An Essay by Anita Sharma on Comfort and Care
Communities of care are sustained by rituals of regard.
– bell hooks
In her 2019 book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, writer, activist, and feminist, bell hooks explains how the context of community is so important in cultivating gratitude. “Communities of care are sustained by rituals of regard,” she explains. Let’s magnify this message. Imagine if you will, a world where gift-giving is synonymous with community care. What might this look like? For me, this signals an important mandate: what are our own rituals of regard and how are we uplifting our changemakers?
In a society where thankfulness is foundational and gestures of gratitude are the norm, interconnectedness prevails. This creates a space for unequivocal community building and enables wholehearted interactions. Artists Friday, Loni Johnson, and Chire “VantaBlack” Regans continually create spaces where transformative acts of care are possible. For them, this act begins at home, in The Front Room. Here, they have created a refuge as well as a place of possibility, where the past, present, and future are reimagined. In this space, rest and resistance can co-exist. Through their multidisciplinary social and studio art practices, they have forged enduring pathways of belonging and inclusion for Black women, girls, and communities of color. Their visionary practices have impacted all of us, in monumental ways.
What offerings and “rituals of regard” can each of us embrace and bring to The Front Room? From each of these artists, we have learned that caring for the community is not optional, so let’s remove obstacles from their path. We have learned that a call to action is an invitation and everyone is welcome, so let’s do more than just show up. In the movement for liberation, we all have a responsibility, so let’s build a communal scaffold and amplify their messages.
As pioneers of memory work, they are activating new models of engagement for Black youth, so let’s give them an enduring platform. Friday’s iconographies revive and propel a visual language that is rooted in the Black experience. She presents a critical counter-narrative that rejects dominant cultural assumptions, so let’s squash the dominant culture. Loni Johnson’s altars teach us with powerful images of sisterhood that ancestry matters, and that our personal and cultural geographies are potent markers for reinforcing identity, so let’s multiply these spaces. VantaBlack’s mural-making, portraiture, and sculptural interventions illustrate that activist art is a powerful vehicle to combat erasure, so let’s rewrite history together. Let this be a Call to Action Miami.
The Front Room: A New World School of the Arts Alumnae Exhibition with artists Friday, Loni Johnson, and Chire “VantaBlack” Regans
Curated by Pamela “Zee” Lopez del Carmen
On view through January 13, 2023
New World Gallery
25 NE 2nd St., Miami, FL 33132.
Free and open to the public. Special thanks to Mitchell Wolfson Sr Foundation for supporting our partnership with New World School of the Arts.
ANITA SHARMA
Anita Sharma is a Miami-based archivist, researcher and collections manager with over twenty years of experience in the field of Visual Arts Archiving. She is the founder of WAAM (Women Artists Archive Miami) and specializes in community-based archiving initiatives, digital archiving practices and legacy preservation. She has worked at libraries, archives, museums and private collections in the US, England & India, including the British Library, Arani & Shumita Bose Collection, Rubell Collection, Debra & Dennis Scholl Collection, Zarina Hashmi Archive, Frost Art Museum, Aditi Singh Archive & SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature & Arts Archive).
Video by Juan Luis Matos and Preguntas Studio