"The Willing"

2022-2025

30 minutes to 60 minutes (depending on iteration)

live performance

Recent performances from this series:

2025 Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, OH

2024 KADIST San Francisco, CA

2024 Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA

2023 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates

2022 Praise Shadows Art Gallery, Boston, MA

Description:

The Willing is a live performance that activates several of my sculptures within a multimedia installation. During the performance, I engage in song, movement, and text alongside collaborators to share the stories of familial, artistic, and political ancestors, who have participated in defiant actions against colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchal oppression in the African Diaspora. The crown, tapestry, photographs, and ephemera passed between women provide ritualistic entry points to conjure memory and oral histories. The sculptural components point toward the aesthetic of regal adornment as a way to elevate one's position in societies that are fraught with institutionalized and systemic oppression against Black women's bodies.