EXHIBITIONS
Another Happy Mambo Day: The Invented Worlds of Della Wells
September 1, 2017, Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College
Welcome to Mambo Land: where black lives matter because they don’t: An Afro-pessimist reading of Della Wells’ feminist world-making
by M. shadee malaklou
To walk into a Della Wells drawing, painting, or collage, or to hold one of her dolls is to be transported into an/Other world. This is “Mambo Land”, a fantasy world where Wells, a Milwaukee-based artist, lives and invites us to dwell with her. Not just whimsical, Mambo is frightening. It is where goblins and Otherworldly monsters live. It is also where black lives matter, in spite of the odds.
…Mambo tells the story of who has to die in order to make and sustain the world, [at the same time as] it stages a more profound critique about who has to die in order to conceptualize world-making more generally. It captures not just the wonder and possibility of Other world-making but also and especially the violence that underwrites all world-making. This is not an indiscriminate violence but the specificity of anti-black violence, which reduces black life to a matter that cannot matter. Not subject but object, racial blackness is the brick and mortar of everyone else’s world-making. …Wells understands, as Afro-pessimist Frank B. Wilderson III writes, that black death “is the prerequisite for world-making at every scale of abstraction.”
Black Matter/ing: An Activist Poiesis
November 2018 – February 2019, Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College
As the 2018 Parker Faculty Curator of the Wright Museum of Art, Malaklou worked with students in her Fall 2017 and Fall 2018 “Black Lives (Don’t) Matter” class to expand Beloit’s collection to include contemporary pieces by black artist-activists. Notably, the Wright Museum had just one piece in its collection by a black artist (procured in 2015) before she undertook this project. Alison Saar delivered the keynote address for the opening and local artists Della Wells, Evelyn Patricia Terry, Rosy Petri, and Jesse Howard also attended.
exhibition statement:
This exhibition interrogates discourses of modernity and humanism that exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections.Its content takes seriously the fact that when Enlightenment thinkers defined the human, they could only ever arrive at a definition of the human’s Other — as the black African.
This exhibition thus asks how black life can matter as non-human life, further deliberating how black life might be sexed and/or gendered, thus rephrasing the “Black Lives Don’t Matter” refrain as a question for metaphysical philosophy: Can life matter if it is black? How are black lives sexed and/or gendered if they are not first recognized as human? How can black life be liberated from the alienation and surveillance of the white gaze?
If, as Jared Sexton notes, Black life cannot matter — cannot live — in “the world that the world lives in” — in what Hortense Spillers describes as our “American Grammar” — or, if black life can’t matter in language, because language reduces black people to objects, made alive only as un/gendered chattel beings; then poetry is the site where black life can and does matter. Within language, racial blackness exists as the in-between parts of speech, in the ‘break,’ having no essential form of its own. What racial blackness connotes, instead, is the indeterminate spaces of poetry or, more to the point, of poiesis and art-works: a metaphysical Otherwise where one makes something from nothing.
It is by subordinating language (i.e., the world) to poiesis and art-works that we begin to understand the function of what Frantz Fanon famously describes as “the leap”: an invention of the self that does not attempt to arrive at human being, that is to say, at the pinnacle or apex of existence. Stated another way: the antiblackness of the world “that the [rest of the world] lives in” need not be a closed door to relationality, but rather, can be a portal into an/Other sociality — one outside of humanist language and its structuring logics (i.e., grammar) of being and doing and knowing and feeling. This realm, in which poiesis/art is the non-space that allows for black mattering, demonstrates the unjust yet expanding freedom of blackness.
The selected works interrogate the relationship between the gaze and psychic attachments, for example, to the devaluation of black life; and gender and its raced expressions, including the racial politics of alienation and of its inverse: the im/possibility of black world-making. We hope that viewers will walk away from this exhibit with questions about the nature of humanism and its raced-cum-gendered exclusions, as well as with questions about what it might take for black life to matter against humanist odds.
