EAT LITTLE
& LIVE LONG
Brooklyn, New York
​5 June - 4 September 2021
Photos by David McDuffie, Gerald Horton
​​​In 2021 - in the midst of COVID - dance artist Makeda Thomas invited 22 dance artists and their collaborators to her home in Flatbush, Brooklyn for a Yard Performance Series. Performers included Fana Fraser, J. Bouey, Thomas DeFrantz, mx oops, Shamar Watt, Brotherhood Dance, Chris Walker, Andre Zachery, Michelle Gibson, Gabri Christa, Obika Dance, Jean Appolon, and Jade Charon. The gathering merged food, dance, and storytelling; was "an opportunity to engage with artists and supporters of my work; to share and to practice; to make good on the ancestral knowledge to transform stories of loss into tales of togetherness".
UNTITLED
various locations
April 2012 - ongoing
a tiny little thing
Turchin Center for the Arts
Boone, North Carolina
​7 June - 7 December 2019
Mixed textiles, wood
15.5in x 174 in.
​
“a tiny little thing”, a project of The Light Fantastical, exhibited at the Turchin Center for Visual Arts in Boone, NC from June 7 through December 7, 2019. The exhibit, “With or Without”, curated by Cara Hagan engaged a long-distance collaborative practice and philosophy called, “Artistic Surrogacy", which seeks to create issues of institutional bias, financial constraints related to art making and distribution, issues of geographical and/or circumstantial isolation, environmental implications of artist travel, commonly-held notions of what constitutes “art,” and what a “successful” art career looks and feels like.
​
"A fire resulted in the loss of my family home and archives last year, and cleared the path for this work. The initial aim was to make a book - a tiny little thing - collaged with documents, recipes, drawings, quotes, bits and pieces, pockets of mythologies...A gift to my children - Shiloh and Nyah Love. In its place, is a 14’ length of cloth that survived the fire. It is composed of three pieces: a piece from my mother, a piece from my sister, and a wrap I wore during the home birth of my first child. Sewn hastily together just before the birth of my second child, the cloth is a traditional African tie used in pregnancy and during birth. Its great length and materiality is a meditation on motherhood and legacy; on surrogacy as an artistic practice."