Spotlighting Black Art: Q&A with Kemi Adeyemi

The University of Washington and the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity are pleased to recognize Kemi Adeyemi for Black History Month. Adeyemi is an associate professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and director of The Black Embodiments Studio. She is the author of the book “Feels Right: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago.” Adeyemi earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. We salute Kemi’s efforts to create powerful community spaces to see, write and talk about contemporary Black art.

We had a chance to speak with Kemi about her experience with Black art, writing about Black art, and what she looks forward to next with The Black Embodiments Studio.

Q. Tell us about The Black Embodiments Studio? How did you think of it?

I got my first three years of funding from the Simpson Center, which allowed me to create The Black Embodiment Studio (BES) and also have a space to exercise my thinking in ways beyond the classroom or research. I came from Chicago, and I had a huge culture shock coming to Seattle. My first question to myself was: What can I set up here to make this place livable for me, to create the environment that I want to see and participate in? How can I access the University’s resources and make them available in different kinds of ways to the community? That was really the primary force behind starting The Black Embodiment Studio.

I was also coming to Seattle in a time when arts writing had all been largely defunded in the city. The internet had changed in a way where art writing wasn’t profitable. In a small or midsize city, a healthy arts ecosystem requires arts writing. It requires discourse. I came to the city at the time where I felt like there was a really vibrant art scene. But without a critical writing arm, it’s just stagnant. Artists make work, but they don’t get feedback. And when they don’t get feedback, their work doesn’t progress. So, what can the University of Washington, which has thousands of people who are so skilled in so many ways, do or offer, to allow people to use that university training in other public forms? The BES started as a graduate training lab, to give graduate students the opportunity to learn how to write about art, to flex that creative muscle outside of the classroom, to loosen up our academic language and write for the public in certain ways. That was the first goal of the BES.

I started building up public programming alongside that, like inviting Black artists, writers, curators, to town to give a talk. I was training people and writing about Black art in the city, and I realized there’s no place to put it. I started a journal, A Year in Black Art, to publish that writing. Building the BES has been really rewarding because we, as faculty members, also need to use our brains outside of the classroom. Even though I’ve been working on the BES as an additional project in addition to my regularly taught courses, since it started in 2017, I still feel energized by it.

Q. Tell us about your community work at the UW and the philosophy behind it.

I think whether it’s in my classroom or through the BES, I’m primarily concerned with giving people structure where they feel like their voice is certainly heard, but also that it’s valued. And that’s a tricky thing to do. When we’re in a classroom, for example, historically we presume that the professor is the authority in the room. So, the challenge of the teacher is to say to the person sitting in the classroom seats, “No, no, you are just as important to this conversation as me.” The key to building community in the classroom, in particular, is patience. Because that patience allows people to take the time that they need to enter into the conversation in the way that they need or in the way that they’re practicing right now.

With the BES, my belief is that arts writing is not complicated. Literally anybody can do it. We have set up a lot of explicit and implicit rules that suggest only certain kinds of people have the skills to write about art. And there are ways that we can dismantle that expectation by, for example, dismantling degree-granting programs in arts writing. But we can also do it in smaller scale ways by just teaching people some of the basics of that specialized language that we believe dictates who is qualified to write about art and not. And I think that too, along with patience, is giving people opportunities to take ownership over those words, filter them through their own experiences and produce new words about it.

You just have to give people the space and the time to do that. When that happens, people then feel like they are in community with other people because they feel like they are in conversation with other people—and that that conversation is leading towards something.  I think that patience allows for that communication, that conversation and that shared goal-building.

Q. What are you excited about when you think of what’s to come?

I’m really interested in how the BES can function as a node on a larger network that provides more sustainable opportunities for writers, artists and editors to do their work. It would be great if the BES can act as some sort of platform, or interlocutor, or a funding machine. I just want to be sure that people have the opportunity and the structure of support to be able to create Black art and create discourse around Black art. This year, I started an Editorial Fellowship, where somebody who’s gone through our Arts Writing Incubator returns and then takes over the publication of the journal. I’ll be doing more iterations of Current Resident, a public art project where the BES commissions a Black artist to create work that is inserted into the “shared mail package,” sometimes known as a grocery circular, full of coupons and ads that are sent to tens of thousands of people every week. In the art world we really wring our hands about making art accessible. The answer was very simple to me: just distribute it for free to the most amount of people as possible. We’ve done two iterations of Current Resident, sending Ari Glass’ work to 150,000 people in multiple zip codes on the South End of the city and sending Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo’s work to 25,000 people in [the zip code] 98112.  I’m also in the early development stages of a public-access style show, akin to Ways of Seeing and Art 21 and Masterclass that introduces people to Black art critics who also teach us how to experience and talk about art created by Black and Brown people.

I like to do arts programming that doesn’t require you to show up in a fixed way. With Current Resident, you might not even see the art amidst all your other pieces of mail, or you’ll handle it for a few minutes and throw it away. I like that you can ultimately think and feel about it, without any prescribed interactions to justify the value of the art.