded in an idea of jazz without patriarchy. From bridging female jazz artists and composers to visual artists and archival history, she celebrated the work of the institute through multimedia art, making space at one point for the publication of 101 lead sheets by women composers. “In doing so, we seek to set new standards,” Wood said. “That is also what Black feminist thought does. It sets new standards—it raises standards.” She chose to lift up some of the names of the Black women composers in the publication:
Lil Hardin Armstrong. Dorothy Ashby. Geri Allen. Abbey Lincoln. Mary Lou Williams. Terri Lyne Carrington. Lakecia Benjamin. Cindy Blackman. Carmen Lundy. Cécile McLorin Salvant. Jazzmeia Horn. Elena Pinderhughes. Camille Thurman. Esperanza Spalding. Alice Coltrane.
And so many more.
Wood ended by quoting jazz dancer Princess Orelia Benskina, beautifully encapsulating the day: “Our Black women are an assorted conglomeration of vivaciousness.”
Walking away from the symposium, panelists and attendees alike spoke life into the generations, past and present, of Black feminist artists whose practice and lived experiences are wholly connected. “Black Feminism, Black Art” was remarkably timely considering the recent loss of iconic artists like Nikki Giovanni and Lorraine O’Grady, who now join bell hooks in our host of ancestors. How urgent it is that right now, the luminous possibilities of Black feminist art, creativity, and imagination are needed in every form. In multiple mediums, Black feminist artists—named and unnamed—all exist in our artistic lineage, with the depth and urgency that the legacy of hooks, and Black feminist artistry itself, demands.
