Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation

Contents

Acknowledgements

Our Mother, My Muse Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago

Part One

MORE BLACK AND MORE BEAUTIFUL: SOCIAL MEDIA & DIGITAL CULTURE IN THE REWRITING OF SELF

1 Regarding the Pain of Our Own: Jazmine Headley, Portraiture, and the Sorrow of Black Motherhood Brie McLemore

2 Beyond “Welfare Queens” and “Baby Mamas”: Low-Income Black Single Mothers’ Resistance to Controlling Images Jennifer L. Turner

3 Black Motherhood Online: A Reimagined Representation: A Conversation with Tomi Akitunde Kellie Carter Jackson

4 Thotty Mommies: The Erotic Potential of Black Mothers Online Marly Pierre-Louis

Part Two

“TURNING THE FACE OF HISTORY TO YOUR FACE”: SEEING THE REAL SELF THROUGH REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK MOTHERHOOD

5 Motherhood in the work of Deana Lawson — A conversation with the Artist Susan Thompson

6 Photographic Afterimages: Nationalism, Care Work and Black Motherhood in Canada Rachel Lobo

7- “I Like to Make Pictures of Children”: African American Women Photographers and Wielding the Weapon of ‘Motherhood’ Emily Brady

8 Losses Not to Be Passed On: Paula C. Johnson’s and Sara Bennett’s Portraits Rewriting (Ex-) Incarcerated Black Mothers Atalie Gerhard

9 Speaking of “unspeakable things unspoken”

Sasha Turner

Part Three “you Are Your Best Thing”: Self-care As A Site Of Resistance

10 Black Birth Matters - A Conversation with Andrea Chung and D’Yuanna Allen-Robb Nicole J. Caruth

11 Worth a Thousand Words: Visualizing Black Motherhood and Health Haile Eshe Cole

12 Three Black Mothers in a Cleveland Cabaret Rhaisa Williams

CONTENTS

Part Four

“IN SEARCH OF MY MOTHER’S GARDEN, | FOUND MY OWN”: BLACK FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE MATRILINEAL SPACE

13 Letter IV: Where Are They? - Mjothering R/evolutions Renée Mussai

14 Every Day is Mother’s Day in My Book: Black Motherhood in the Work of Nona Faustine Simmons Jonathan Michael Square

15 The Motherland Between Us Grace Aneiza Ali

16 The Impossibility of Breathing When the Sun Covers Your Face Marcia Michael

Part Five

“THE ASSERTION OF THE LIFEFORCE”: A SELECTION OF WORKS CURATED BY WOMEN PICTURING REVOLUTION

Afterword. Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

Contributors Artists

Colophon

311 321

Thank you to my family, my sons Marcel and little Naeem. You are my heart. To my dear and loving husband Mike. During the course of this book, we brought our little baby Naeem into the world. And through motherhood and Black motherhood in this particular moment, you have held my hand, held me as I’ve cried, and comforted me when I needed it most. You encouraged me to push through and inspire me more than you could ever know. Words cannot express how thankful I am for you.

Iam so thankful for the community of women who raised me and continue to provide guidance and love. For my rock, my mother Marcia Zoraida Bonitto. Thank you for loving me, believing in me and from an early age, showing me that Black girls and Black women could accomplish anything and everything. I am forever indebted to my grandmother, Rosetta Bonitto, who like so many grandmothers, took care of me so my mother could work. Thank you grandma, for ensuring your girls would always get an education.

I dedicate this book to the women in my family, the root of my Black matrilineage, those who always beckon me home.

—Zoraida Lopez-Diago

To my family Andrew, Noa, and Mateo for quietly supporting the late nights and early mornings dedicated to this project, I thank you. Together we create love and light in the everyday and I am endlessly in love with the home we’ve made. To my mama community, thank you for your deep and lasting commitment to mutual care. There is power where women co-create and I am indebted to the women artists in my life for your camaraderie and dedication to one another. To my students, time spent with you is a pleasure and privilege, Iam grateful for your willingness to stay curious and move deeper into your images. To my stepfather, my dad Larry Schultz, thank you for being there (for everything) and especially when the chips were down in Baltimore. I will never forget. To my siblings and especially my sister Teresa Gallaway for your unwavering big sister encouragement, which kept me going more times than you know, I thank you. And to our mother Jacqueline Anne Canossi Schultz who centered our lives in laughter and kindness, you are missed. Twenty-four years without you is absurd.

To the women lost to history or violence, unnamed, or renamed—this book is dedicated to you.

—Lesly Deschler Canossi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not be possible without the support of many, whom we'd like to acknowledge and thank. Thank you Leuven University Press for believing in this project. We deeply appreciate KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access and Knowledge Unlatched for making this work accessible, independent of one’s financial means. Thank you to our editor Mirjam Truwant for her extraordinary guidance, and just the right amount of impatience to bring what could have been an endless labor of love, to a beautiful end. Our gratitude extends to Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the International Center of Photography, and Fast Forward: Women in Photography, for their belief in the Women Picturing Revolution. In the early formation of Women Picturing Revolution, Suzanne Nicholas, Dr. Samuel K. Roberts, Lacy Austin, and Dr. Deborah Willis encouraged us to dream big. We extend a heartfelt thank you to the many contributors to this project, without your scholarship and artistic brilliance this would not be possible. It is in the shared spaces of conversation and collaboration that ideas such as this book, Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing are born.

We as co-editors of this volume we capitalize Black when we or essayists in this volume are referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. Through this effort, we hope to demonstrate how Black reflects a shared sense of community and identity for Black mothers throughout the African Diaspora.

OUR MOTHER, MY MUSE

SALAMISHAH TILLET AND SCHEHERAZADE TILLET

Growing up in Boston, in the late 1970s, we saw Black motherhood as inseparable from Black Glamour. Our mother, Volora, a young R&B and jazz singer, and model had two types of photographs in our apartment, professional photographs of herself stored in a black leather portfolio with riveted handles and color polaroid images taken by our father, which lived in our family albums. As the older sister, I adored a color photograph of our mother and our aunt, our father’s sister, Annette, modeling together, side by side. Pd return to the image over and over again, sometimes sharing with Scheherazade, and

Wes Williams, Mother modeling photograph at Wes Williams Studio in Boston, seven months pregnant with Scheherazade. 1978. Chromogenic print.

10 — 11

Lennox Tillet, Volora in the Wicker Chair (Our mother, age 19). 1975. Scheherazade Tillet, Asha, Age 12, Dancer, from series My Family Polaroid. Chair, 2018. Inkjet archival print.

together we'd stare at their slightly smiling faces to understand the magical process of Black women defining their own beauty.

As the younger sister, my favorite image was a photograph of our mother seven months pregnant with me as she gazed directly into the camera playfully twirling one of the golden woven ribbon braids in her hair. As early as four years old, I would whisper to Salamishah about this image right before we went to bed, and created my own fairytale in which we imagined our mother nesting and eagerly awaiting my birth. I immediately recognized the power of being able to tell the story of who we are, and who we could become, in pictures.

We were lucky that we had those family albums, and had the opportunity to press our tiny fingers against the padded album covers or delicately loosen those stuck together pages that sounded like sparklers going off when you tried to turn them. Image after image, we found slightly faded but beautiful portraits of our mother sitting stylishly in the iconic wicker chair with her hair beautifully braided. Through her gaze, we were able to see her strong sense of self as she navigated the harsh realities that lay beyond the frame of the

OUR MOTHER, MY MUSE picture and outside of our family home. When I (Scheherazade) began to document African-American girl leaders in Chicago, with whom we work within our organization A Long Walk Home, I immediately witnessed those same traits of self-possession and self-definition that my mother exuded when she was a young woman. They, like her, continue to inspire me and help shape my own representations of Black girls coming of age on their own terms.

Like many Black mothers, ours had to navigate the public demands of racism and sexism, and the gendered inequities of home life. For example, in the 1980s, as we were in the full throes of our Black girlhood, President Ronald Reagan demonized Black women as “Welfare Queens,” and canonized the stereotype that all Black mothers were destitute, bearing countless children, and taking advantage of the social safety net and social services. It was a lie.

But, despite the fact that most welfare recipients are white families, the image of the Welfare Queen was so successfully pernicious, that President Bill Clinton was able to rely on it to push through his massive “Welfare Reform” Bill, a decade later. That racist and sexist image—as well as that of “crack babies”—put Black mothers further under attack.

Against such a vicious backdrop, our mother, and Black mothers across the country, resisted these attacks by turning to each other, sharing the latest beauty and hair trends, staging family photoshoots, and teaching their children the value of self-presentation and self-representation. Such acts were deeply political and profoundly loving, and we both learned that Black motherhood is an embattled status, a place in which Black women fight for themselves, and their children. Glamour was not an anathema in such spaces, but one more strategy for these women to be their fullest selves.

But, even such gestures were limited by the respectability politics of their time. Now that I, Salamishah, am a mother of two young children, I also think about all that is missing from these photo albums. The police report of her sexual assault by a stranger late one night. Evidence of her body bruised by our step-father’s fists. Her quest to find the real identity of her biological father. Her sexual desires and intermittent romantic relationships. Her ambition to be a renowned jazz singer. And her most devastating tragedy of all, the loss of her mother, and her only son, our brother, Shaka at the young age of twenty-six due to a year-long battle with cancer, both within the same year.

These days, the image of the grieving Black mother has replaced the dominance of photographs from the 1960s of Black widows in mourning. Then, we saw Myrlie Evers, Betty Shabazz, and Coretta Scott King. Now, it is Sabrina Fulton (Trayvon), Lezley McSpadden (Michael), Geneva Reed-Veal (Sandra),

SALAMISHAH TILLET AND SCHEHERAZADE TILLET [2 — 13 l F te = oF =, x, =

ia

M

Scheherazade Tillet, At the Beginning (Salamishah, age 36, while pregnant with her first child). 2012. Inkjet archival print.

Gwen Carr (Eric), Lucia McBath (Jordan), and Tamika Palmer (Breonna). Their public mourning is in service of the movement for Black Lives Matter, but what is beyond the camera’s eye is the complexity of their rage, depression, and hope.

We must pay attention to these documents of their grief without overusing these images. We must refuse the impulse to freeze these women in the moment of their most insurmountable loss, and approach this moment and movement with the urgency that it requires, and the recognition of Black life that it demands.

In the final days of Salamishah’s pregnancy in May 2012, I photographed her wearing a blue sheer robe that we picked up at a vintage store. Reminiscent of our friend Mickalene Thomas’s paintings of Black women in repose, reclined on a chair or couch, I wanted to pay homage to the complexity of Salamishah’s identity and body as she understood it as she lay waiting and on the cusp of motherhood. The image is both intentionally nostalgic and undeniably modern—a symbol that we created together to make this moment in time as brand new.

OUR MOTHER, MY MUSE

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing brilliantly achieves this by challenging the norm and by recognizing that visual representations of Black motherhood and Black mothering are multidimensional, layered, and complicated. In this book, we find a retelling of history through carefully selecting and sharing images by Black women that reveal the myriad of emotions in our lives while elevating analysis that thoughtfully considers their past, present, and future experiences; it humanizes Black women, Black mothers, and all of their humanity.

SALAMISHAH TILLET AND SCHEHERAZADE TILLET 14 — 15

Another Way of Knowing

Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one’s status in society, “the mule of the world,” because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else-everyone else-refused to carry. We have also been called “Matriarchs,” “Superwomen,” and “Mean and Evil Bitches.” Not to mention “Castraters” and “Sapphire’s Mama.” When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in the farthest comer. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats. To be an artist and a black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it and yet, artists we will be. Therefore, we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know. I stress some of them because it is well known that the majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without “knowing” it, the reality of their spirituality, even if they didn’t recognize it beyond what happened in the singing at church-and they never had any intention of giving it up.’

— Alice Walker

A young Black female photographer sits in class at the Philadelphia College of Art in the mid-197o0s. During class and in front of a room full of students, her male professor tells her that she is “out of place and out of order as a woman.” He continues by telling her that all she could and would do is “have a baby when a good man could have had her seat.” The woman is “shocked into silence” but remains undeterred and continues to make photographs. Roughly twenty years later, a Jamaican-born, Black female photographer participates in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study

16 — 17

Deborah Willis, / Made Space for a Good Man, 2009. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI

Program. She is the first pregnant artist to do so. She tells people in her program that she is pregnant and was met witha response of “Oh my God, are you sure? What are you going to do?” She is outraged and knows that motherhood would not end her career.3

Less than ten years ago, a mother, a Black female photographer whose work includes documenting her family, enrolled in an M.F.A. program at a prestigious New York photography institution. A younger white woman who is also enrolled in the program, shares that her (the photographer’s) presence is “devaluing the degree.”

Proclamations of Black Motherhood

The stories described above happened to Dr. Deborah Willis, artist Renee Cox, and photographer Nona Faustine, respectively. In 2009, Dr. Deborah Willis revisited images she made of her pregnant body in the 1970s and created the triptych I Made Space for a Good Man, 2009. The text left to right reads “A woman taking space from a good man” | “You took space from a good man.” | “I made space for a good man.” In this work, she gazes squarely at the camera in a manner that forces the viewer to reckon with her body and presence in a manner that cannot be ignored.

For over thirty-five years, Dr. Willis has been a leading photography historian, authoring dozens of books focused on the intersection of history, race,

Renee Cox, Yo Mama's Last Supper, 1996. Five-color coupler prints. Courtesy of Renee Cox © artist Renee Cox estate and gender photography. Her many awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center. Her legacy of mentoring and uplifting Black women photographers has been monumental in shaping and shifting the historical, present, and future visual landscape.

Through visual representations of people from the African Diaspora, particularly Black women and mothers, artist Renee Cox reveals a new way of seeing our past, present, and potential future by positioning Black women as Afro-centric superheroes rich with sexual agency and power. From 1993-1996, Cox created Yo Mama, a series in which she embodied a Black Mother Goddess while challenging the whiteness of western religious iconography.° Inspired by Queen Nanny, an 18th-century iconic female figure in Jamaican history who helped free nearly 1,000 enslaved people on the island, Cox created Queen Nanny of the Maroons, a series of images exhibited at the Jamaican Biennial in 2006. By portraying 21st-century women and men of color in place of the Founding Fathers in The Signing, —Cox’s recent project, an ambitious 12-foot-long photograph— she serves a sharp response to Howard Chandler Christy’s painting, Scene at The Signing of the Constitution of the United States.’

Nona Faustine graduated from her program and in a few short years

Renee Cox, Yo Mama, 1993. Gelatin silver photograph, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Carol and Arthur Goldberg Collection. © artist Renee Cox

Nona Faustine,

The Two Queens, 2011.

Courtesy of the artist.

© Nona Faustine Simmons

Lower: End of Baby Days, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. © Nona Faustine Simmons her work had been shown at institutions including the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian and acquired by leading art organizations including Brooklyn Museum and the Carnegie Museum.

In her series Mitochondria’, Faustine offers representations of Black motherhood in photographs she has taken of herself, her mother, her sister, and her daughter in their shared home in Brooklyn, New York. In this work, Faustine creates images calling on the viewer to think about “how we (Black mothers) have mothered and sustained our families with love and richness,” and “the beauty of how we carry ourselves in our everyday lives. Or how we make and create out of nothing.”®

How do Black women subjected to the double oppression of racism and sexism use the camera to portray themselves truthfully? How do they, as photographer Ayana V. Jackson describes, fight “photography with photography?” In Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing, we ask how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates the interlocking Western socio-political structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her mother, her grandmother and so on. We buck these falsities by elevating analysis and visual representations that highlight the joy, depth, dynamism and intrinsic brilliance that are a part of Black motherhood. We are interested in filling the gaps that exist in photographic representation and disrupting the destructive, racist, and limiting image of Black motherhood.

The link between photography, representation and Black activism can be traced back to the early days of the medium when prominent abolitionists and orators Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass understood how images could mold narratives. Both Truth and Douglass knew that through photography, they could engage in what scholar Leigh Raiford calls critical Black memory, or how photography could serve as “an important resource for framing and mobilizing African American social and political identities and movements.”" Douglass frequently wrote about photography and deeply understood how it could serve as a necessary tool for Black people across the globe to be seen and represented as fully human. With this in mind, he demonstrated what Black freedom and dignity looked like—confident, in control and unafraid— when he posed throughout his lifetime and became the most-photographed person of the igth century. Fellow abolitionist, women’s rights activist and orator, Sojourner Truth sold carte de visites, or small-sized photographs often mounted on cardboard, which included the phrase “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth,” at her lectures and via the postal service to earn a living. As she became increasingly popular, Truth shrewdly registered her cartes de visite as engravings and in turn, legally owned the copyright of her image in her etchings. Upon this, Truth reflected that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.””

This double oppression of racism and sexism bound to the social stigmas of motherhood situates the overwhelming visual representation of Black motherhood as a site of grief and disempowerment, layered with mythologies tied to what Patricia Collins called controlling images.” In this, Black mothers are offered a limited script of mammy, matriarch, welfare queen or jezebel as they are not afforded the full range of emotional expression. In her 1993 essay Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood, Dorothy E. Roberts examines the interaction between racism and patriarchy in the social construction of motherhood. She argues that the “patriarchy denied to Black mothers the authority and joy of mothering which it allowed white mothers.” These beliefs, rooted in slavery, falsely portray Black mothers as less deserving of motherhood and have been prevalent throughout history. As early as the first photographs, the Black mother in pictures existed as a “faithful” wet nurse posing with her (white) charge in colonial family albums”. She is invisible and dehumanized while her own experience as a mother is denied. At the turn of the 2oth century when Black mothers were represented with their children, social workers and sociologists took photographs of young mothers and misleadingly positioned them and their families as poor and dependent on welfare; in exchange, the mothers received what was rightly theirs, access to health services, food and assistance obtaining employment. A deep and expansive exploration into the topic of Black women in photographic history can be found in The Black Female Body: A Photographic History by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams. Through their research, we see examples of European 19th century photography that used Black female bodies to support colonialism, scientific evolution via medical apartheid” and the sexualizing and fetishizing of Black women and girls. In Post-Emancipation

Carrie Mae Weems,

Welcome Home, 1978-1984.

Vintage gelatin silver print

with text, 8 1/2 x 13 inches.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems and Post-Reconstruction America, “the desire to act rather than be acted upon, to be a subject rather than an object, took hold with regard to representation.”* In contemporary image making, not unlike Truth’s radical understanding of the medium, Black women photographers “have used their own likeness and those of other black women to create an autobiography of the body and to develop themes of home, family gender, representation and identity in contemporary society.”

Family Pictures

In the early 1980s, while in graduate school, artist Carrie Mae Weems was documenting her own multigenerational family story as seen in her body of work titled “Family Pictures and Stories.” In this series, Weems photographs her family to provide an intimate and truthful look at African-American family life. Nearly forty years later, photographer Nona Faustine began the ongoing

Carie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up), 1990, gelatin silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems photographic series Mitochondria (2008-) working consciously to give her daughter a visual diary as evidence of how much she was loved.

Although Weems’ Family Pictures and Stories and Faustine’s Mitochondria are separated by time, both bodies of work serve as counterpunches to the 1965 report, “The Negro Family: A Case Study for National Action,” also known as the Moynihan Report. The report, which became one of the most controversial documents of the twentieth century, continues to reinforce racist stereotypes and paint a false and denigrating depiction of the Black family. Weems and Faustine not only rebuke false claims made in the report but expose a deeper and more complicated understanding of power dynamics, society, and history while also sharing sensitive and nuanced expressions of Black love.

In 1990 Weems created The Kitchen Table Series (1990), a twenty image and fourteen text panel series of staged narrative scenes centered around a kitchen table lit by a single light. She performs the role of the women, of which the characters of her relationships appear and disappear—friends, a lover, and children. The series became a seminal body of work and opened the way for future women artists, and Black women in particular. Speaking specifically about the image Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup), scholar Salamishah Tillet writes that the women and daughter pictured “see each other, their black woman and black girl selves, in spite of the gendered and racial invisibility into which they both were born.” Reflecting upon the image, she shares a memory of seeing her own daughter looking in the mirror and writes “reflected back is a child who hasn't been taught to un-love herself.”*°

This act of re-envisioning how we see and make images is one in which Black female artists are tethered to their matrilineal precursors. And the connection is not rooted in a legacy filled with guilt and burden, but rather, is full of devotion and love; Black women and artists bind themselves together in this manner to continue the quest for Black freedom, ensure their histories are not forgotten, and bring forward the spirit of their ancestors, both familial and artistic. This can be seen when Alice Walker designates her precursor an author of Black legend and Black female liberation (Zora Neale Hurston), a woman who facilitates what Adrienne Rich calls “re-vision” and who enables female possibility; her dedication, that is, her inscription and devotion to Hurston acknowledges that, without predecessors, a writer cannot write, since texts enable other texts.”

While Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing supports and centers the discussion surrounding motherhood in marginalized communities, we acknowledge there is much work left to be done and recognize that motherhood can be defined in many ways. Research on LGBTQA+

Black motherhood pioneered by scholar Mignon Moore as well as images taken by H. Lenn Keller, founder of California’s Bay Area Lesbian Archives, provide a more holistic view of how race, class, and gender identity intersect with family formation and societal acceptance. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: A New American Grammar Book” literary critic and Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers reminds us that “motherHOOD is a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women, those women whose legal rights to their children are never questioned, regardless of who does the labor (the how) of keeping them alive,” and continues, “MotherING is another matter, a possible action, the name for that nurturing work, that survival dance, worked by enslaved women who were forced to breastfeed the children of the status mothers while having no control over whether their birth or chosen children were sold away.” Motherhood encompasses care in its many iterations and mothering is not limited to gender identity as can be seen in the “house mothers in ball culture who provide spaces of self-love and expression forjas queer youth of color in the street.” Othermothering, which is rooted in principles of African collectivism, is defined as the practice by which female neighbors, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, or other women step in to care for children they have not biologically birthed. Where we find othermothering, we often find extended communities concerned with mutual care, public health and social activism. This can be seen when Black women artists Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, and Faith Ringgold, formed a childcare collective to help ensure fellow Black mother artists had time and space to create.” Most recently, we have seen how Black women continue to organize and manage critical mutual aide networks in response to COVID-19; for example, Tanya Fields, owner and founder of the Black Feminist Project, created a South Bronx-based food pantry program that ensured families in need received farm-fresh local produce, with no questions asked, while offering a paywhat-you-can model. Black motherhood and othermothering continue to exist in these ways and as “mothering of the mind,”* a means to share knowledge and build confidence through the sisterhood that binds Black women together.

How do Black women and Black mothers in particular, care for themselves and continue to claim spaces that rightfully belong to them with power and joy?

For nearly twenty years, photographer Sheila Pree Bright has documented the complexities of Black life. With her extensive body of work #1960Now, she

Sheila Pree Bright, Mothers, 2019. Tynesha Tilson (Atlanta); Wanda Johnson (Oakland, CA.); Felicia Thomas (Atlanta); Gwen Carr (New York); Monteria Robinson (Atlanta); Dr. Roslyn Pope, author of “An Appeal for Human Rights” (Atlanta); Dalphine Robinson; (Atlanta); Patricia Scott (Atlanta); Montye Benjamin (Atlanta); and Samaria Rice (Cleveland). © Sheila Pree Bright, courtesy of the artist

Sheila Pree Bright, Installation at 190 Pryor Street in Atlanta, 2019, © Sheila Pree Bright, courtesy of the artist has photographed protests across the country, fulfilling the role of timeless visual bonds that tether the Black Lives Matter movement of today and the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, together. More recently her lens has focused on the mothers who lost their children to police brutality and other acts of racial violence. When asked why she tirelessly documents the tensions and conflicts between police and the communities most affected by racial violence and police brutality, Pree Bright responds, “I was unwilling to sit on the sidelines.” “When a Black body is born, theyre born into a movement whether they’re conscious of it or not, and it’s called the Black Liberation Struggle,” “It’s a perpetual revolution.”