BLACK History Month

a Solo Exhibition by Kenya (Robinson)

History is a funny thing.  Peculiar like. A divider, simplifier, multiplier, proselytizer, unifier.  A designator, perpetrator, instigator, congratulator, player hater, and tot-of-tater. All at once.  Sifted through a sieve of extreme self-interest, the details are arranged by hierarchy, silt at the bottom of the Mississippi, or a hobbled foot over the Mason-Dixon line.  I’ve been a witness to history revised in my own professional practice; moments and relationships and statements renamed to serve a sexier story. Flags planted on “undiscovered” territories, the indigenous, perplexed by the arrogance of strangely clad newcomers.  Or a registered U.S. patent acting as a legalized stand-in for an invention - Eli Whitney ain’t got nothing on Catharine Littlefield Greene...

But I bet the title of my next creative journey has you thinking of field hollers and Negro Spirituals (Ummm hmmm).  “Slaves” fucked by “forefathers” with and without a foreskin. “Black bodies” brutalized, ‘buked and scorned. Pop culture mayhem and twitter finger manifestos, Crip-walking on graves of those long dead, or a shackle shuffle because American capitalism requires a permanent underclass.  You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The better to skeet-skeet-skeet off of funded flagellation and shine up that deep skin to admire your not-racist reflection than to be reminded of the darkness of mind, where the notion originates.

Nah player. We conversating, ain’t no more “conversation”.  Pimp parlay and ho stroll, so we know the roles and can cipher a reversal.  It’s a very zero and one situation - digital dash. I have a whole bunch of shit in my storage unit to show you.  I dare you to take a look.

January 2019