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.
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Title reference from The Oppositional Gaze by bell hooks.