“…marvels of my own inventiveness…” :: Ra Malika Imhotep
On View :: Sat. Jul. 9th, 2022 - Sun. Aug. 28th, 2022
On view: July 9th – August 28th
Receptions:
Saturday, July 9th from 6:00 – 10:00 PM
Saturday, August 13th from 6:00 – 10:00 PM
“In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. The personal pronouns are offered in the service of a collective function” – Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammer Book”
This gathering of works is a celebration of Black feminist creative-intellectual labor. It is an experiment in the public presentation of an emergent body of art practice. Organized around 3 principle verbs of Black feminist practice – Study, Feel, Harvest – this exhibition includes work from the spiritual political education project, The Church of Black feminist Thought (co-convened with miyuki baker), my text-based screenprint series “Cojourner,” and collaborative works of film and photography (made with Jazz Franklin, Muse Dodd, and Felli Maynard) that accompanied my debut poetry collection, gossypiin (Red Hen Press, April 2022).
About the artist:
Ra Malika Imhotep, ph.d is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia with a PhD in African Diaspora Studies and New Media Studies from UC, Berkeley. As a scholar and cultural worker, Ra is invested in exploring relationships between queer Black femininities, Black vernacular cultures, and the performance of labor. As a steward of Black Studies and Black feminist thought, Ra dreams, organizes, and facilitates spaces of critical reflection and embodied spiritual-political education. Ra is co-author of The Black Feminist Study Theory Atlas and their debut poetry collection gossypiin was published by Red Hen Press, April 12 2022.
