September 28 - October 21, 2016
Asylum is a reflection of the continual loss of individual members of our neighborhoods, communities and society at large to a violent and racist police state. We take this month to consider and understand their absence, not as abstract symbols, but as a permanent deficit that will never be restored, one which grows with each passing day. Asylum is both a rupture in the national silence and a public and private contemplation of the value of human life.
The Storm Before the Storm
by Melanie Stevens
September 2016: The artist we had hoped to show for our second exhibit fell through, and we were all dressed up with no art to go, so to speak. Simultaneously, there seemed to be wave after wave of not only Black people being murdered by police, but the perpetrators being acquitted of all charges, in most cases not even facing a trial.
It’s hard to feel like your life is worth something in these extremes.
And insult to injury, harder still to live in a city in which most of the people around you refuse to acknowledge the gravity of those killings. And to be in academic and professional settings where most of your colleagues either don’t know or don’t care the silent war that is being waged by police officers against Black people and POCs.
Do you know what that’s like? To live in a constant state of fear that your existence might be marked as inconsequential while the people around you (some of them your friends, co-workers, lovers, etc) attempt to convince you that you are overreacting or, worse yet, imagining things?
Most Black people know.
We decided to press pause, and use the space to create an environment for conversation and contemplation of the lives lost: not just as symbols or hashtags, but as human beings, complete with every gift and breath and movement that a person contributes to the society around them.
Nat Turner Project created a video, comprised of portraits of the people who had been killed by police, which was projected onto one of the walls in the large corner stall of the “men’s” bathroom on a continuous loop. During the month, as a new life was lost to the violence, their photo would be added to the video. It started at about three minutes long. By the end of the month, it was almost six minutes.
We took September to recognize and mourn those losses, and the many more to come.
-Melanie Stevens
the barba shop
by maximiliano
growing up my brother taught me everything,
he was my compass
and the answer to all the questions i never knew i had.
he was the blueprint of cool.
i was born in 1989
and spent the early 90’s in dayton, ohio.
when i wasn’t at school or my house, my brother and i
would be in our grannye’s
(nancye c. donaldson, they called her fancye nancye cos she spelled her name with an e and drove a mercedes, rev. harris, the pastor of her lifelong church, zion baptist, would say sister d in her white chariot, her mercedes was white, her second one.)
basement.
in the time of california love part ii music video and like usher my way,
and marquez houston singing in the rain about some girl, idk.
he was my standard, and being cool he was always fresh and put together, and a major part of that
was of course,
the hair cut,
the barba shop.
as little kids in dayton we would go with our granddad (our parents worked a lot so we spent a lot of time with our maternal grandparents) to the barba shop which was located behind a blue house.
as a little kid the hardest thing was to sit still,
even when hands manage the direction of your head,
eyes so firmly pressed closed
as to not have any stray hairs get in,
get maybe a 0 up to a 1 on the sides as it fades up to a 3 or 4,
and a final touch of one to two
horizontal lines on the left or right side on the head
