zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o'neal

A scenic view of Lake Michigan from the Chicago shoreline may not seem like the basis for a socially radical work of art, but this is precisely the kind of quiet interventions into historically freighted domains of visual culture, such as landscape art, that zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal stages through her work. The artist combines still and moving images of bodies of water with archival images drawn from her own family and other community-built collections on Chicago’s South Side. Through these visual juxtapositions, dumas-o’neal engages in creative world-making, forwarding an aesthetic vision that finds a parallel in philosopher Kevin Quashie’s concept of “Black aliveness.” At its heart, this approach seeks to abandon the pervasive—though often implicit—frame of antiblackness that shapes so much of the contemporary discourse on race. As artistic meditations trained on self-realization and personal sovereignty, her works do not ignore the cultural prevalence of anti-black racism; instead, they challenge antiblackness as a default position that permeates our culture. To cite Quashie, “An antiblack world expects blackness from black people; in a black world, what we expect and get from black people is beingness.”

Through the visual grammar of gesture and landscape, these works point to the burden of history while also seeking to move beyond. In the artist’s words, the work “highlights the ways Black aliveness and interiority show up through vivid poetic observations of my relationship to the land, time, and the sublime—that my being and gaze isn’t inherently tied to trauma, marginality, or colonization, but at times beyond it.” In this way, dumas-o’neal is invested above all in being.

- Carl Fuldner (curator).

somewhat ridged, with smoked purple. 5min, 30sec. Looped.  Appropriated 8mm, 16mm film, found photographic images, digital video. 16:9 ratio. single channel.