You might be asking what the difference is between all these components of my substack offerings, well it’s easy:
1.
ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS is my seasonal newsletter (the original offering), which you are reading now. This newsletter comes out seasonally (sometimes more, sometimes less) and focuses on sharing upcoming and current shows, projects, book releases and events! This seasonal newsletter is broken up into two parts: BULLETIN BOARDS, which acts like a bulletin board of recent happenings around my work. practice and projects & ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES, which shares a written/poetic/personal essay!
2.
Footnotes & Headlines is my weekly newsletter. A special ritual of coming together every week to share about what has been on my mind, brewing in the studio, in progress, in the library, in the heart. This is a paid-only subscription.
Footnotes & Headlines newsletters this Spring/Summer have spoken to my most recent movement work, the fact that my studio has been in the streets, in the collective classroom, in and with kinship that has teaches me to continue fighting.
Explore past offerings, here <3
If you become a paid subscriber today, you will be able to read all areas of this substack, browse all past newsletter posts and support my studio practice! ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS is my practice, is labor, is my work. $5 a month, $50 a year or become a founding member for $150 a year.
If you are already subscribed, thank you!
Part 1. BULLETIN BOARD
Summer Print Sale
July 17, 6pm est, 3pm pst, via https://tinyurl.com/lbv24studio
Save the date! On Wednesday, July 17th, I will be having an online studio sale! To help fund my studio move, I will be releasing 3 new Limited Edition risograph prints, as well as pulling out prints from previous editions and a few copies of some publications from my archive.
Ordering info: ships anywhere in the United States, varied payment options.
We Fly for a Liberated We, We Rooted in Flight
Up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2024- Ongoing
We fly for a liberated we, we rooted in flight is a public artwork inviting passerbyers to join in the journey of collective flight. Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo’s body of work, F.L.I.G.H.T. S.C.H.O.O.L., invites community into the life-long commitment of giving flight, breath, safety, care, prioritization and long-lived lives, to Black, Indigenous, queer, Trans, non-binary, people of color, and all oppressed peoples. Spanning three sites (YBCA loading dock door, entrance to the Third Street courtyard, and a line of doors at the corner at Third and Mission Streets) the work can be viewed in sections, but is encouraged to be taken in a whole, perhaps even by moving across the street to get a full view.
With this large-scale work, the artist asks: What does flight feel like for our movement elders and youth rising up? How can our actions, gestures, and work come back to the soaring our people must do to survive? What are the spaces we learn to love each other in and invite in deeper dialogues of liberation? How can my wings always always carry you, always always carry us, into a justice-filled tomorrow?
As we root deeper into a collective commitment for the liberation, freedom, resistance, and care of folks on the margin, our wings get stronger, we are soaring, we fly for we.
Commissioned by YBCA and the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District Grant for Public Artwork.
Herban Cura Market
July 24, 5-7pm, Lil Debs’ Oasis*, 747 Columbia St, Hudson, NY 12534,
*The Market happens in the back courtyard of the restaurant, please mask up!
Join us for an evening of laughter, wonder and community weaving! Our monthly market is woven of our local community makers, artists, herbalists, astrologers, massage and acupuncture therapists and so many more gifted creators. Some of the offerings are free, others are sliding scale donations and others are for purchase. Everyone is welcome, whether you are looking for a gift for yourself or loved one or just want to come hang out.
Dear Mazie
September 6, 2024-March 9, 2025, ICA VCU, 601 W Broad St, Richmond, VA 23220
Dear Mazie, is a group exhibition inspired by the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), the trailblazing artist and educator who became the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States. Curator Amber Esseiva has commissioned nine contemporary artists and architects to create responses to Meredith’s multifaceted legacy for this show, which will be accompanied by public programs and a robust publication enriched with archival material.
Honoring Meredith’s prodigious and passionate letter-writing (as evidenced by the hundreds of missives Esseiva found in her 5,000-piece archive), the curator has invited the participating artists to consider the epistolary form as a conceptual framework for their commissions. Dear Mazie, is thus something like an exhibition-as-letter, addressed back to the subject at its heart.
Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1895, Amaza Lee Meredith was denied formal architecture training due to her race and gender. Undeterred, she went on to design landmark structures in her home state (where she built the remarkable Azurest South, 1939, in a modernist style never before seen in Virginia) and beyond (New York and Texas). Also a trailblazing educator and artist, in 1935, Meredith founded the fine arts department at the historically Black college Virginia State University (VSU), which she chaired until her retirement, and exhibited her art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and in galleries in New York and North Carolina. These contributions and many more had indelible impacts, paving the way for Black Americans to see themselves in environments where they were so often prohibited; and yet, today, Meredith’s legacy is woefully under recognized and in urgent need of attention.
Dear Mazie, intends to redress this by introducing Meredith’s work to new and wider audiences, producing novel art pieces in response to her work and locating them in her home state, and bringing Meredith’s archival material (letters, blueprints, photographs, and more) to light, much of it never before seen by the public. The project will go beyond existing scholarship, plotting Meredith’s life and work within themes of placemaking, gender, sexuality, and Black love, while also exploring Meredith’s legacy in public education, the arts, and architecture. A special focus is placed on the ways she built sanctuaries (from homes to institutions to communities) for herself and other people of color to allow rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution.
Inspired by Meredith’s archives, which are the wellspring for this project, the form of the letter serves as a conceptual framework for Dear Mazie,. The new commissions—to be produced in a wide range of media (sculpture, video, painting, installation, and performance) in the exhibition, programs, and a publication—will function as a response to Meredith’s legacy, a note to the past from the present. Dear Mazie, can thus be seen not only as an exhibition, but also a conversation with, and even a continuation of, Amaza Lee Meredith’s groundbreaking practice.
Exhibiting artists: AD—WO, Cauleen Smith, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, The Black School, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Tschabalala Self
Scrawlspace
September 19–December 7, 2024, The 8th Floor Gallery, 17 W 17th St, New York, NY 10011
Scrawlspace will bring together work by artists of the African diaspora who conceptually and aesthetically manipulate text, writing, and language. Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh notes: “As curators and academics, we regularly confront the power and limitations of the written word. We’ve witnessed artists not only addressing this in their work, but aptly tying this tension to social, historical, and political issues that affect, but are far from unique, to Black people.” Emily Alesandrini adds: “It’s such a thrill to work with the Rubin Foundation, who I see as having set the standard for social justice-focused curatorial practice and audience engagement.”
In preparing for their fall exhibition, Alesandrini and Momoh describe how artists have rendered phrases and words illegible, glyphic, or coded to the point that letters and graphic gestures no longer constitute language but become images, demonstrating an opacity and multiplicity of meanings beyond sanctioned readings and definitions. The act of obscuring words and documents often references horrific histories, such as anti-literacy laws in the antebellum South, the threat and power of state documentation, the ongoing dominance of European languages in de/colonized lands, and unknowable silences and omissions within the archive. Yet artists also demonstrate how language can be utilized in acts of refusal, sabotage, liberation, joy, and world-building. Such instances speak to expansive communicative innovation and adaptation via code-switching, regional accents, or the development of Creole and Pidgeon languages — lingual means of social mobility, resistance, and assertion of personhood. Alesandrini and Momoh are compelled by artists who illustrate the inability of language to truly encompass the excess that is Black life, invent new vocabularies, and insist that we must keep writing. As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, “The story exceeds the words…”
Exhibiting artists: Sadie Barnette, Lukaza Branfan-Verissimo, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonya Clark, Tony Cokes, Renee Gladman, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Steffani Jemison, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Jamilah Sabur, Gary Simmons, and Shinique Smith
Palestine Will Live Forever, Collaborative edition with Ghost Proposal Press
Order free copies here, as well as two other designs by me, they ship anywhere in the United States of America. Please march in the streets with this work, put it up in your public facing windows, give to a beloved, become a tool for you to learn from and with Palestinian people in their fight for liberation, self determination and land back!
Part 2. ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES
As I begin to pack up my studio for my upcoming move, I write you an acrostic poem with the words that hang on pieces of paper taped to my wall, show brochures, Spring teaching calendar, notes from loved ones, bills, postcards, post it notes…..
One of the reasons I love acrostic poems is because they invite nuanced subversion, a form that weaves multiplicity, spinning language into new pairings, newness that expands the brain, the knowing of what language can do. I have memories of writing a lot of acrostic poems as a kid, in birthday cards and for fun, to pass time. A form that invites improv writing, free flowing overlapping words to form new meaning. A year ago, as I rooted my practice in flight, in New Mexico, I brought acrostic poems back to the writing table, an accessible writing format, that allowed me to paint with, craft with, build with.
These words are traces of my year in this space, these words are spells- both ways, crawling into my mouth to speak and live a new life. These words carry their own meaning, yet together they are becoming a liberated demand. May these words fly free into the remembrance of more then 186,000 + Palestinians killed over the past ten months, into flames that burn down an empire that funds genocide with our tax dollars, into long lives for Black trans community/self/us/we, into wings, into the forest, to a new home, from river to sea.
Full slides across the scanner bed, pockets full of poems as tactical strategy, June Jordan as a tactical strategy, always and forever
Research, it is all research, including this picnic
Envisioning a radically different form of living
Everywhere
Poetry licks sweat off your forehead as we march in the streets with banners that act like shields, curtains, rooms, sanctuary spaces
Archive, after seeds but before sharing, the movement school book is in the works
Learning, loving, leaning in, laughing sometimes
Engulfing us all in the truth, because why be an artist if you aren’t going to be a truth teller
Strategy, romantic strategy, strategy that is based on and in and with friendship at the roots, crush strategy when you are in love with the movement
Tactics
Introducing friends to friends to friends to friends to web together within it all
Now has been the time, none of this is new yet now we must show up for Palestine, none of this is new, yet now we must stay committed to armed resistance
Entering into a moment in which the American people get distracted by the presidential race and forget about the most pressing issues
Never, new
Occupation, de-occupation, boycott, occupy wall street, occupations as tools we do then they do but we do better
Windows, worlds, witnessing
I love learning from you - Amaza Lee Meredith! Acrostic poems! Thank you always for making my world expand.