Liminalities: A Journal of Performance StudiesVol. 21, No. 3 (2025)
Between Harlem and Me: Layered Time,Memory, and Corporeal Migration
Dianne Smith
It is not an uncommon burden but rather a choice that Black women artists embrace, creating art as a socio-political strategy to save themselves and their communities. Tanisha M. Jackson analyzes visual and personal narratives, historical archives, and artmaking practices to reveal how Black women artists facilitate wellness through creative expression and cultural knowledge. Delving into historical and contemporary practices, Jackson looks at Black women who use their artwork as acts of resistance, self-expression, and holistic wellness. Jackson’s multidisciplinary approach blends art history, Black studies, and personal narratives to examine how the art ecosystems created by these women foster resilience and empowerment. Their dramatic stories underscore the transformative power of art in cultivating activism and mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being but also provide a framework for understanding how art can be a vital component of self-care and communal wellness. A meticulous portrait and inspiring roadmap, Black Women’s Art Ecosystems celebrates Black women’s artistic achievements while revealing how their work creates communities of restoration and mental health.
A visual journey of Caribbean art profiling more than 60 contemporary Caribbean artists, curated by award winning multidisciplinary artist and textile surface designer, Malene Barnett.
Through powerful interviews with more than 60 artists and designers of Caribbean heritage, accompanied by gorgeous photographs, Crafted Kinship takes readers on a unique journey through the world of Black Caribbean creativity. Each maker crafts a kinship with the land, the people, the culture of their country of origin. Their art explores and reflects deeply on themes like African origins, ancestors, Black womanhood/Black manhood, identity, joy, memory, and the complicated and painful history of migration and diaspora. An art that is more often than not multidisciplinary, created by makers who eschew traditional labels by reshaping the boundaries around art and design.
This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora.
In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others’ specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith.
The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.
