Auntie Assata, the Baby Ancestor

This interview is from the INDY’s Portrait of Pride series. You can read the rest of the pieces here.

The year was 2000.

I was a nine-year-old in the fifth grade. My mother and I stepped onto an elevator alongside my EK Powe Elementary School art teacher at the time, Malcolm Goff; Afiya Carter, and their baby girl. We were taking the elevator up to a Durham school board meeting where my father had called together a group to protest the notorious out-of-school suspension rate that marred Durham Public Schools’ reputation.

My mother looked down at the couple’s baby.

“Wow, that is the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen!” she said excitedly. (Funny enough, my mom’s own baby was standing right beside her). But, a beautiful baby, she was, like a live doll, but glowing and smiling as if basking in the love surrounding her.

“What’s her name?” my mom asked.

“Assata,” Afiya answered.

Since then, I witnessed beautiful baby Assata evolve into a now 24-year-old Durham institution. Although I’d seen Assata grow through the years—facilitated panels where she spoke, taught workshops where she participated, admired her student activism, marveled at her artwork, chopped it up and shared space with her parents—I didn’t have a way to contact her directly. So I asked Afiya to reconnect me.

As fate would have it, Afiya told me her firstborn, Naeemah Kelly, would very soon have a child of her own. Afiya and Afiya’s wife, kynita, were days away from welcoming their first grandchild.

How sweet it is that, when I finally connected with Assata on Zoom, she took the call in the bathroom of the hospital room of her sister Naeemah, and her then day-old niece Golden-Raye, who is nicknamed Goldie (both Golden and Goldie are ancestral family names on multiple sides of Naeemah’s lineage). This theme of family and ancestry is woven through Assata’s art and identity as a young wielder of queer magic in Durham. Assata, who was one of Naeemah’s doulas, had been awake and present for the last three days.

Where are you from?

Durham, been here my whole life.

Define art.

Art is expression, a way to explain purpose, change, evolution, whatever is ruminating in your mind, heart, and soul. Artists use things that weigh on them: love, their mental health, their community, or their change and journey. For me, it’s all of those, a form of expression that declutters everything in my head, a way for me to put dreams and ideas that make things more tangible than [what] you can see in your mind. It’s something you can show others, how to dream and express. Artists can pull that out of people.

Are there any artists who helped to pull it out of you?

Two exhibitions changed my art style and how I think about art and life. The first was when I went to New York for a summer in 2017. I was 16, and I went to the Cooper Union summer art intensive. I studied animation there and spent the whole summer with my grandparents, who lived in Brooklyn. My grandparents sent me to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Art Museum [called] “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85,” with works by artists and revolutionaries [including] Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold.

All of these artists were making multimedia art. They weren’t just expressing the reality and the struggle of the Black woman experience at that time but also their dreams and hopes for the future. For me, it was like, ‘Oh shit, I’m living in what they imagined.’ That was an example of the power of art, how they were able to express their past, present, and future at the same time.

In New Orleans, Wangechi Mutu, a multimedia artist, does performance art and sculpture and artifacts. She’s brilliant. I’m a person who works heavily against perfectionism and I need to control my timeline of life, and there’s a very specific way that I want my life and timeline. Every time I get in that mode, there’s something that reminds me that time isn’t real. I already have what I need to continue making. And it doesn’t have to be from this capitalist lens to create, create, create. And in the depth of [Mutu’s] work, oftentimes I think [about] that.

One of my mentors, Michelle Gonzalez Green, who passed away, [would say], “What would you create if no one was watching?” And I would say what I’m doing right now. Now, I wouldn’t say that. Because you can’t put people’s negative perceptions of you in your art. For me, seeing Wangechi’s exhibition really grounded that thought. Create and take it further. Whatever this deep and powerful emotion, thought, and idea. Whatever you are creating, take it further. Let that vulnerability shine through. That’s something that we miss in this life. That vulnerability. That’s why that work stuck with me and what spoke to me about her work.

You talked about how the artists in “We Want a Revolution” also drew inspiration from their own hopes for a Black feminist future. Does your art draw on anything that you hope for for the future of your identities—your Blackness and your queerness?

Yes. Recently, my work has been taking a shift. But it has always been around my identity, especially my “I Am An Ancestor Too” exhibition. That was all self portraits, it looks like what I want for the future of myself. Everything I want for myself, I want for others. I’m of the belief that everyone should find that peace and love within themelves and ultimately within their lifetime. Much of that also comes from accountability. That exhibition was about finding that peace within themselves. That’s my personal hope for the future of us as beings in this society that we have been dropped into.

My work is moving into more of a societal hope to sustain access to things we not just need but what we need to thrive. This idea of eco-grief and specifically, through a Black and queer lens, of the things that have been systematically taken away from us when it comes to the environment. Black folks have experienced a very specific type of grief when it comes to the environment. Especially queer folks. Having those identities stripped from us, because this system is not what our ancestors developed. Including our gender norms and expressions and those limitations and the stripping of connection to the environment. And the stripping of indigeneity on the connection of our land. That’s a very specific grief we hold. And so my work has been exploring that and thinking about how we move and use the idea of Sankofa to acknowledge our past and bring those lessons and knowledge into the future—a future that is eco-futurist and solar punk. All of the sustainable and beautiful things. Coexisting with plants and animals type of things.

Your sister just welcomed a new baby girl. What do you want her to see in Auntie Assata’s art?

I want her to see that there is hope and that is hope. She has been brought in during some tough and interesting times socially and politically. But through all of that is solidarity and hope and imagination. And the work that we do to make that tangible for her and for ourselves and for our ancestors.

How has the Durham community helped to nurture you as an artist?

I have to bring it back to my parents, grands, and great-grands. My great-grands instilled in my grands that community work is important. Everyone should be doing something to engage and help their community. My grandmother instilled that into my mother as well. Both of my maternal and paternal grandparents have been very involved in reshaping Black experiences. And my mother always wanted me to be in things and part of things that I may not have even have wanted to be [laughs]. I’m quiet and an introvert and I don’t want to be around people all the time. But she instilled in me that being in the community helps give you a strong sense of who you are.

Durham has so many amazing programs for youth and development. I was a part of the Indigo Generations with Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I was also in Sangodare’s Film. I was in Collage Dance Company, and Satos, the baby version of Collage. I did Capoeira when it was at Weaver Street. I was a part of community gardening at my school. My dad was an art teacher, he did film and art-making summer camps. I was in lots of plays and I had amazing mentors like Michelle [Gonzalez Green] and Baba Chuck Davis. I think all of those people and programs, I was still able to be in my little shell and still it was OK and beautiful, and also it was OK to step out and explore identity. Durham has fostered and helped me to move into my identity in a unique way that I’m very grateful for.

Can you tell us about the self portrait piece?

It is very layered. It’s a piece of identity which is complex. This portrays me and not-me, simultaneously. I realized this is my face and who I am, and all of these features are physical features in my ancestry. My eyes, nose, curly hair, all of these are things in my past and what make me uniquely me in the present. That goes for my identity and my personality. I take all of these things and people and loved ones, and that I am all of them. Because of that, I am me.

It was also a piece of getting over inadequacy that is very intentionally placed upon us as young adults specifically. And that sense of perfection, because if there is this unattainable way of being, it’s almost impossible to reach that standard while also maintaining sanity and health. I’m always very hard on myself, and it’s realizing that if that isn’t how I interact with others, I don’t want to internalize shame and homophobia. I wouldn’t do that to other folks. So the mirror part of the piece is, if I can see the beauty and importance of others, of random people and my community, family and ancestors, my siblings, then I can always bring that to myself and vice versa. That was that piece—very layered and emotional. It felt like the beginning of my current journey of radical self acceptance and expression.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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