This Grief Will Be of Use | Part II: A Demonstration in Four Vignettes

“Bound in a web of violence, the lives of slave women and slaveholding women were intertwined, but they were never linked in sisterhood.” ~Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Influenced by the 1912 case of 16 year-old laundress Virginia Christian and her white employer 51 year-old Ida Belote as well as Stephanie Jones-Roger’s book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. We give an illustration of the violence white women inflicted upon black bodies, black women, and black babies. We strive to deconstruct a painful past by giving it a voice through a public demonstration that seeks to make space for communal healing and conversation.

The performance installation will be every Saturday August 13th-September 3rd
2:30pm / 3pm / 3:30pm

FREE

An Antebellum Theory

This performance will be presented in conjunction with Theatre Roscious’ “An Antebellum Theory” – an art installation and film series that examines and explores how Black Women + White Women have had to navigate in space under hundreds of years of patriarchal control, missed opportunities and old unspoken pains.

In this exhibition, we re-imagine two paintings: Felix Vallotton’s La Blanche et la Noire (1913) and Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863).

In reversing Manet’s painting, the act of reconstruction is activated to break down the distortion of white oppression, and thus we can reclaim the Black Female body in any space. Elevating the Black Female body from the maid to a woman in ownership over her body, we reify the existence of Mitochondrial Eve who lived in East Africa 200,000 years ago. We take Felix Vallotton’s (1865-1925) La Blanche et la Noire (The White and the BLACK) and decolonize as well as break down volatile physical restrictions put upon the Black female body for hundreds of years. In going back to our Mitochondrial Eve roots we create new space by changing our relationship to colonization in a physical and intentional manner.

FREE