Johanna Poethig. Songs for Women Living With War, 2016. Courtesy of the Artist.

(some thoughts for other instructors and artists)

my sister
when will it come finally clear
in the rockets’ red glare
my sister
after the ceremonial guns salute the ceremonial rifles
saluting the ceremonial cannons that burst forth a choking
smoke to celebrate murder
will it be clear
in that red that bloody red glare
my sister
that glare of murder and atrocity/atrocities
of power
strangling every program
to protect and feed and educate and heal and house
the people

(talking about us/you and me talking
about us)

—June Jordan, “Poem to My Sister, Ethel Ennis, Who Sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the Second Inauguration of Richard Milhous Nixon, January 20, 1973”

Listen to Black women. Listen to women of color. Listen to indigenous communities. Listen to queer and trans people, especially QTPOC. These are the things, above all else, that I want my students to learn, in the art schools where I’ve been one of the few instructors of color, in “diversity” classes at the public university I teach at now. Listen. Look. Learn.

Read the full article here.

LOSTBOY. Clusters, 2014; pen on paper; 26 x 19.75 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Betti Ono Gallery, Oakland.

LOSTBOY’s ink-drawn organisms multiply, sometimes expressed as rhizomes across the border of the page and sometimes caught in mid-bloom around a central core. The artist returns to these strategies obsessively in drawing after drawing, with a proliferation of miniature circles, sagging topographies, marrow and lash-like figures that swell outwardly toward the viewer in the strongest works, like Clusters (2014). Where the exhibition loses its power, however, is in the installation of the drawings.

The generic black frames chosen for the works act as a blunt punctuation to the organic energies of the illustrations. The frames are heavy-handed, linear gestures in what is otherwise an organic world with nuanced line quality, creating alternating areas of excess and rupture of form. LOSTBOY misses the opportunity to let the ecosystems growing in each work merge or overtake one another. Instead of curating the tensions of nonlinear growth within each drawing, the artist seems most concerned with communicating a sense of formality about the work though the use of the frame. LOSTBOY’s linework, however, has much more to offer the viewer than this sense of formality.

The signature work of the exhibition, Clusters, could speak volumes as a map of gentrification. Here, the artist employs the visual language of topography, with clusters of curved lines positioned at varying distances from one another but encapsulated within forms that wield the outward force of fungi rising up to touch the onlooker and threatening the very boundary of the map itself. Is the change of neighborhoods an organic process? What exists beneath the aesthetic, if not hypnotic rehearsal of “revitalization” rhetoric within civic discourse? Clusters functions simultaneously as a map of structural growth and a map of structural consumption, in what is effectively a queer use of abstraction.

Considering the social systems the work can be in dialogue with on the page, it’s essential to consider what LOSTBOY’s obsessive gestures could accomplish off the page. Had the artist followed their intuition to expand their wall and window drawings throughout Betti Ono, a more dynamic relationship between the kinetics in the work and the physicality of the viewer would have been possible—inviting onlookers to become immersed in the exploration of ambiguous nonlinear structures in their own lives.

LOSTBOY: CORE is on view at Betti Ono Gallery in Oakland, California through February 15, 2015.

Indira Allegra is a text-based artist writing through textile processes and queer performance. She is a recipient of the Oakland Individual Artist grant, a winner of the Jackson Literary Award, and a former Lambda Literary Fellow.