Papers by christina knight
William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision, 2023
American Literary History, 2021
Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2020
Jacolby Satterwhite is known for creating virtual worlds that feature multiple avatars of himself... more Jacolby Satterwhite is known for creating virtual worlds that feature multiple avatars of himself voguing within densely rendered neon landscapes. He populates those landscapes with three-dimensional objects painstakingly traced in the animation program, Maya, from drawings that his mother made during his childhood in the hopes of striking it rich on the Home Shopping Network. This article will focus on an early work, The Country Ball (1989–2012), an animated video that brings together archival footage from Satterwhite’s family during a 1989 Mother’s Day cookout, alongside his mother’s drawings of what he calls “recreational American material culture.” I argue that Satterwhite’s virtual performances link queerness and utopia: his animated avatars make manifest his desire to occupy a world as multiplicitous and far-reaching as his sense of self. I believe, however, that this queer utopics begins with Satterwhite’s mother and her crafting of a creative process in the midst of terrible constraints on her physical and economic mobility. By reading the artist’s virtual worlds through his mother’s drawings, I investigate a similar strategy of making do to make new, or reworking the mundane in the service of the marvelous.
Black One Shot stages brevity and precision in response to the art of blackness, contemporary and... more Black One Shot stages brevity and precision in response to the art of blackness, contemporary and/or prescient. At 1000 words a pop, these pieces divest from academic respectability to inhabit the speculative, ambivalent, irreconcilable ways of black forms, and move through the fires this time. Seditiously, we are object forward, conjuring up the necessary intimacy generated between a critic and their object and keyed to the channels and frequencies of blackness. We hold fast to the given/taken works, the cultural productions without reduction, the condition of knowing all-too-well, and the imagining of something otherwise. Object love in the time of pandemics and insurrections. b.O.s. will run the course of summer 2020, come what may. We invite you to follow and share hard. Thanks to b.O.s. 10.4 / Rebirth Is Necessary / Christina Knight -ASAP/J
The Black Scholar, 2019
Abstract: Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death is a video work that charts a p... more Abstract: Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death is a video work that charts a path of Black expressive culture and racial violence. The artist employs found footage from popular culture, including police dash-cams, documentary film and viral YouTube videos, scoring the whole with Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” Jafa explores, in the words of cultural critic Aria Dean, how “black death and black joy are pinned to each other by the white gaze,” particularly online. However, this essay explores the work as an address to Black audiences, for whom white fetishization and state surveillance constitute an everyday racial commonsense. Showcasing Black performers and athletes as well as academics and other non-celebrities, Love is the Message offers up an iterative, affective representation of a people collectively managing spectacular pain and communicating that pain through a performative virtuosity. The piece thus mines the subversive power of a shared (viewing) experience that remains unseen to mainstream audiences, even as they endlessly watch and circulate images of Black pleasure and pain. Ultimately, I argue that Love is the Message demands a reading practice that surpasses the extremes of virtuosity and abjection that dominate representations of Black life, and instead centers all of the living, making and community building that falls in between.
I flew to a state that neither of us lives in to talk about migration. Bamuthi told me that he ha... more I flew to a state that neither of us lives in to talk about migration. Bamuthi told me that he had been invited to create an installation in Central Park as part of Creative Time's Drifting in Daylight project. When we met that day, we walked to the North Woods and looked out at the space that marks the difference between due north on a compass and the way the city's grid maps north, which faces slightly eastward. On a hill, watching the movement and sounds of Harlem, we thought about northward migration from both the South and the global South; we thought about what the "North" has meant and still means to people who look like us. The park itself holds a lot of memories for the artist, who was born in Queens, but made his name performing all over the city before getting (higher) educated in the South, and eventually settling in California. My own mapping of the U.S. is similarly triangulated: born in the South, educated in both California and New England, with a few New York years in between.
Theatre Journal, 2005
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 139.140.232.150 on Fri
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Papers by christina knight