BLACK FEMINIST HEALING ARTS: A MAKING OF PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS
. . .
– the inception –
It was Summer 2020, at the height of the pandemic, amidst erupting waves of Black grief. And there I was, sittin’ up in my room, preparing to teach my very first university course amidst a global chorus of righteous rage.
I wanted to curate refuge. An invitation to learn from Black women new models of care amidst crisis. Something creative, and capacious enough to hold both horror and healing. I witnessed myself as I struggled with language, scribbling a string of key words in my journal that might encompass this intent.
Blackness. Wellness. Womanhood. Womanism. Art. Healing. Wholeness.
I toiled with each phrase for hours as I searched for the heading of my syllabus. Then suddenly, it came to me, almost ancestrally, like a scripture sent in sacred form from women of my lineage –
Black. Feminist. Healing. Arts. Black Feminist Healing Arts. #BlackFeministHealingArts
– the inspiration + intention –
Black Feminist Healing Arts became a sacred foundation for my life’s work. What started as an attempt to hold students through quarantine developed into an expansive container of care that I curate with Black women at the center.
Black Feminist Healing Arts is a theoretical framework for the experimental practice of using art and ritual to cultivate healing amidst structural and institutional violence. It is also a pedagogy, a methodology, and a praxis that is embodied and communal in nature. It is a method for researching and teaching, for creating and convening. A decolonial orientation to the work. It centers artistry as an essential tool for spiritual, ancestral, and somatic well-being. And it celebrates the healing power of everyday Black women’s ingenuity. A merging of Black feminist care work (Sharpe, Tillet, Hill-Collins) and womanist creativity (Walker, Gipson, Moore), it is a Black feminist way of thinking about art and healing, and a womanist way of being in praxis that honors the fullness of our care work.
Deeply inspired by Alice Walker, Black Feminist Healing Arts celebrates “the far-reaching world of [us] creative Black wom[e]n” (238), who “love music. Love dance. Love the moon. Love the Spirit… Love the Folk. Love [our]self[s]. Regardless” (xii). It honors “our mothers who were not famous,” (239) our sisters, our homegirls, our kin, our care, and all the ways we grieve. How we “pull out of ourselves… [this] vibrant, creative spirit that… [we have] inherited… [that] some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know” (237 & 239). In this way, it honors politic and play, poetics and prose, and the birthing of creative life force energy.
This work is done with deep reverence for Black women who paved the way. Toni Brown. Valerie Boyd. Zora Neale Hurtson. Ntozake Shange. Lucille Clifton. Audre Lorde. June Jordan. Vèvè Clark. Barbara Christian. Kenyatta Hinkle. Simone Leigh. Karen Senefuru. Amara Tabor-Smith. Ashara Ekundayo. Asè. Asè. Asè.
And it is birthed from a long genealogy of Black Feminist Healing Artists. Poets. Painters. Singers. Sculptors. Choreographers. Curators. Photographers. Altar-makers. Women who adorn. Everyday folks like the homegirls I heal with. Homegirls who struggle with housing insecurity, who make gardens of tent cities in Oakland. Women like my Mama, who returned to crochet at age thirty eight as a balm for her depression. Detroit’s daughter. Mamie’s daughter. And Grandma Mamie, who’d throw a record on and sing along like she just got signed to Motown. And Grandma Ethel Mae, who’d sew to pass the time amidst the torture of Georgia misogynoir (Bailey & Trudy, 2018). And Grannie Annie, who heard ancestral voices as a Gullah Geechee girl child in the backwaters of South Carolina. Who speaks to and through me as an ancestor today. Who guides my spirit art praxis.
I, too, am a part of this lineage. My inner[blackgirl]child, my inner teen, all the parts in between and beyond. The girls in me who taught me how to heal deep in quarantine. Through left-hand drawings and watercolor paint, play with portraits and poems. I curated a world between journal pages as the world caved in on me. Crafted an art praxis that promised to hold me as horror cracked me open. Cradled myself in small corners of rooms through stickers and stamps and glue. Got messy. Got ugly. Gave permission for imperfection. Little fingers fooled with frets of a guitar, flimsy and uncertain. Body danced a make-shift ballet to Beautiful Chorus as I cried, isolated, in my room.
In 2020, I allowed myself to create, freely, in all the ways I needed for my healing. I let it be multi-medium, multidisciplinary, amateur, and unbound. This liberatory orientation to creative process is also at the core of Black Feminist Healing Arts Praxis; the embodied healing journey I cultivated in quarantine laid the grounds for this work.
– the intervention –
Integrative Medicine and Art Therapy, as subdisciplines, have enhanced the ways we think about alternative care models beyond the clinic. Yet, little has been written about how everyday Black women find healing at the merging of the two. While there is a long lineage of Black women theorists who have written on art and healing, health sciences has been reluctant to make room for these interventions. Black Feminist Healing Arts (BFHA) expands this discourse by bridging gaps between academic disciplines and community audiences. It places therapeutic arts in conversation with holistic medicine to celebrate how ordinary Black women enliven and invent the care solutions we need.
In theory, Black Feminist Healing Arts centers our diasporic creativity as a critical source of knowledge that broadens traditional understandings of wellness. And in praxis, it expands limiting notions of healing arts to meet the needs of everyday Black women.
BFHA holds an expansive definition of healing arts at the center; a healing art is anything we make that gets us closer to our wellness. And BFHA is particularly concerned with art-making that is first and foremost engaged for our healing. Not presentation, performance, nor professional gain, though that may later be an outcome. But BFHA is most interested in the art we make for the sake of tending wounds and alchemy.
Like hair braiding and twerk dancing, jewelry-making and quilting, beading and weaving by the altar. Like a selfie. A caption. A reel. All art. A song. A dance. A slay. All art. All the ways that we are makers in our lives allow us to be healing artists. We are healing and making, creating and sustaining. Our survival itself, an art form. These everyday ordinary arts and crafts are embodied and somatic in nature. They serve as sacred cartographies, a mapping of sorts, for how we return self to body.
Black Feminist Healing Arts invites beloved community to learn from Black women new ways to be well. And it invites homegirls to marvel at our genius for the healing that we know in our bones, that we inherit as ancestral birth rite (Walker, 239). It is a holding of space for the holistic healing process within and beyond the self, the sanctuary, the classroom, and the community. And it is an honoring of creative expression as it exists within us all.
What I have found from nearly ten years of doing Black women’s healing work is that we are all artists, in our own way, in our own right. When oppressed peoples connect with the creative life force energy that exists within us, we allow ourselves to tap into a healing power that transcends the bounds of space and time. This healing power connects us with our bodies, our ancestors, our spirit guides, and frees us up, even if just in small moments. And that is the essential essence of Black Feminist Healing Arts; it’s an embodied way of knowing and being that places care and creativity at the center of our collective visions for liberation.
– the impact –
In 2015, I founded blackwomxnhealing – an intergenerational wellness collective that curates courses, exhibits, publications, and care circles with Black women at the center. What I came to realize, through my 2020 course, is that the work I’d been doing with blackwomxnhealing was offering Black Feminist Healing Arts to everyday Black women. The Black Feminist Healing Arts Framework became a sacred grounding for me; it gifted me language to articulate the purpose work I’d been doing for years within and beyond the academy.
In 2022, I created the UCSF REPAIR Communiversity Certificate Program, where university folks and community folks learn alongside each other. The first course I offered, in Spring 2023, was a Medical Anthropology elective, entitled #BlackFeministHealingArts. I was additionally invited to co-found The Black Feminist Healing Arts Lab by beloved mentors Adeola Oni-Orisan and Ugo Edu, who had also been thinking about and practicing Black feminist healing arts through their Collaboratory for Black Feminist Health & Healing.
From courses on Black Birthing and Matrilineal Healing to local exhibits on homegirl sanctuary, Black Feminist Healing Arts continues to serve as a container of care for community. It meets Black women where we are and loves us in fullness from that place. And it affirms a radical wellness vision for how we get more free – through creation, curation, communal care, healing, and the arts.
. . .
*deep gratitude to the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, where I currently serve as a 2024 Poet in Residence. to Lilith Todd for editorial support. to Adeola Oni-Orisan, Ugo Edu, & our Black Feminist Healing Arts Lab AFUBU Soul Tribe for beautiful collaborations rooted in deep ethics of care. to my mother(s), mentors, ancestors, and homegirls who deeply inspire this work. & to my beautiful husband for all the ways you hold me through it and remind me who it is i am <3
& additional gratitude to Karen Senefuru, curator of The Black Woman Is God, whose 2017 San Francisco exhibit was my very first invitation to seeing myself as a curator as an artist. you showed me what was possible by being in your gifts and for that i will always be grateful.
– REFERENCES –
Bailey, M., & Trudy. (2018). On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 762–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395
Bambara, Toni C. The Salt Eaters. New York: Random House, 1980.
botts-ward, reelaviolette. mourning my inner[blackgirl]child. Nomadic Press. 2021.
Boyd, Valerie. Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic. Lookout Books.
2022.
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York, Scribner, 2003.
Brandy. Sittin’ Up in My Room. Waiting to Exhale. 1995.
Gipson, Leah. “Envisioning Black Women’s Consciousness in Art Therapy” in Art Therapy for Social Justice. Routledge. 2018.
Hill-Collins, Patricia. WHAT’S IN A NAME?: Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond. The Black Scholar. Volume 26, No. 1. 2001.
Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.
Routledge Press. 1990.
Hill Collins, Patricia. Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology; Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief. Yvonna S. Lincoln, Norman K. Denzin. AltaMira Press. 2003
Hogan, Susan. Healing Arts: The History of Art Therapy. London, Jessica Kingsley, 2001.
Moore, J. R. V. (2016). African American Quilting and the Art of Being Human: Theological Aesthetics and Womanist Theological Anthropology. Anglican Theological Review, 98(3), 457-478. https://doi.org/10.1177/000332861609800302
Richardson, J.L. (2018). Healing Circles as Black Feminist Pedagogical Interventions. In: Perlow, O., Wheeler, D., Bethea, S., Scott, B. (eds) Black Women’s Liberatory Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65789-9_16
Shanklin Roberts, I. (2023). Art therapy & contemporary black women: Moving through stress, anxiety, and depression (Order No. 30524217). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2833698704). Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/art-therapy-amp-contemporary-black-women-moving/docview/2833698704/se-2
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: on Blackness and Being. Duke University Press. 2016.
Tillet, Salamishah and Tillet, Scheherazade. “‘You Want to Be Well?’ Self-Care as a Black Feminist Intervention in Art Therapy.” in Art Therapy for Social Justice. Routledge Press. 2018.
