“I left feeling affirmed. Intrigued. Inspired. I left marveling at the abundance of our (Black women’s) creativity and expression.”
A big thank you to MPLSART and Yonci Jameson for their recent review of our current exhibition, A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking! Read an excerpt, and find the rest of the story at the link below!
In the dining room hallway of my grandmother's house there hang two prints of her making, products of a series of printmaking classes led by art educator Bill Slack at Highpoint in the early 2000’s. The large, mask-like monoprints are Speak No Evil and Through/Within/Beyond, created using the same template then altered individually. “It was a very interesting process because I had never done anything like that before,” she says. It was there, in my grandmother’s house, that I was first exposed to printmaking.
As a teen, her love of the arts and culture led me to the Loft Literary Center for poetry workshops and bookmaking classes, the Minnesota Historical Society for exhibits, and eventually, back to Highpoint for their Free Ink Days. Marked by the crude block prints created by me and my younger brother, the walls of our family home are now evidence of a Black matriarchal lineage, and a continuing artistic exploration.
Cornrows, combs, cotton and quilt, braids and barrettes; Objects once relegated solely to Black familiarity become cultural motifs, coalescing with narrative themes of hypervisibility and obscurity. A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking is the first of its kind; an exhibition dedicated to Black women printmakers, curated by Black women printmakers, Tanekeya Word and Delita Martin. “Like our foremothers,” Word writes, “Black women printmakers have used the tools in our hands to create visual languages that tell the stories of our past, future, and the in-between spaces within fractal time.” Featuring twelve Black women printmakers, the exhibition is on view at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a Twin Cities’ staple for printmaking and education.