Miyuki Baker shared this talk, that Alexis Pauline Gumbs gave on her forthcoming book (!!), Primary: Alma Thomas, Sisterhood and the Revolutionary Quality of Light.
I told so many people about it. I am now telling you people about it. I was wonderstruck.
Alma Thomas is better known and regarded as a visual artist. She was also an innovative and revolutionary arts educator who taught Black children and teenagers in Washington D.C. for her entire adult life. Gumbs notes that Thomas taught her students to “animate life” by teaching them puppetry!! “She gave children opportunities to play with light and connection.” She also instilled in them a reverence for beauty, taught them to see it in themselves and their communities—and taught them that they could bring it about.
The whole talk is remedy, feels necessary and urgent.
I was especially struck by a comment Alma Thomas made on her painting “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” that’s cited in the talk. She said, “Do you see that painting? Look at it move. That’s energy and I’m the one who put it there. I transform energy with these old limbs of mine.”
Thomas’s authority is beautiful, born of both her fluency in transformation and the willingness that makes it possible at all.
Later, in response to an audience question, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reflects that many of us, unlike Thomas, “still don’t know how to take responsibility for beauty as it comes through us.” Luckily both Thomas and Gumbs, and Baker (poised for light adepts…) offer plenty of guidance on how we might do so.
What if we all had more opportunities to play with light and connection? What if we were allegiant to our own and each other’s beauty and capacity to create it? How precious. How might we live then. We have choices to make about our energy, about where we put it, about how it moves.
All quotes are from the talk!
Miyuki Baker is the steward of The Portal for Beautiful Scholarship, they are also asking what happens when we take care of / unleash the beautiful that is in each of us—as inseparable from the work of liberation. I am taking their class ‘Embodied Study for Collective Liberation’ this year and their framings/invitations/thinking/work are shaping my notes/research/wondering here.