More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh solo album, offers a much different vibe and one that also represents an intergenerational inheritance engulfed in the pleasures of Black dance music vibrating across the various subcultures of Black communities around the world.
Black women—across genders, sexualities and communities—have been the blueprint, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance proves that.
“We felt it our responsibility to depict the war on Black women’s bodies raging in this conservative state,” said Katori Hall, creator of Starz’s P-Valley.
This year’s Met Gala invited A-list celebrities in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, racial divides, rising inflation costs, and the widening gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else.
During this event a leaked draft of the majority opinion from the Supreme Court immediately sent shockwaves, as the public learned that our highest court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the right to abortion. Suddenly, the extreme wealth on display at the Met Gala seemed to represent all the “gilded” hubris of an historical era that seemed more “golden” than it really was—as we are now thrust back to a dystopian and despairing future we must confront and resist at all costs.
The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project concludes with the Harriet Tubman Syllabus—an exhaustive list of works about and inspired by Harriet Tubman, which confirms the wide-reaching impact of her legacy more than a hundred years after her passing on March 10, 1913.
Our final conversation in the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project features Mary N. Elliott, museum specialist and curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian Museum. Elliott helped to research, conceptualize and design the “Slavery and Freedom” inaugural exhibition for Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“Who is this woman beyond the iconic? That was really important for us: to humanize the experiences of African Americans and to also show that we’re not monolithic.”
Karen V. Hill is president and CEO of the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc. in Auburn, N.Y. She has successfully pursued federal legislation to have Harriet Tubman’s homestead become one of the newest units of the National Park Service.
“To me that’s just startling, that this place in Maryland where she had been treated so harshly, she was able to separate the brutality of slavery from how she loved the land.”
Nettrice Gaskins is a digital artist and self-identified Afrofuturist whose work has been receiving national attention. A 2021 Ford global fellow, Gaskins’s work is featured in the current “FUTURES” exhibit at the Smithsonian.
Ms.’s Janell Hobson, who invited Gaskins to create original art for the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, interviewed the artist over Zoom.
Dr. Nkeiru Okoye, whose first name means “the future is great,” has already dazzled the world as an internationally recognized music composer of opera, symphonic, choral, chamber, solo piano and vocal works. A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, Okoye is best known for her opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom, which premiered with The American Opera Project in 2014.
Tubman was the fifth of nine children born enslaved to Harriet “Rit” Green and Benjamin “Ben” Ross in Dorchester County, Md. She rescued her parents and some of her siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews from the clutches of chattel slavery. Their descendants thus have a special connection to “Aunt Harriet.”
“We are witnessing slavery in many forms throughout the world. My advice: Don’t own anybody and don’t let anybody own you. Seek your own freedom, set yourself free, and when you do, take somebody else with you.”
Launched Tuesday, Feb. 1, and culminating on March 10, the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project pays tribute to this feminist icon with a special commemorative issue through Ms. online and in print.
The project explores the meaning of freedom through the example of this one extraordinary life.
