My Electric Genealogy Winter Tour + More

I’m so thrilled to present the performance-lecture “My Electric Genealogy” no less than eight times in February – and in some of the Midwest locales closest to my heart. All shows are free and first-come, first-served.

I am so grateful for a favorable review by George Melrod in the print edition of Los Angeles’s Artillery Magazine. Arts journalism is a tough gig, and coverage of ephemeral works with limited runs can be really hard to justify. So I really appreciate the labor and the attentive viewing evident in the full review.

On the Reception of “The Embrace”

Boston has been name-checked more than than usual since Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group’s new monument to Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King was dedicated on January 13. Entitled “The Embrace,” the monument – which also celebrates the 1965 Freedom rally and a multiracial group of Boston’s local civil rights leaders – seemed to signal an ongoing correction of the city’s famous and reprehensible racism. Programming around the dedication included exhibitions and discussions with Hank Willis Thomas and local artists and culture-bearers, and there was an almost euphoric sense of new beginnings for a city where it’s not often easy to be an artist at all—let alone an artist of color.

The ways that “The Embrace” celebrates not just the Kings but also an entire generation of lesser-known local Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian activists goes unmentioned in Karen Attiah’s generally perceptive critique of the monument’s alignment with the whitewashing of MLK’s legacy into a deracialized and de-politicized message of love. The curdling of the broader national reception of “The Embrace” into outrage or ridicule over the suggestive nature of particular photos circulating on the internet further severs the monument discursively from both the experience of actually looking at it and conditions in the city where it was commissioned and installed.

There’s a lot to be written about the desire for agape and eros to stay in separate lanes (and why it’s hilarious when they don’t), but I found myself wondering how, if at all, the memes, the TikToks, and the Daily Show jokes had shaped how people view the monument. So, I went to the Common yesterday afternoon. Despite it being a cold and windy weekday, there was a steady stream of visitors who seemed mostly reverent. Their attention and cameras were directed at the giant, intertwined bronze arms, and no one seemed to be trying to recreate the visual double entendres they’d probably seen online. At the same time, I didn’t see anyone reading the names embedded in the plaza. Sadly, such is the script for viewing bronze monuments: even when they question the traditional framing of the heroic individual (as “The Embrace” certainly tries), the audience may still approach them, whether with rapture or ridicule, as the materialization of a lone individual’s legacy. The furor over the monument will eventually cool, and Boston’s artists of color will remain, nurturing the beloved (creative) community that was experienced more broadly, if briefly, just two weekends ago.