Bobbi Kindred I  Artist Statement 

Any method or material that facilitates the articulation of messages gifted to me in my meditative practice, is useful to my art making-be it words for poem, paint to canvas, pencil-spectrum to paper, or digital scapes, I create with them-- always of service to Black folk and in constant conversation with my Black feminist foremothers. In this piece, “The Folk Are Still Flying”, digital images overlay of Beyonce’s Lemonade, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and Virginia Hamillton’s The People Could Fly. In this piece, the sky takes the many shapes it tends to in one day; women cross through water; Sandra Bland clad in an orange jumpsuit walks amongst the women of Beyonce’s Lemonade project; Africana heads bob above ocean waters; Black folk ascend/fly/levitate; grounded by imagery of shoals. This work is part of a larger collection entitled, “The Graduation: Black Ascension To A Full Fleged Black Feminist Future”, in which I explore folktales as a roadmap to liberation though the documentation, recounting, and invoking of these narratives, such as the ones of Ibo Landing and other legends of flying Africans. I am curious about the psychological impacts and material implications of affirmation of Black existance through exploring narratives of Black Ascension as an inevitable reality, in the midst of the many manifestations of genocide, and how this particular affirmative knowing catalyzes revolutionary action. 

In creating “The Folk Are Still Flying”, I am particularly interested in exploring the shoaling effect as invoked by Tiffany Lethabo King in her piece, “The Black Shoals”, specifically, how the shoal that is folkloric story around Black Flight, not only disrupts hegemonic understandings of Black capability, but throws into crisis narratives of total Black submission--void of resistance, in documented instances of chattel enslavement occurrences. When King describes the many iterations of a shoal, she explains, “The shoal is a small uncovered spot of sand, coral, or rock where one must quickly gather, lose oneself, or proceed in a manner and fashion not yet known. In a temporal sense, the shoal is also the location that offers a moment to reassemble the self as an amphibious and terrestrial subjectivity. Not just water (fluid, malleable, and fungible) but also a body landed. A place and time of liminality where one becomes an ecotone, a space of transition between distinct ecological systems and states. A place to come to terms with a changing terrain that demands that you both walk and swim to shore—and whatever the shore may bring.”

Much like King is interested in disrupting the deliberate compulsion to relegate Blackness to being solely of the ocean, I additionally interrogate shoaling as an opportunity to explore Blackness in context of the etheral terrain, as also belonging to the ether. The shoal that is where the ocean meets land, is then considered in conversation of where land, ocean, and air meets: this connection explicitly explored in the Ibo Landing retellings that both allude to Blackness as buoyant and Blackness as airborne.