Tag: Sahara Clemons

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Arts Culture

Letting it flow

Bolanle Adeboye’s “Rain Dancer” is part of “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience,” which features work by 25 Black artists from across Virginia. The exhibition is on display at McGuffey Art Center through March 28. Photo courtesy of the artist

By Alana Bittner

When writer and photographer Kori Price agreed to be part of the curation committee for a Black artists’ exhibition at McGuffey Art Center, water was not on her mind. It didn’t come up until someone asked how they wanted viewers to move through the gallery. Price recalls discussing ways to make viewers feel like they were underwater: “How did we want them to feel? Should they follow a specific route through the space? How should they flow through?”

Those questions evoked sobering scenes for Price. Water signified the Middle Passage, the expanse of ocean that was used for trans-Atlantic slave trade, into which an unknown number of Africans jumped rather than endure bondage.

But water is also present in moments of joy and release, strength and protest. Price says the committee, which also includes Derrick Waller, Sahara Clemons, Dena Jennings, Jae Johnson, Tobiah Mundt, and Lillie Williams, soon realized it was the perfect metaphor for framing such a broad topic, and agreed on “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience” for the show’s title.

The group intentionally kept the requirements for the participating artists simple, asking only for interpretations on the theme. The results are wide-ranging and surprising. The show features painting, photography, and film, plus banjos carved from dipping gourds. In the films of Ellis Finney, water symbolizes the flow of time and memory. For painter Clinton Helms, the theme manifests as a powerful thunderstorm, while Bolanle Adeboye captures the joy of a young girl playing in the rain. Yet despite the range of subjects, Price marvels at how “each individual piece flowed together as a cohesive unit in the show.”

Waller, a photographer, says that initially, he had no idea where to begin in creating his art for the show. The challenge encouraged him to step out of his comfort zone and pick up a paint brush. The discussions involving the trans-Atlantic slave trade had imprinted one quote in particular on his mind. In Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan’s character Killmonger says, “Nah… Just bury me in the ocean…with my ancestors that jumped from the ship…cuz they knew death was better than bondage.” Waller’s resulting work, “Death Was Better Than Bondage,” is a haunting tribute to those who jumped. Black pins are scattered across a background as blue as the sea, marking the lives lost to the waves.

When Price discovered that the first slave ship to the mainland colonies, the White Lion, landed in present-day Hampton, Virginia, she grabbed her camera and drove down to visit. The experience was moving, and resurfaced questions about her own past. “Like many Black Americans, there’s likely not a record of who my enslaved ancestors were or when they gained their freedom,” Price says. “Though I don’t know them by name, I think about them…and wonder who the more than 20 Africans were that walked off the White Lion and became our legacy.” Price’s “Shadow of 20. and Odd Negroes” shows ethereal shadows cast upon a deserted beach, stretching almost to the ocean beyond.

As submissions came in, the McGuffey committee noticed that many of the participating artists were showing work for the first time. Waller says that in talking with the artists it became clear that opportunities for Black artists to show their work were limited. For Waller, this affirmed a troubling trend. In his experience, it’s been “very rare to attend an art show that is totally focused on celebrating the talents of Black artists.”

During the curation process, the committee members began to discuss the role they could play in helping Black artists get connected with opportunities to show their work, and eventually decided to present the show as the product of a new organization: the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective. Waller says that “helping Black artists gain exposure will be at the core” of CBAC’s mission.

“Water” shows just how valuable that exposure is. By featuring a variety of Black voices, the exhibit captures the nuances and multiplicities of the Black experience, something missing from white-domintated art spaces.

“I think that people can make a mistake in interpreting the Black experience as a singular and stereotyped experience,” says Price. She hopes viewers can “leave with a better understanding of our complexities.”

For Waller, “Water” touches on something fundamental. “I think the show will make people feel,” he says, “whatever that emotion may be…joy, sadness, anger, peace. I want people to feel. And then I hope these feelings spark good conversation and dialogue.”

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Arts Culture

Rising above: New Sahara Clemons mural depicts the strength of black women

Sahara Clemons took inspiration from her mother’s strength of character and community involvement to design a new mural on 10th Street NW. Image: Eze Amos

On the afternoon of the year’s hottest day so far, Sahara Clemons stands at a concrete wall about three times her height, a roll of masking tape around her wrist, a brush in the other hand, cans of paint and a cup of melting bubble tea at her feet.

As she puts the finishing touches on her mural for the Charlottesville Mural Project, Clemons, who grew up in the city and recently finished her first year at the Rhode Island School of Design, periodically steps back to consider her work.

A larger-than-life black woman reclines across the full width of the wall, her face illuminated by the warm, intense, orange-pink light radiating from a lightning bolt she holds above her. She has the air of a goddess, powerful and at rest.

Clemons found inspiration for the piece in her mother, Eboni Bugg. Bugg, who currently serves as director of programs for the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, is a licensed clinical social worker, a family reunification advocate, and a yoga instructor who has worked to make mental health resources more available and accessible to women of color in the area. “She has shown me a lot” about what it takes to become a leader in a very racially polarized community such as Charlottesville, says Clemons. “That really affected me.”

While the mural isn’t an exact likeness, Clemons says it is most certainly a representation of her mother’s essence.

Sahara Clemons’ mural. Staff photo

She drew inspiration from the lightning bolt tattoo on Bugg’s wrist. “She talks about it as empowerment…and empowerment in the ability to rest,” says Clemons. “Life is tiring for a black woman, and we don’t always get that luxury [of rest], whether or not we are in a leadership position. There’s [always] a level at which we are having to uphold some sort of position, some sort of level of expectation that sometimes goes beyond our capability.”

To complement the lightning bolt, Clemons incorporated clouds (“they are about contemplation…rising above, heaven, the ethereal”) and light. A golden yellow halo circles the woman’s head and a sun emanates from the earring on her earlobe. Her dress looks as though it is composed of beams of light.

“I don’t usually put [the sun] in all of my work, but it’s specific to black women, to black girl magic,” says Clemons, and depicting that in this work was important to her. “There is a lot of invisibility that happens with black women, in Charlottesville and in general, that I wanted to combat,” she says.

This mural would be a powerful statement anywhere in the city, but its location—on the border of West Main Street and the historically black and now quickly gentrifying 10th and Page neighborhood—amplifies its message.

Above the mural is the recently built Standard apartment complex, which offers “lavish amenities” for UVA students. To its right, the new Tenth Street Warehouses retail development. Across the parking lot from the mural is the Westhaven public housing community, built in the 1960s to house (mostly black) people whose homes in the Vinegar Hill and Gospel Hill neighborhoods were razed by the city in the name of “urban renewal.”

Clemons didn’t select the site, but it’s significant to her. She and Bugg once lived in the neighborhood, and this afternoon, looking at the landscape around her, she can’t help but acknowledge how much it’s changed.

She designed the mural a month ago, and says the image has taken on new meaning in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, and the resulting protests against racial injustice.

“It’s different now. It’s challenging to think about it in terms of police brutality and what that’s doing to the black community,” she says. “I hope that what this does is…present something different in terms of what’s happening within the black community.”

“I’m reminding [people] that there’s strength happening as well.”

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Arts

Sahara Clemons steps out in SSG’s Backroom

“Bleached” (above), is a reaction to Clemons’ experience when visiting a birthing center in Uganda, inspiring a deeper exploration of identity for the artist. The emerging artist will participate in SSG’s “Teeny Tiny Trifecta” show in September, and was recently awarded an Incubator Studio residency at McGuffey Art Center for 2018-2019. Courtesy of the artist

Like most teenagers, Sahara Clemons is figuring out who she is.

She describes herself as “quirky” and “introverted,” a bit shy and quiet. She wears bright lipstick and expresses herself via clothing. She likes to read, travel and look at art. And she’s a Charlottesville High School rising senior who only recently started thinking of herself as an artist.

Clemons can’t remember a time when she wasn’t drawing or sketching, and was often told that she had talent, but she wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. “Talent can motivate you, but it’s hard to distinguish” between enjoyment and talent, especially when you’re young, says Clemons.

She developed a distinct visual voice through both pop art pen-and-ink self-portraits and fashion design—Clemons has participated in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Teen Stylin’ program more than once and won “most creative construction” accolades. She has always created for herself, as a means of self-reflection, but about a year ago, she noticed that people weren’t just looking at her work—they were reacting to it, connecting with it. That’s when she felt like she could call herself an artist.

Clemons’ exploration of her identity as a black woman is a central theme in her collection of paint-and-textile works of abstract portraiture on view in the Backroom at Second Street Gallery—how she sees herself, how she imagines others see her and how she can’t help but incorporate the world’s perception of her into her inner self.

Selections from Sahara Clemons’ collection of new work are on view in Second Street Gallery’s Backroom through July 27.

At the top of a long, vertical piece, Clemons’ face is drawn in pop-art style, with thick, expressive black lines outlining her features, hair, arms and hands, all rendered in yellow against a deep cobalt. The viewer has caught her mid-dance pose, and below Clemons’ face is a pattern comprised of four pairs of feet, all on tiptoe, in yellow and black, dancing across a striped plane. In each black shadow cast by the feet is a dancing figure.

This particular piece represents Clemons’ love of dance, an aspect of herself she generally keeps under wraps. Not that she doesn’t want people to know, but because she likes to surprise people by dancing when the moment is right. By publicly declaring her sub-secret love for dance in a slightly abstract way, she says she is able to “reiterate my means of feeling different, but also feeling somewhat empowered by keeping it in.”

The pattern is reminiscent of Dutch wax fabric (also called ankara), which Clemons first saw during a trip to Uganda where she connected with the bold, unique fabrics in a way she didn’t connect with other things in the country. The fabric has a long history, but in brief, the Dutch adopted a centuries-old Indonesian wax resist-dyeing technique and brought it, along with the bright, batik-style patterns, to Dutch colonies in southern and western Africa in the 19th century. Ever since, the brightly colored bold patterns have been widely associated with West African garb.

One of Clemons’ favorite artists, Yinka Shonibare, uses Dutch wax fabric in his sculptural works to comment on “expansionism and colonialism…and how the world was tapered with that kind of imperialistic mindset,” Clemons explains.

She says the fabrics have allowed her to reflect upon her identity “as a black person, feeling like I was taking something that was part of myself and putting it out there [in a way] I hadn’t done so before.”

Another piece in the collection, “Bleached,” is inspired by the same trip to Uganda, where Clemons and her mother, Eboni Bugg, stayed in a birth center. In the piece, a light brown figure appears to either consume, or be consumed by, white liquid bleach, while a smaller, darker brown figure looks on; they’re cradled by bright green pieces of a Dutch wax fabric pattern.

At the birth center, one woman had much lighter skin than the other women and children there, including her own child, Clemons says. She later learned that this woman bleached her skin “probably for years and months” in order to lighten it.

Clemons felt extraordinary sadness at the idea that this woman was reacting to pressure to look a certain way, and she also “felt some sort of guilt” in her own (naturally) light skin: “I felt like I was perpetuating something for her,” says Clemons, adding that she intends the piece to “show the generational trauma” that can persist among black women when the idea that light skin is more beautiful than dark skin permeates a society. And she wonders how it has affected her perception of, and the perception of her within, black culture.

In creating these pieces, Clemons has come to understand how many things converge to form her identity. “As I became more developed and more aware of things that would be reflective upon me as a black person, my character, my self-expression, it sometimes became easier to walk life more freely, and it became harder, too.” Such is the paradox of self-awareness.

But Clemons continues to search, (she’s still in high school!), and that’s the function of art, after all, she says. It’s “a language to find something in others, find something in yourself, that you didn’t see before.”