For better or for worse (and mostly for worse given the state of media these days), I’m a writer who came up in the age of the Internet. My poetry tumblr was mercifully sent to a watery grave during the purge that followed Yahoo’s acquisition of the microblogging platform. If you Google my name, a handful of poems that should never have seen the light of day still come up; it’s the price I pay for being young and precocious. But my first serious byline came in 2018, an essay in my hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, on local efforts to commemorate the victims of racial terror lynchings prompted by the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Almost seven years later though, it remains hard for me to believe that anyone other than the handful of friends I bully into coming to my readings read my work.
That changed when I got an email inquiry from an editor at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia’s oldest art museum, via my website contact form, asking if I’d be interested in writing about Black-and-queer textile artist (and Known Texan) Diedrick Brackens, who’s featured in their Triennial. She’d come across my article for the Oxford American in researching Brackens.
My history with Brackens dates back to my tenure as the digital intern at the Texas Observer in the spring of 2021. My primary duty consisted of writing and scheduling tweets to go out on the hour, twelve hours a day, which left me scouring the magazine’s archives desperate for ways to rewrite the headline to fill the requisite 180 characters. One of these articles was my pal Nic Yeager’s coverage of Brackens’s show at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art, “darling divined.”
“In his return to Texas, artist Diedrick Brackens from Mexia uses animals, silhouette, and texture in his latest installation at the Blanton Museum of Art.”
“Drawing on diverse artistic traditions, including West African weaving, European tapestries, and quilting from the American South, Diedrick Brackens reimagines Black and queer experience.”
“Just a couple of weeks left to check out textile artist Diedrick Brackens' work at the @blantonmuseum” (a bid for engagement via tagging the museum’s twitter).
A year and change later, Brackens followed me to the banks of the Hudson. I’d pitched an essay to the Oxford American about “The New Bend,” an exhibit of twelve quilting and textile artists curated “in tender dialogue with, and in homage to” the quilters of Gee’s Bend, a group of Black women from southern Alabama whose quilting traditions were vaulted into notoriety after being “discovered” by an art collector in the early aughts. My editor (the inimitable Danielle Jackson) suggested I hone in one artist in particular rather than trying to cover the whole exhibit, and there he was.
“At roughly eight by eight feet tall, the piece dwarfs my 5'4 frame. But rather than feeling overwhelming, the size evokes majesty. A silhouetted figure crouches at the center as its arms extend outward, and they are framed by a black star, though a more muted black than that of the central figure.
The title in many ways reminds me of why I made my way to New York. Brackens is right: Survival is a shrine, something holy, something to pray toward, to point one’s life in the direction of.
Survival is something worth leaving everything you know behind for, worth sacrificing the soil on which you were sown. I’d set my sights on New York from a young age, in large part because I grew up on Broadway soundtracks with a healthy infusion of Glee, which told me that the city was the place to go if you were queer and had any sort of artistic inclination. When college applications rolled around, New York broadened into the Northeast, where I wound up at Yale, oft branded the “gay Ivy.” There, in my African American studies classes, I learned of the New York of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde and June Jordan, the city where they struggled, loved, and lost and wrote of the world as they saw it and as they hoped it would one day be re-born. My heart tugged me toward the city, and I landed in Hoboken, just across the river, where I work at a publishing house and write poems about the Gulf South where I grew up.”
I’m still very proud of this piece, both for the writing and because behind the scenes, I was able to negotiate a rate that I found satisfying for my labor. 50-cents-a-word is a far cry from whatever fictional salary Carrie Bradshaw was making when she started freelancing for Vogue in an attempt to pay off her credit card, but it helps pay my bills. If you’d like to read that full piece, you can find it here.
Two years later, I returned to Brackens’s work for the NGV Magazine. The world is a different place than it was two years ago, I have ever fewer illusions about what art can be and do, and what lengths the powers that be will go to in order to maintain their world order. So I chose violence:
“Breath of course, is central to our understanding of freedom as Black-and-queer people, especially as we continue to live in a pandemic that is passed through the air, one that disproportionately affects those at the margins. The land colonially known as Texas is a place that knows all too well how fragile breath is. When I was 16 years old and Brackens was 26, Sandra Bland, a 28-year old Black woman, was found hanged in her cell in the county jail, after being pulled over for a traffic stop on the same highway that my mother drove to work. Each breath we take is in defiance of the police state that seeks to dispose of us in the time it takes to inhale a single breath, if we are not useful, if we are wayward, if we are Black-and-queer.
There’s an easy enough reading of this that focuses on the act of taking up space in and of itself — the reclamation of the Black body, the forceful foregrounding of the black acrylic on the backdrop of the tapestry, the ability to simply be, as revolutionary, when being, when breathing has been foreclosed. But instead my eye is drawn to the chain which breaks forth from the tapestry, held in the hands of the central figure rather than being bound by it. Though they are on their knees, they are free from bondage.”
The piece went live this past weekend! If you want to read the rest of it, you can check it out here, the password is NGVMarApr.
Spinning: Susie Save Your Love by Allie X ft. Mitski
Currently reading: The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin by Hafizah Geter