Manual / Issue 14

This anti-visibility is not the same as being invisible, rather it is the power to operate against systems of imperial domination, including the gaze. It asks: How do we force the gaze to surrender? What if explanation were off the table? By enabling a petit marronage that can be expressed in the visual and symbolic use of shadow, the gaze is challenged.

This issue of Manual and the accompanying exhibition (opening at the RISD Museum Fall 2020) posit that the right to opacity de-burdens contemporary work by artists who identify as Black and/or queer and/or feminist and/or non-binary and/or OVER IT-whatever sociocultural constriction “it” signifies. Opacity extends to artists who are simply not interested in explaining themselves or offering the emotional labor that is expended for inclusion. This right says, “I have given enough.” It also legitimizes and reclaims the shadow as a place of refuge, instead of being a place from which to escape.

-Anita N. Bateman

The RISD Museum’s fourteenth issue of Manual shines a light on the shadow, centering the black body as a site of possibility, liberatory self-awareness, radical non-conformity, and joyful defiance. This issue serves as a companion to the exhibition Defying the Shadow.

Manual 14: Shadows opens with an excerpt on the shadow from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, followed by an introduction by Dr. Anita N. Bateman, who elucidates: “Operating in the shadow comes with a legacy of resistance, both in spiritual and ideological forms.”

From the Files

Dominic Molon ponders the meaning of waiting for Nick Cave’s Soundsuit to arrive.

Artists on Art

Akwaeke Emezi eats the sun, removing the shadow by removing the light.

Shuriya Davis sings from Butterfly Hymnals That Won’t Disturb the Pleasant: Complacency, and Other Lullabies.

Kelly Taylor Mitchell reminds you that Black people don’t owe you shit.

Double Takes

Rashayla Marie Brown and Matthew Shenoda celebrate the love in Ming Smith’s Romare Bearden, New York, NY, 1977

Leslie Wilson and Emanuel Admassu consider sideways glances and multiple meanings in Aïda Muluneh’s Age of Anxiety

Andrea Achi and Gina Borromeo grapple with racial types, missing handles, and the long lost history of an ancient bust of an African child

Kevin Quashie and Sade LaNay take a peep at Black privacy, gender, and sensuality in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Last Portrait of the 18th Marquess

Portfolio

Radiant works and glorious shadows from across the RISD Museum’s collection

Object Lessons

Makeda Best highlights Calvin Burnett’s 1964 portrait of Sojourner Truth, and the photos Truth herself commissioned.

Melanee C. Harvey studies the preliminary works for and final version of Aaron Douglas’s Building More Stately Mansions.

Tayana Fincher casts new light on a 19th-century Nubian sandal, its largely obfuscated earlier history, and its purpose in a museum collection.

How To

Kate Irvin lays out how Harmonia Rosales and Fe Noel collaborated to Design the Black Imaginary to Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.).

Oluremi C. Onabanjo illuminates how Carrie Mae Weems haunts history.

Portfolio

Radiant works and glorious shadows from across the RISD Museum’s collection

Object Lessons

Makeda Best highlights Calvin Burnett’s 1964 portrait of Sojourner Truth, and the photos Truth herself commissioned.

Melanee C. Harvey studies the preliminary works for and final version of Aaron Douglas’s Building More Stately Mansions.

Tayana Fincher casts new light on a 19th-century Nubian sandal, its largely obfuscated earlier history, and its purpose in a museum collection.

How To

Kate Irvin lays out how Harmonia Rosales and Fe Noel collaborated to Design the Black Imaginary to Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.).

Oluremi C. Onabanjo illuminates how Carrie Mae Weems haunts history.

RISD Museum Interium Director: Sarah Ganz Blythe

Manual Editor-in-Chief: Sarah Ganz Blythe

Editor: Amy Pickworth

Art Director: Brendan Campbell

Graphic Designers: Jada Akoto, Everett Epstein, & Hilary Dupont

Photographer: Erik Gould (unless otherwise noted)

Printer: GHP