TNM Studios March, April + May 2023 Newsletter
TNM Studios March, April + May 2023 Newsletter
Always on tiiiime.....
Yep, I’m two months late or rather on time. I’m writing you from the sky while on my flight to Phoenix, AZ….
I’ve been restricting my writing as I needed the language to form in another manner through sculpture. For the past two months, to focus exclusively on what I have going on with my work. It has been nonstop on my side, and digging deep in the studio has been really good for my body and brain.
March…
Was all about the core work for my Kunsthalle Basel solo exhibition. It's a very physical show on my end in a way that I have had to train for. To handle the objects and not harm myself while moving them around the studio. I had some serious fabrication delays that made me realize that it is now time to really build out a full Philly network and how important good and direct communication is when working with others. I have worked with fabricators in NYC but hoping to shift that and fully invest in Philly by any means necessary. This work is also one that started as a very dense object exploration and ended up becoming so much more. Timing has yielded a lovey conjecture in my way of thinking and being with this one. The work started as a study on the choke valve and its manipulation of air, notions of mercy, tension, and asphyxiation. Ultimately the work became a foreshadowing device that knocked me over my head so hard in the strangest way. I can’t wait to share this work and am eager to see how it holds space, me, and ultimately itself in a room.
I visited the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple, one of the U.S's most prestigious African American archives. The collection houses over 500,000 items relating to the global Black experience. It was lovely to meet with the archivists and better understand what the Blockson archives offer in relation to Philadelphia, specifically North Philadelphia, where I live and work. It was my first visit there, even after all these years of living in the city. It is a phenomenal collection I look forward to exploring over the next few months.
I had a series of great studio visits as an artist and curatorially conducted more studio visits than I ever want to do again, which made me think a bit more about how important it is to engage with curators who come to my studio. Some curators are just pickers - people who just pick your stuff and think they're giving you the opportunity. This energy can make the curator-artist relationship so D/s heavy and really wrought. It should be an exchange. For some artists, I think the conversations alone can provide assurance or complicate the work in a generative way. If work is difficult and hasn't had a lot of visibility, the curator that is willing to take the time to understand a little bit more about what you got going on to support the work in your stead is gonna be a better bet than the one that just picks and drops the work into a room with no grounding.
April was just as wild…..
April was Autism Awareness Month for some, Autism Acceptance Month for many of us. I have ASD and am considered low support. It's something that I've known for many years before I shared with the public in 2019. It has been a part of my life since I was made aware that I was possibly on the spectrum in 2001 during my first therapy session as an adult while in college. I struggled with communication and the loudness of the classes. I went days without talking. If it weren’t for a concerned professor who held me after class after I failed a timed test to ask me each question uncovering that I not only knew the material but overall firmly grasped the knowledge around the work studied. For two decades, despite numerous struggles, I hid my sensory issues, the non-verbal episodes, and the affected state my body would enter when things were simply too much.
Since my diagnosis, it's taken me a couple of years to get to a place to explore what this meant for me. I wanted to think about that on my own for this past month. This time put me in a place of thinking very much about how important it is to have a particular acceptance more than awareness.
I wake up daily and its a roll of the dice. I don’t know exactly where I will land on that spectrum, sensory issues for me fluctuate and my struggles do as well. I've battled with non-verbal episodes throughout my life. When my diagnosis came, which I paid for out of pocket, thousands of dollars to do after saving money for it, it was a revelation. Since then, every April I spend time looking at that paperwork to read myself because my diagnosis has assisted in my understanding of who I actually know myself to be. The diagnosis did not limit anything for me. It actually opened up a lot more possibilities for me, and has softly pushed me on a long-term journey to unmask every day in some little part of myself to make up for all the time hiding.
On April 2, World Autism Awareness Day, I took part in an event with Harmony Holiday and Nikita Gale, talking about grift and grief, which you can find online. Was a great time riffing with two great minds and artists that I admire.
keondra bills freemyn is an archivist, who also happens to be one of my best friend. She recently took me on as a special project and came through my studio to begin building my personal and studio-based archive. We've been working together for the past year just trying to think about what the archive for my studio practice looks like and putting it into action. To do it right, and with her guidance I purchased a shit ton of archival boxes and built out an archival shelf to set the foundation the right way. It's an investment that can get expensive, but it's worth it. Keondra has often reminded me that I must put the effort in now, so that I can have a hand in contextualizing my archive and influence the way it can be read, It’s a humbling exercise in looking back, and forward at the same time.
An honor. One of the more important moments in my adult life was judging for IMsLBB, the 2023 International Ms Leather and Boot Black Contest that was held in Jersey recently, April 20th - 23rd. After a rogorous few days, we crowned Liquid as the 2023 International Ms. Leather. Liquid is quite a dynamic force in the leather community and is well respected by her peers. That weekend was a phenomenal experience for me to really understand what the stakes were for the leather community during this time. I spent my time while there extremely focused and locked in as more of a voyeur that a player that weekend in order to wrap my head around what this contest meant, what it meant coming in the shadow of COVID, what it meant to have such a diverse and intergenerational range of participants as well as attendees.
Contest owner/producer Madamoiselle Ceci was my invite to judge the IMsLLBBGen5 contest back in 2020 and I've been supporting by allowing access to my work via a special video presentation made specifically for the community. This was the first time the contest was on in over three years and by sharing my work so that it could be on view for those who wanted to just partake and have an aspect of seeing art catered to them and how leather works within my practice outside of just being a part of my identity. I had a blast, met some amazing new people and am very eager to attend next year's to see how things hold up because I think it's going to come back even stronger.
I have felt the reality of shifts and endings in the last week of April. I navigated two massive art pickups from my studio which changed my space so drastically I felt disoriented but happy to have my space reset to a semi-blank slate. Art pickups can be so gutting. I taught my last class at Princeton, which was my course Black + Queer in Leather: Black BDSM Material Culture, which ended with the last of two sets of final papers and presentations. A student who took most of my classes offered at Princeton shared that he would be entering a graduate curatorial program, which really warmed my heart. While at Princeton, I had the chance to introduce curatorial practice to students with great responses. This week I taught my last class as a Princeton Arts Fellow. The proudest moment was having two of my students proudly turn towards curating via their graduate studies. I'm very proud of that as an artist who curates to present curatorial practice as something that can actually be of interest to people so young is really inspiring to me.
I had a talk at Dia Chelsea in conversation with scholar Lisa Cohen where we talked about Chryssa and read from our contributions to the Chryssa & New York exhibition catalog. I was in conversations with scholar/writer with Lisa Cohen about the fragility of the archive in relationship to Chryssa and her artist community and specifically her queerness. I read my piece San Titre which translates from French and simply means without title. The piece is more poetic than an essay and leans into the unexplainable space of being without a title in a relationship to a lover. I chose to figure Chryssa and Agnes Martin's work itself as lovers, not them as lovers, and came out with a piece that I felt was a good representation of these types of queer relationships of the past that we perhaps need to reconsider when we think about social formations of the artists that we adore. In what ways do we neglect the actual work production by centering the romantic? In what ways can the romantic enhance the work between lovers? These are the questions I explore in my piece.
I thankfully had the last of my crits at Upenn as a return visiting critic/curator this past weekend, and I’m very much looking forward to taking a HARD break from all academic art-related engagements and, more specifically, any and all MFA-related shit for the foreseeable future. It is such a polarizing and troubled space – more on that in the future.
Now, I am en route to Phoenix, AZ for the second stop of the Juan Francisco Elso: Por América second stop on tour of the exhibition. Deimstall was earlier in April. This month is packed tight as I have two additional exhibitions that will open later this month….
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Announcements + Exhibitions + Events + and all else…
May 6th – Sept 17th Phoenix Art Museum - Juan Francisco Elso: Por América [Group Exhibition] May 6th 1-2:30 pm artist conversation at PhxArt Museum moderated by Erica Moiah James
May 25th – Aug 13th Kunsthalle Basel - THE POETICS OF BEAUTY WILL INEVITABLY RESORT TO THE MOST BASE PLEADINGS AND OTHER WILES IN ORDER TO SECURE ITS RELEASE [Solo Exhibition]
May 25th - Jul 29th Sadie Coles HQ London HARDCORE [group exhibition]
June 14th Kunsthalle Basel - A SINGLE MOMENT OF INATTENTION performance with Tiona Nekkia McClodden + Danielle Deadwyler. ***One of one an will never be performed again.
I’m jumping WAY ahead here, but I want to share this news as it is a highlight of my year in various ways. Im so thrilled to be included in the upcoming exhibition Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC has recently been announced and will be opening in October. Curator Ashley James wrote one of the best curatorial statements I’ve ever read for this exhibition- truly so thorough and brilliantly conceived. The work I am making is brand spanking new, and I’m thrilled to be a part of the show and execute this body of work as it aligns so well with where I am at with rethinking and revisiting leather-based works and Black history.
Conceptual Fade has a new look and I wanted to share here first. Hassan Rahim’s Design studio 12.01AM took on task of developing a new identity for Cf. that will take the space into the future. More soon on this as I prep the launch of a few special goods.
Art, Music, Films, + Videos…
I witnessed a perfromance Pull Up by poet Simone White and artist Wilmer Wilson IV in early April that was very moving. They read from inside of a car while trap and chopped and screwed music played from speakers. STUNNING!
The Series Finale of Snowfall has blown me away,, Damson was acting ACTING
Power Book II: Ghost is back and it’s hilarious and I love it. Mary J Blige is unreal in this show lol.
A Thousand and One – Teyana Taylor is a revelation. A very good film and an interesting take on a period piece.
I finally saw Avatar and is was a race play nightmare. Just empty and foolish tbh. Foolishnessssss.
The Cleaning Lady was a flight watch and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
ORNA IS BACK! And looking stressed TF out by the NY queers and polywogs. Im holding off on watching till June after my first half of exhibitions are wrapped so I can be fully present, and then I’m all in!
Music that’s gripped me as of late…
Baby Rose – Dance With Me … gorgeous writing and delivery.
SLAM DUNK – EST Gee + Young Scooter … gym motivation.
A Plane Over Woods – The Vernon Spring… on repeat in the studio
Freddie’s Inferno – The Slow Descent by Freddie Dredd + OG Ron C ...an odd find but digging it
11 – SAULT brilliant!
Songs for Women, Free Game for Niggas – Jozzy just a good listen top down.
See you in June…
xTNM
TNM Studios March, April + May 2023 Newsletter
Ugh! Yes Snowfall! Yes Baby Rose. Excited to peep this new website design! Happy to hear all of the other brilliance you’re cooking up!!!!