The Black Noetic

This experimental documentary, which lends the exhibition its title, follows Black individuals—including the artist—as they intuit and improvise their ways through the world. In the chapter on washington-queen, we see the queer nonbinary photographer receiving hormone replacement therapy and meditating on themes of gender, difference, constraint, and freedom, and how they experienced the limits and possibilities of all those things while playing basketball growing up and negotiating their identity as an adult.

Combining photography, moving image, and archival material, this multipart video portrait draws from personal accounts and broader histories stitched together with textual sources, including the talk “Transgender Solidarity” by counselor and theologian Pamela Ayo Yetunde and poet Kevin Young’s 2012 The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. In his collection of essays illustrating Black strategies of storytelling, lying, and improvising, Young writes, crucially: “If we cannot first imagine freedom, we cannot actually achieve it. Freedom, like fiction and all art, is a process in which the dream is only the first part.”

As we start to imagine freedom, washington-queen observes here, there may not be a clear blueprint to follow. Resume at the Point of Interruption illustrates how the Black figure, tasked with envisioning a new and different future, responds to obstacles, conflicts, crossroads, and threats with gestures—a fake-out, a doubling-back, a pivot—that may appear illogical, but which are in fact the creative gestures that will allow them to chart a course to elsewhere.

Field Goal, Goal Tend draws on this deep history and links it to present modes of discipline, surveillance, and labor that exist in the field of sports. The work includes a sculpture of a fan-shaped basketball blackboard covered with handprints stained from nicotine chew and other farmed products. Above the sculpture, a CCTV camera streams a live feed of visitors in the gallery—prompting the viewer to become conscious of their own surveillance as they observe Black art and the Black subject in history, and their own relationship to all those things.

The work also includes yellow gym wall pads beneath the sculpture and yellow barricades surrounding it. On the road, yellow is a color of caution, of yielding. But yellow can be many more things besides. For washington-queen, it can be the color of optimism, a color of the mind, a color that prompts mental agility and heightened perception. The artist associates the color yellow with the themes engaged by their research and the resulting artworks they create. Yellow is the hopeful color of the freedom that foregrounds this exhibition—a freedom that requires creativity, improvisation, and artfulness to be achieved.

Unmanned cameras like the “slam cam” and “sky cam” were introduced to basketball courts in the 2000s for instant replays and call reviews, both for the benefit of spectators and for referees to make more precise rulings based on evidence that would escape the naked eye.

The “slam cam” is a motion camera installed behind the backboard and on the shot clock to capture action at the rim. These cameras allow us to glimpse players laying up the basketball, dunking, rebounding, blocking the ball, or striking the blackboard—all gestures that demonstrate particular feats of athleticism.

Proof of Flight is a durational video composed of footage from a “slam cam” mounted on a sculptural backboard marked with prints made from slapping hands stained with nicotine chew. The work ties the surveillance and commodification of the Black sporting body to the surveillance and commodification of the Black enslaved body enlisted in crop production. The repeated, looped striking gesture illustrates how a body that is transformed into both product and producer gradually gets worn out, used up, and discarded over time.

I was raised to be an athlete. My sisters and I participated in organized sports since we were five, our athleticism and church upbringing set the tone for us being and becoming in the world. Tee-ball baseball was the introduction, softball kept us ambitious, however, basketball gave me an identity. It brought a sense of authority and discipline, driving me toward an unceasing evolution as a player, as a creator. In my youth, AND1 Mix Tape Vol. 1 (1998) and AND1 Mix Tape Vol. 2 (1999)1 were resources studied religiously until the tapes unraveled.

As a child, I memorized the streetball player’s mastery on the court. In dream-state, I envisioned my body within their performing / competing bodies, knowing their perception on the court. I was expectant and capable because I could see it. And, because I could see it, I knew it. Every day, after finishing my homework, I would pass up the hoop on our rooftop for the sidewalk and dribble inside the squares: high-stepping, pounding the ball into a cross-over, head fake hesitation, between the legs and around the back on any imaginary defender that stepped to me.

The isolation was voluntary, the imagining was a result. It was meditation wrapping myself up in memory and vision, in mimicry of motion not my own but becoming mine. In these moments, my focus separated my body from the surrounding world. The repetition of movement sparked an energy inside of me. Every elusive jolt more spiritual than the last, anticipating something not yet and something just becoming. Every thought edging closer to trance until I embodied the streetball player’s motion, an affective experience of transformation. There has always been a knowing in basketball, it’s biological, psychological, and sociological.