Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.

Surveillance is nothing new to Black folks. It is a fact of anti-Blackness.

​Not Only Will I Stare draws attention to the interventions made by artists whose works explore the surveillance of Black life. From policing and incarceration to profiling and algorithmic racism, surveillance permeates Black worlds and undermines Black resistance. Exemplary of this history is the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which ran from 1956 to 1971 and sought to disrupt, discredit, and destroy individuals, activists, and political organizations it deemed subversive, like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X.

When it comes to troubling surveillance and its various methodologies, these five artists—American Artist, Sadie Barnette, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sable Elyse Smith, and Ricky Weaver—employ strategies of invention, disruption, refusal, and care. Whether through sculpture, etched Plexiglas, Xerox-based collage, archival portraiture, video, or powdered graphite drawings, the works in this exhibition distill the productive possibilities of creative innovation and of imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state.

​This exhibition’s title is borrowed from a line in the essay “The Oppositional Gaze” by the late poet, professor, and Black feminist writer bell hooks, from her 1992 book Black Looks: Race and Representation. In that essay, hooks examines the role of Black spectatorship, the violent ways in which Black people are denied the right to look, the meaningfulness of counter-memory, and the critical practice of Black women’s rebellious gazes as “a way to know the present and invent the future.

​— Dr. Simone Browne, Curator, Associate Professor, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the University of Texas at Austin

Not Only Will I Stare is an exhibition at Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin, February 3 – May 21, 2022.

—
Title reference from The Oppositional Gaze by bell hooks.

The center of gravity

Art is restoration.
The idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life,
to make something that is fragmented
(which is what fear and anxiety do to a person)
into something whole.

— Louise Bourgeois

The memory ephemeral

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

— Gregory Corso, epitaph. January 17, 2001.

"I think that the monuments that are the most interesting are the monuments that either disappear, question themselves, that complicate some of the stories that we tell ourselves."

In the exhibition, A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer creates the anti-memorial, an ephemeral space to share the memories of those we've loved and grieve our collective loss.

A single body of sand produces each of the hundreds of portraits over the course of the installation. After a portrait is complete, the image tilts and the sand slides away to be recycled. In the face of an invisible virus, Lozano-Hemmer hopes to build “a sense of universal solidarity” and connect the individuals depicted in the installation. “The ephemeral helps us remember.”

-

Love is the message, the message is death

'Mid the discordant noises of the day I hear thee calling;
I stumble as I fare along Earth's way; keep me from falling.

Mine eyes are open but they cannot see for gloom of night:
I can no more than lift my heart to thee for inward light.

The wild and fiery passion of my youth consumes my soul;
In agony I turn to thee for truth and self-control.

For Passion and all the pleasures it can give will die the death;
But this of me eternally must live, thy borrowed breath.

'Mid the discordant noises of the day I hear thee calling;
I stumble as I fare along Earth's way; keep me from falling.

— Claude McKay, A Prayer

“Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death is a video by artist, director, and award-winning cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Set to the searing highs and lows of Kanye West’s gospel-inspired hip-hop track, “Ultralight Beam,” Love Is The Message is a masterful convergence of found footage that traces African-American identity through a vast spectrum of contemporary imagery. The meticulously edited 7-minute video suspends viewers in a swelling, emotional montage that is a testament to Jafa’s profound ability to mine, scrutinize, and reclaim media’s representational modes and strategies. Jafa discloses both his vulnerability and authority as an artist—what it means to contribute to the vast and complex terrain of Black representation. While Love Is The Message poignantly embodies the artist’s desire to create a cinema that “replicates the power, beauty and alienation of Black Music,” it is also a reminder that the collective multitude defining Blackness is comprised of singular individuals, manifold identities and their unaccountable differences.”

Charybdis

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The stories that we tell

Darling, I want you to buy me a car in my favorite color.
My favorite color is wine.
Also, give me a flower in a paper cup.
You shouldn’t ever leave me.
That’s a way to get your tuxedo cried on.

Darling, why don’t we share adjoining rooms?
Let’s get stewed to the eyeballs.
Now let’s have a fight while I brush my hair.
Can you be trusted?
So why don’t you come over to our table and introduce yourself?

— Chelsea Minnis, “Darling,” 2018.

The duty of disobedience

"Wading through my work, you must look through multiple layers, double meanings and symbols. My process combines found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures. These figures often take the form of young girls and increasingly Black boys, whose well being and futures are equally threatened because of the double standard of boyhood and criminality that is projected on them at such a young age. The boys and girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity. Each child has character and agency to find their own way amidst the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history."

— Deborah Roberts

Deborah Roberts is a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the USA and Europe.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it

The spectacle itself is weird and fantastic in the extreme.

The few guests asked by Loie Fuller to witness the performance in her studio, for it is not yet given to the public, are marshaled at one end of the gallery, with all lights put out. Through a slit in the curtains opposite a green glow is seen.

Suddenly an apparition comes into view.

It is a vague form, only distinguished by hundreds of tiny glow worms which it seems to carry on its flowing raiment. The tissue of twinkling stars floats about, circles, sweeps along the floor, or is wafted up until it assumes the shape of a great luminous vase.

The dancer’s face is never seen, her form feeing vaguely outlined by the glowing lights. The apparition vanishes and is followed by another more weird still. Above a perfectly invisible head, which you only suppose to be there, shines a bluish halo. Below, clothing an unseen figure, is a long robe, which is merely a great patch of the same ghostly light.

The apparition, slowly moving to a solemn rhythm, seems to invoke heaven, the halo being thrown backward when the head is, as you conclude, uplifted. Finally, the robe of light sinks on to the floor, when you infer that the figure kneels.

The second ghost vanishes, a third appears, a monster glowing moth, with shining antennae a foot long, eyes which are globes of light, and wings six feet high, glittering with numerous scrolls in all colors. The moth flutters round and round the studio, then goes out of sight, but reappears almost instantly, accompanied by a smaller, glowing white butterfly, which beats its wings over the monster luminous insect’s head.

Lamps being relighted, the visitors are brought back to reality out of ghostland...

— Los Angeles Herald, Volume XXXI, Number 215, 1 May 1904

Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) was a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques. Fuller combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design.

—
Title reference from Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

I learn by going where I have to go

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

— Theodore Roethke, “The Waking” (excerpt)

Adele Herter Seronde was an artist and organizer for Boston’s Summerthing Festival which she organized in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. She wanted to give people a way to express their anger through creativity by taking over decaying city walls and covering them in art. Her idea was to move the marches happening in the city streets into marches happening all over the city walls.

Gravity and entropy have it out inside of me

The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars. And the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways. If you wanted to trace back the cause of any event, you would have to go back all the way to the beginning of creation.

The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word, cosmos, means order. But this is not an order the human mind can ever comprehend, although it can sometimes glimpse it.

— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Title reference from 88 Ways by Mia Doi Todd.

Theirs is an act of grace, and it is given to those in Hell who can imagine Heaven.

Anarchic anger came to beat us down,
Until from all that battering we went numb
Like ravaged trees after a hurricane.
But in its way we saw fierce angels come—
Not gentle and not kind—who threshed the grain
With their harsh wings, winnowed from waste.
They brought love to its knees in fearful pain.
Such angels come after the storm is past
As messengers of a true power denied.
They beat us down. For love, they thrash us free,
Down to the truth itself, stripped of our pride.
On those harsh wings they bring us agony.
Theirs is an act of grace, and it is given
To those in Hell who can imagine Heaven.

—May Sarton, A Storm of Angels

Association for Women’s Rights in Development

Center for Reproductive Rights

Global Fund for Women

Global Grassroots

Happy Period

International Alliance of Women

International Center for Research on Women

International Women’s Day

International Women's Health Coalition

National Organization for Women

Planned Parenthood Action Fund

Pro Mujer

UN Women

Womankind Worldwide

Women for Women International

Women’s Environment & Development Organization

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

Women’s Refugee Commission

World Pulse

Field of Otherness

I want a field of otherness where people understand to have been a Jew in Germany was other—and what was it like to be other in space and time?

— Peter Eisenman

this is
a reckoning with those in silence —
those who slice the lines to divide us
this is
a reckoning with those who will deliver
the coming violence

Once the word is uttered aloud, there is a seismic shift. You will feel it.

“Automatic Earth refers to what I see as a “blue print” that exists within nature; a plan within each organism to automatically generate a particular form or pattern that is then, inevitably flawed. I approach these broken patterns within the landscape as allegories for human emotional experience. It is where the pattern breaks that we are told something: a draught, a trauma, an interaction, the slash of a chainsaw…. a crack in the earth. The flaws in these pre-destined forms become a record of time and of labor and they tell the story of the life that made them.”

— Klea McKenna, Artist Statement

Title reference from Hospice/Honeymoon by Joyce Carol Oates

Kind of like the Cosmos

Where do these ideas come from?

Well, they’re everywhere.

How do they get into you?

I don’t know. I mean it’s like… there’s so many ideas, right? There’s so many books to read, and movies to watch, and poems, and places, and things that I live in a constant state of overwhelmingness… almost complete arrest. Because it’s the infinite detail in the information. It’s so vast that it’s incomprehensible.

Kind of like the cosmos.

—

Debbie Millman interviews Dustin Yellin for Design Matters

Lean back and be floating in air

My father taught us to trust our intuition, y’know... my mother would always say that, believe your intuition. You always get in trouble when you don’t pay attention to it. And I think that, not in other aspects of my personal life or daily life do I do that, but always in my art I do that.

And sometimes I don’t like where my art is going, but I always know that… y’know, I always go like, why do I have to be making these things? It’s embarrassing or something, but I always trust that, that that’s what’s appropriate for me to be doing.

I have no innate ability for doing things physically, so I have to really learn and try to do it. And to me that’s the pleasure in it.

Kiki Smith tells Stories

The Arrow Paradox

“This argument against motion explicitly turns on a particular kind of assumption of plurality: that time is composed of moments—or ‘nows’—and nothing else.

Consider an arrow, apparently in motion, at any instant. First, Zeno assumes that it travels no distance during that moment—‘it occupies an equal space’ for the whole instant. But the entire period of its motion contains only instants, all of which contain an arrow at rest, and so, Zeno concludes, the arrow cannot be moving.”

— Zeno’s Paradox, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Solange Ferguson | Metatronia (Metatron's Cube), 2018

Metatronia is a collaboration between Solange and Uniqlo; the artist explores “the relationship of movement and architecture as a meditation… centering around building frequency and creating charge through visual storytelling.”

We before us

“It starts with a smell, her smell, lingering on my fibers, clinging to my ankles. That is how the all-day texting starts. That is how ribs cave in. She turns on her back, pushing her self into me. We spend years of nights on this bed, tongues and limbs folded into one another, knotted together. My palm touches the lilac tattoo on her back. We become the face in the petals, we are inked with the weeping woman, we carry her moans in our spines as our bones bend to our shape. The sun starts to creep through the cracks between the blinds. It’s always the scent of her that endures: in the pillows, in the sweaters, in the blankets, in the couches. She takes a deep breath and turns to face me, eyes open just enough. It’s another morning under our tongues, another sun on her skin reminding me of the malleability in my chest.”

Jorge Quintana
I am an undocumented Xicano poet and activist. My poetry revolves around my thirst for love and my conceptions and deconstruction of manhood and my culture.
 

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Collective conscience, constructed forms

“The political world was anathema; its activists both retro and progressive, seemed wrongheaded and dreamy. The revolutionaries, armed or peaceful, had no notion of what should happen after they “won.” Who would rule? The “people”? Please. What did that mean? The best outcome would be to introduce a new idea into the poplation that a politician would act on. The rest was theater seeking an audience.”

— Toni Morrison, “God Help The Child” (2015)

Where we belong

“Knowing that she was about to die, my aunt said that she would have less regret about leaving this world if she knew that she would still be able to send letters.

I feel that my camera acts as an antenna – to receive signals carrying urgent messages from the lost lives and objects that fill the air around us. I believe that it is this frantic whispering of death that pushes me to take photographs, and enables me to continue living.”

— Akiko Takizawa, Artist Statement

either/or

“With respect to love we speak continually about perfection and the perfect person. With respect to love Christianity also speaks continually about perfection and the perfect person. Alas, but we men talk about finding the perfect person in order to love him. Christianity speaks about being the perfect person who limitlessly loves the person he sees.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, “Works of Love“ (1847)