 Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us this evening for our conversation between Dr. Taneesya C. Ford and Dr. Tiffany E. Barber on black women in fashion in conjunction with our exhibit at the main library called Toward the Black Aesthetic. I'm so glad to have you here while people are coming in. I'm just going to go through a few announcements and then we'll get started. So before we get started, I wanted to acknowledge that the library is located located in the area known as San Francisco, which is on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush O'Loni peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramaytush O'Loni have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the ancestors, the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working and learning on their traditional homeland and as unadvided guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramaytush community. At the African American Center, we also honor the gifts, resilience and sacrifices of our black ancestors who toiled the land, built the institution that established the city's wealth and freedom and survived anti-black racism despite never being compensated nor fully realizing their own sovereignty. Because of their work, we are here and will invest in their legacy. We acknowledge the exploitation of not only our labor but our humanity and through education and outreach, we are working to repair some of the harms done by public and private actors. This statement was taken from the San Francisco Advisory Committee on Reparations and I thank them for all their work. So this is the second to the last day of Black History Month and I hope you all had a great Black History Month at San Francisco Public Library. We call that, we call it more than a month, Black History, Culture and Heritage. Many of the programs that we've done this year and including in years past are available on our San Francisco Public Library YouTube page. Please check them out. And tomorrow we're going to have one last program for Black History Month. It's a conversation between Dr. Jackie Francis and Virginia Smiley on the new Sergeant Claude Johnson exhibit at the Huntington in Southern California. Dr. Francis was the co-curator of the exhibit and Ms. Smiley is on the board of the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society, which owns some of the work that are in the exhibit. Please join us. That's on Zoom as well. And if you haven't already, I really, really, encourage you to come to the library to see the exhibit toward the Black, toward a Black aesthetic, Kenneth P. Green Sr.'s photographs of the 1960s and 1970s. It is on view at the main library through April 21st. In our Jewett Gallery, we have images of gorgeous Black women in fashionable clothes. And in our African American Center, we have photos of the 1972 march through the Fillmore in support of African Liberation called African Liberation Day, May 27th, 1972. Hope to see you here. And also in conjunction with this exhibit, we will have a program at the African American Center on March 17th at 2 p.m., talking about the making and meaning of African Liberation Day with longtime revolutionaries Marvin X and Dr. Oba T. Tashaka. And now on to our show. As we were working on curating this exhibit with our exhibits department, and thank you for all the work that they did to steward this exhibit at the library, we were working with Kenneth P. Green Sr.'s son, Kenneth, to pick out photos for the exhibit and trying to figure out how we could explain, you know, all the gorgeous images of women that are in the Jewett Gallery exhibit. And we came across the book Liberated Threads by Dr. Ford. And we said, and then we came upon her other books Dressed in Dreams and Our Secret Society and said, we have to have Dr. Ford at the library to talk about all this gorgeous Black fashion that we're seeing in this exhibit. So right now I'm going to introduce our two guests. And then we'll have we'll take off with their conversation. The we'll have a Q&A towards the end of the conversation. So please put questions in our Q&A box that you find at the end at the bottom of the screen. So I'll give a couple of brief bios for both of our guests and then invite them to the screen. So Dr. Tanisha Ford is Professor of History and Biography and Memoir at the Graduate Center City University of New York. She has written four books, including Dressed in Dreams, A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power of Fashion, Liberated Threads, Black Women's Style and the Global Politics of Soul. And her new book Our Secret Society, Molly Moon and the Glamour Money and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement. As well as Kwame Birthright Black is Beautiful. I don't know if I pronounce his name right. Sorry. And is currently working on a genre-bending book about sculptor and institution builder Augusta Savage. Ford has received several major awards and honors and was named one of the Roots 100 Most Influential African Americans. Her research has been supported by prestigious institutions such as New America, Emerson Collective, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and London University School of Advanced Study, among others. Tanisha writes regularly for diverse newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Time, L, Town and Country, Harper's Bazaar, The Root, Aperture, CBS News, WNYC and NPR. A native of Indiana, she currently resides in Harlem. Dr. Ford will be in conversation with Dr. Tiffany E. Barbara, a prize-winning internationally recognized scholar, curator and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and in the broader Atlantic world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis. She is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as Curator-in-Residence at the Delaware Contemporary. Dr. Barbara is a recipient of the Smithsonian's 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director's Essay Prize. All right, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and welcome our two guests, Dr. Tanisha Ford and Dr. Tiffany Barber. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for that beautiful introduction and laying the groundwork for what we'll talk about today. It is a joy, a true joy and pleasure to be in conversation with Dr. Tanisha Ford today. I'm a huge fan. I have all my books here. I don't have the Kwame Barathe book, but I have my stack is here. I encourage you to get your own. But I am so excited to talk more about your work in relationship to the exhibition that's on view at the San Francisco Public Library. And I want to start with a question about how you approach your work, actually, from the position of, as a historian, as an academically trained historian, as we might say, but also as a public intellectual. You are a historian by training, but you're not a traditional historian or what we would think of as a traditional historian. And over the course of your career, you've written several books and articles that develop your notion of an eclectic archive. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit about this way of working and how it informs your writing practice. Yes, I'm so excited to do this with you. I want to first say thank you to Shana Sherman and the staff at the San Francisco Public Library for inviting me to be in conversation. And when they asked me, like, who do you think, who would you like to be in conversation with? I immediately gave them your name. I just think you're a perfect thought partner as we, you know, question the archive, the visual archive of Black life, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, and do so in the Bay Area, like really locating this conversation in the Bay Area and perhaps even moving out globally as much of my work does. So thank you for being here, Dr. Barbara. You know, you're one of my faves. We were colleagues at UD and Africana Studies and the bond that we formed then, I think, has carried us through the years, even though neither of us are currently in that department, but we still have much love for the people who are there. So to answer your question, yeah, I was trained in 20th century U.S. history and with a minor field in African diaspora history. But I came to history through English and Black Studies. My undergraduate degrees are in English literature and African diaspora studies. I have a master's in Black Studies. And so then when I went to get the PhD in history, history wasn't a discipline I was familiar with. I have a focus in my work on interdisciplinary studies or approaches to Black life. So thinking about doing archival work was part of the work I was doing as a master's student, but I was also doing close textual readings, both of literature, but also of photography, year books, and other materials that really informed these earliest ideas around an eclectic archive. As I did embrace my studies as a historian, I started to expand those materials even more, looking at newspapers, cookbooks, menus from restaurants, passports, broadsides, obscure newspapers, of course personal letters and other personal documents. And I like putting a more traditional manuscript collection in conversation with a more object based archive, which allows me to think as a material culturalist, but also using queer studies as an approach, Black feminist thought as an approach. So my work is a blend of all those different things. And I think what it allows me to do is pull together what in history we call historiography. So the study of the study of a thing, it allows me to move across historiographical fields in order to understand why there are certain gaps in the ways we understand particular historical moments. So for me as someone who studies the Law and Black Freedom movement, when I started working on the dress and the sartorial politics of the movement, I began to ask, well, why is it that historians of the movement talk about bodies but don't necessarily talk about how those bodies are dressed and why? I mean, we're thinking about bodies as blockades or bodies as transgressing the line of Jim Crow segregation. And in fashion studies, people were thinking about clothing, but not necessarily thinking about the bodies in the clothing. So my work allowed me to move across those seemingly disparate historiographical fields of literature to pull them together to ask new questions of the archive and that eclectic archive that provided the evidentiary base to substantiate the claims I wanted to make about the dressed Black body. Thank you so much for that answer, because as long as we've known each other, I didn't realize how much our work spoke to each other. I mean, I did kind of, but not in this way, because as you know, I have a dance background and came to art history and interdisciplinary studies of art history through the kind of like backdoor, through practice, right? Through dance and curatorial practice. And shout out to Herman Gray, who's in the Zoom room, who also really much too taught me to do close textual analysis of images and to think more broadly about their sociocultural politics, the geographic context in which they're emerging, what's happening on the ground in these spaces and to really center, as you said, the kinds of voices that get left out of the historical record. And so I want to talk a little bit about how photography plays into that. You mentioned sartorial, sartorial politics, dress, the body, performance even, self-fashioning is something that you didn't say, but I know you think a lot about it. So I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about when and how photography actually figured into, figures into your work and how you first came to it. You mentioned your books and thinking about that, but how did you start to study, when did photography become really central to your work? Because it's been a through line in the last few projects that you completed. Like most African Americans, I grew up in a house with many photo albums. And in Dressed in Dreams, there's this scene that I recreate of what it was like to look at our coffee table in the living room and peel back that sticky adhesive that protects the photographs and to pull them off of that sticky material and really examine them closely. So part of this became a way to enter a portal into the past in my own family's life to think about the ways in which my mother, my father, but also their parents and their siblings and friends, how they adorn themselves in the 1960s and 70s. Once I started working on my dissertation, I realized that these very photos that I had looked at for years actually were part of a larger archive that told a story about Black political resistance, Black self-fashioning, as you say, diasporic politics and how those things are articulated intellectually, but also through embodied practices, like dressing, like styling one's hair. So I used the tools that I was learning in my history courses and in my American studies courses to read those photographs in conversation with images I was finding in the archives in London, for example, when I was a dissertation fellow at the University of London, images of people like Olive Morris and Gerlin Bean who were important figures in the Black feminist and Black power movements in the UK. I was looking at more contemporary images of Black beauty queens and models in the South African context in Johannesburg in particular and I was placing those images in conversation with my mother and seeing her at Indiana University, a school that we both attended, though several decades apart, seeing her in her dorm room with her Afro in the early 1970s with her Angela Davis photographs on the wall, her big posters and such, and I realized that there is something to be said about the quotidian nature of Black portraiture and how that can also illuminate histories of cultural resistance and this global struggle for Black freedom. So as you've said, my work, the photography is really central to the kind of archives that I access, but also to how I understand Black world-making and Black freedom dreaming. So my use of photographs by someone like, say, Kwame Brathwaite was really instrumental in helping me understand how a teenage photographer who's really taken with the jazz culture of the day and the, you know, garbious politics of the day in Harlem where he's, you know, he's growing up and coming into his teenage years and into adulthood, how that really shaped him as a photographer. So I tried to layer all of these different elements of the ways in which photography factors into Black life across the globe in order to try to get at something true about the nature of Black freedom movements in our fight for liberation. I want to continue that thread and think specifically about the Bay Area and thinking about kind of between seniors photographs. You talked a lot, you talked about transnationalism and Black internationalism, diaspora, Black freedom struggles across the globe. And you really painted a beautiful picture of what's happening in that time period in the 1960s and 70s in particular. But I want us to think with Kenneth P. Green's seniors photographs about that. And I want to hear you talk about how his photographs paint a particular picture of the time period, but that also simultaneously are timeless, and especially in relationship to the work that you've done on Kwame Brathwaite. Yes, I have these gorgeous photos pulled up on, staring at them right now. And I would encourage everyone who can to go see this exhibition. The photos are resting in terms of how they capture Black life. And again, with Kenneth P. Green's senior being the first Black staff photographer of the Oakland Tribune. And some of these pictures, these photographs are captured on his beat as a photo journalist. Some of them are just these kind of casual observer photographs. And together, taken together, it's an incredible body of work. A few things jump out at me as I look at the images. One, it makes me think about how I stumbled upon Kwame Brathwaite's photographs. He begins photographing Black life in Harlem in the 1950s. When he gets his first camera, he's just a teenager. He's not a professional photographer. He's not working a beat, so to speak, but he makes the streets of Harlem his beat in a certain kind of way. And he's again involved in these Black nationalist politics through the African, through a Carlos Cooks organization that is celebrating African beauty. So when he and his brother and the other members of age as begin, you know, hosting these fashion shows that celebrate natural beauty, natural hair, this is in this moment that predates how we have traditionally periodized the Black power movement. So an aesthetic, you know, when we think about this exhibition toward a Black aesthetic, I mean, they are moving toward this more Afro-centric Black nationalist pan-Africanist vision of the liberated Black body. So the Grand Asa models and age as are really instrumental in helping to shape that conversation in the United States context. What was interesting for me as a dissertator who, again, is traveling abroad for the first time, traveling to the UK for the first time. I'm looking at Flamingo Magazine, which is a magazine that was published in the UK, but it also had headquarters or bases in the British Caribbean and also in West Africa. So I stumbled across these women who age as Grand Asa models on like the Nigerian issue of a Flamingo magazine while I'm in the UK doing research for my dissertation, which would become liberated threads. So I'm, you know, kind of charting this aesthetic. So when I look at these photos by green, I see that the aesthetic by the time we see these photographs from the 60s and 70s, certain aesthetic qualities have been set in terms of this culture. Black power is a freedom cry across the African diaspora. And in the Bay Area, of course, this is a major nodal point in this larger transnational struggle for Black freedom. We think about the Black Panthers, of course, when we think about Oakland, but there were all other kinds of Black cultural nationalist organizations and Black women-led organizations that, too, were articulating this vision of the Black body. And through this aesthetic vision, they're also articulating an intellectual approach to Black liberation struggles. So I definitely see Kenneth B. Green Sr. in this long trajectory of Black photographers who use their lens and lens-based art to capture Black life, but also to chronicle the changes in our communities over time and the various entry points that members of our community, people who oftentimes would have been ignored by the lens of some mainstream photographer or magazine, like how they show up in the visual archive of somebody like Green is really significant to how we understand the movement not only in the Bay Area but across the globe. I think it's also really significant that Kenneth B. Green Sr. is working as a photojournalist and a street photographer during this time that the Black Panther Party is also being minted in the Oakland. And Emery Douglas is also illustrating the weeklies and the newsletters that the Panther Party is putting together and circulating within their communities and beyond that also are iconographic in a way, right? Like the Panther itself, the Afro, as you said, the kinds of, I mean, Emery Douglas' work is obviously much more invested in a kind of militant stance, and that is pictured over and over again in terms of pose. But in terms of dress, it's very similar to the figures that we see in the photographs that are on view in the exhibition at San Francisco Public Library of Kenneth B. Green Seniors. And so I was hoping you could talk a little bit about coolness, me. I think I'm like coolness as a kind of like thematic thing that's happening and how you might characterize Brathwaite's approach to, I don't know if it's coolness for him, but maybe there's a different word in terms of the models. And obviously gender is at play as well. As you mentioned, there were a lot of women, women subjects in Brathwaite, as well as women leaders within the movement. So I was hoping you kind of tie all that together for us. Yeah, I think with Brathwaite, there is definitely a cool aesthetic that comes through in his work that is directly linked to the jazz culture of New York City, particularly Uptown in the 1950s and 60s. Of course, he cuts his teeth as a photographer, photographing the jazz shows that he and other members of a jazz would host in the Bronx, for example. So that cool improvisational nature of jazz, the rebelliousness of jazz is definitely alive in Brathwaite's earlier work. And as jazz morphs into these various forms, bebop, hardbop, of course soul jazz in the 1950s was definitely a thing. And we see these iterations of jazz as we move into the Black power years, but also the emergence of soul music and funk music and how that too creates its own aesthetic that has that reimagines what cool looks like, right, which allows photographers of the generation that's just like a half a generation behind Brathwaite to really bring to bear in the photography. Another thing that's happening in this period is that photography becomes even more democratic. I mean, if we think about photography as an art form, it's still a relatively young art form when we start thinking about it in conversation with like, you know, paintings and sculptures and so forth. So we think about the technology of the camera and how that's changing over the course of the mid to late 20th century. Photography itself is becoming more democratic so that people have greater access to cameras, right? And so we know what to do in front of a camera, how to pose and posture and position ourselves. And that's one thing that I love about both Brathwaite's work and Green's work, the ways that we see particularly Black women pose themselves and present a certain kind of body posture that in and of itself offers its own kind of body knowledge, right? Its own kind of epistemology to understand what we have termed self-fashioning. And then two, we can make that connection, we talked about Emery Douglas, but we can make the connection between some of the early hip hop photographers, you know, who are humming on the heels of the Brathwaite's and the Greens of the world and are helping us to understand, you know, hip hop culture and how it's formulating in the Bay Area, in Los Angeles, in New York City, even in places like the Midwest that oftentimes get left out of that conversation about hip hop or the South, which too oftentimes is really marginalized in these conversations about the Black arts movement. But of course, we know that places like Atlanta and New Orleans and other places, Houston, Texas, were also important nodal points in this conversation about Black photography and the arts more broadly. So I just love thinking about this genealogically. And I think it's also important here to note too, Ashley Farmer's book about, you know, remaking Black power and the roles that Black women image makers play so they weren't just the subjects of these photographs, they were also art and image makers that I think too, when we add that layer to the conversation, we really get a richer understanding of Black cultural production in the mid-20th century. No, absolutely. I know I was thinking, I'm like, oh, all of the references that I'm thinking about in terms of coolness is like, of course, Miles Davis is the birth of the cool, Barkley Hendricks own paintings. And I'm like, wait a minute, these are all men. So I love that you were like that you brought us brought our attention to Black women in this archive and in this genealogy. And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the relationship between fashion and gender that you've explored throughout your book projects, not just with the breath weight, but the kind of longer trajectory that you've set out for us in your book projects from liberated threads to now. Well, you know, one of these figures, I think it's definitely significant when we think about coolness and the connection between the music and the fashion is Betty Davis, right? Like, the way that she, you know, as a fashion student, when she meets Miles, I mean, she's the fashion plate. She's the one who understands the fashion culture. She has an articulation of cool. She's funky. She's edgy. You know, she's also talented. It's a vocalist as a musician in her own right. And I can remember too, so much of this for me goes back to my home because I grew up in a home where Blackness was everywhere. You know, my mom was a self-identified Black feminist, Black nationalist. My father was kind of like this, you know, new lefty kind of Black man, you know, who loved music. So he had tons of records. So album cover art for me was always a source of cultural material. It was iconography as well as just the craft of like watching my father care for his albums and put them on this, you know, record player. And we listened to these albums for hours, especially on the weekends when he was off work. So all of that for me is a part of it. And I can remember my mom having Betty Davis cassette tapes, you know, and looking at her with her hot pants and her knee over the knee boots. And I just, I thought, wow, she is such a badass. And it's that kind of energy. So I, you know, I'm thinking here now, seeing my mom and her Betty with her tapes of Betty Davis, like in the 80s and the early 90s. And it's those kind of images before I even recognize that they were shaping my work. When my mom would dress me in black as beautiful t-shirts or the revolution will not be televised. I'm wearing these t-shirts and my dad is playing Gil Scott here and in the house, like those kinds of things became foundational to my scholarship. So a lot of it for me is about honoring that history without flattening black life to show us in our complexity and the fullness of our humanity. And that's especially important for me as it relates to women and gender expansive people to allow us to live in these complex ways. And what that also means in terms of the way I periodize my work is, is that when you follow the everyday lives of black people, people who often you have to read the archive against the grain to even find, it means that we get a greater sense of the everyday life. Another amazing source for me in doing this work has been Drum Magazine, which was published in South Africa. And just looking at decades of this magazine from the 1940s onward to see representations of blackness in the South African context and how of course this magazine is published in South Africa, but it's covering various parts of East Africa and West Africa. And so you get a, you know, a range of depictions of life across the African continent as well. So I would encourage people, if you can find either old issues of that magazine, or they're also, they've been archived on microfilm, it's just such great source material to again, round out a more international picture of this movement. It's also one of the reasons why I'm excited about Chris Johnson's work and all the work that he's doing to reclaim. And I think sometimes we overuse this word reclaim. So I don't want to just say reclaim, but to really tease, do this careful work teasing stories from the archive of these very obscure organizations that again we're a part and parcel to this global struggle to end colonization on the African continent and also mapping these people as they're moving to parts of the African diaspora that we don't typically study. So I love being in conversation with a cohort of scholars who are doing this very careful archival work to piece together these histories guided by many of the aesthetic politics of the day. I love that you mentioned Betty Davis. She is a style con of mine too. And the mention of growing up in a house where black culture and black image making was all around. And I similarly grew up in an environment where my mother had pictures from Jet and Ebony magazine, which I know is also an archive that you use. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But also my grandmother literally would paste and plaster pages from magazines, from music, things that she, VHS, I mean she just out here cutting it out and putting it on the wall. And she would reiterate over and over like this is what's possible for you. And it was all over her house. I mean that was her wallpaper literally. So I love that you talked about that and that being part of your journey and how that shaped you as a scholar. I think about that a lot in my own work and how my how my upbringing in that way environmentally shaped me as well. And I want to talk a little bit about genre and your writing process. The Kenneth Pickering senior we've talked about him as a street photographer, as a photojournalist who documented black life in the Bay. And his pictures are also portraits. And I think it's interesting that most of them are, if not all of them, on view at the San Francisco Public Library, which also maybe San Francisco Public Library has issues of the Drone Magazine on microfilm. I don't know. Maybe. We'll see. I'm like maybe. I don't know. But Kenneth Pickering senior's images in that exhibition are largely of collect like folks gathered in groups, right? And so the individual versus the collective. And I wanted you to talk a little bit about the portraiture that's at play for you and your own work as a writer. Your second book is a memoir. Yeah. And your most recent book is a compelling biography of social worker and socialite Molly Moon, who fundraised for the Civil Rights Movement. And it is so delightful to read both of the last two for in particular. I sped through this. This was I was like, this needs to be a TV show. And this as well. And so both memoir and biography as genres are somewhat like portraits. And so I want to hear you talk a little bit about, do you see them that way? How did you approach writing these books from a place as a historian, but also a writer and public intellectual that's interested in the inner lives of women? And how did that process go for you and challenge you in terms of your craft as a researcher and a writer? Yeah, you know, there is one photograph in the collection that I think I love that you're asking me this. And it's not something that I had thought about directly, but there is an image in this and this exhibition that I think gets at what how your question hits me in my ears. And it's of this, this, you know, black woman. She has this perfectly quaff afro. It looks like she might be in a barber shop. And you know that moment when you're in the barber beauty shop and the, you know, your, your hairstylist gives you the mirror so that you can see the back of your hair through their mirror. And so you're doing this. I would say that is kind of what it was like for me to write Dress and Dreams, like where I'm seeing myself through a reflection of how other people see me and how I've been shaped, bit refracted by the cultural world around me and how I can then render a version of myself that is being reflected back to me on the page. So it is, it was kind of like stepping outside of myself, both being deeply in myself, like to the point where to really get some of those stories. I mean, it's bringing up tears, it's all these emotions, you know, that you're trying to pull out so that you can render them on the page with a, with a degree of authenticity, but it's also you seeing you and treating you like a character, right? Like it's, it's, I found it to be a very bizarre thing and quite uncomfortable for me because I'm someone who's very private. I mean, I think most people who know me would say that about me. In fact, some of them love to tell me that about myself. Girl, you're so private. Nobody knows anything about you. But yeah, that's what it was kind of like. It's like holding a mirror up to yourself and trying to see yourself somewhat objectively and that's not easy. I don't know if I would ever write another memoir. Maybe, maybe, I'll never say never, but it was, it was tricky. So in that regard, I do see that they're, what, what you mean about like portraiture and the artistry, like when I interviewed Kwame Brathwaite, one of the things I loved hearing him say was, you know, how he had to learn to use lighting, like an additional lighting source. And part of that becomes the artistry of it. Like where are you going to place your light, you know, to, in order to see your subject or the cover of the Kwame Brathwaite book, there are actually other images of Ciccolo Brathwaite that he took in that session, right? So you can see, you know, her body twisting, changing, you know, shape and you can see him, you know, he talked to me about his process of how he would bend and move in order to capture that person as they are bending and moving. That is part of the artistry of photography. And it's that work that's also part of the artistry of life writing, where whether you are the subject through memoir or autobiography, or if you are the, the biographer who's in the position where you're trying to move with your subject, that is part of it. Like how do you contort yourself? How do you change the aperture? How do you get other lighting sources in order to render that story, your own or someone else's on the page? And even though writing about myself is kind of tricky, especially doing that deeply personal writing, I have such respect for the craft of life writing and really want to devote this next, you know, stage of my career to really learning more about it and perfecting more about it and thinking about how we as Black people have used life writing as a revolutionary tool. Can you tell us more about what is next in your bio? Shana mentioned that you're working on a new project on Augusta Savage, which is thrilling. I love that. I can't wait to hear more about that, but I would love to hear you talk, tell us a little bit, give us a little preview of what's next for you and maybe what you're currently reading and listening to, what's inspiring you right now. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So you already know I'm going to be interviewing you for this Augusta Savage book, just like I did for the Molly Moon book. You are one of my faves, one of my go-to art historians, visual studies scholars. I mean, you are her when it comes to that, so I just love everything that you're building. I actually want to hear more about what you're doing with your work too and your book. Yes, I'm writing a book on Augusta Savage that I'm thinking of as an experimental biography because Augusta Savage doesn't have the kind of robust paper collection that say someone like a Molly Moon does, even though they were peers and friends. There's less of Augusta Savage and so I want to do, this project is less of me making the attempt to find Augusta Savage in the archive, but more so to treat her at face value, meaning like what is in this archive and using that to think alongside her. I mean, many of us know her as a sculptor, but she was also a poet and a writer of prose, she was an intellectual, she was an institution builder, she was an activist, and I argue that she was a radical activist that she had a radical vision for the democratization of art. So I am using her to think alongside her as I move through some of the key moments of the past decade plus, to how can she help us understand the dynamics around race and gender and artistic production and representation in this era of the movement for Black Lives. So that's what I'm working on now. I just finished watching an amazing PBS documentary that one of the main curators who works on, curators and art historians who works on Augusta Savage has put together, I encourage people to watch that, you can find it on PBS and on YouTube as well. So I've just been watching that pretty much incessantly. Do you know who I'm talking about? I don't know the filmmaker, but I know Dr. Jeffrey Haines who's based in Chicago is the narrator and she is the she is the expert on Augusta Savage. Yes, exactly. So I want to interview you like I have her Augusta Savage book that's part of the exhibition that she curated and I've quoted from that book extensively and I really see this project as complimenting the work that she's done on Augusta Savage and really, you know, Augusta Savage for the 21st century. So I've been, you know, looking at that documentary and reading things about Augusta Savage. I'm also currently reading Jill LaPour's Joe Gould's tea because Joe Gould was the man who stalked Augusta Savage for decades and Jill LaPour has written like the short biography of Joe Gould that goes into detail about his stalking of Augusta Savage and how in certain ways this might have forced her underground because of, you know, his, his, you know, very persistent and even I think LaPour imagines that this was even or had the potential to be a violent, you know, confrontations with Augusta Savage. So those are the things I'm reading right now. Wow. I just, the way that you have to manage and balance all of these incredible, like the archival material and as you said, like, you're not going to look for Augusta Savage, but even with Molly Moon, it's like somebody who hasn't really been written into the narrative of civil rights, of the civil rights movement in a way that she deserves because she was a powerhouse in all these ways. And I'm so glad that you mentioned the piece about radicality between Augusta Savage and Molly Moon. I think that's a connection in this book as well and kind of teasing out what do we mean and where do we locate radicality for black cultural politics when it's not just like in your face loud, potentially like the Black Panther Party, although that's debatable as well, but, you know, our ideas around what counts as radicality, you really start to take that to task in our secret society. And I can't wait to see what you do with that with the Augusta Savage project online. I mean, reading through a stalker's biography to think about how that affected Augusta Savage and then also thinking about how you think, how you are already in tap with inner lives of black women and gender and the politics of that and then surveillance, which is what you also dealt with in our secret society as well. So I see that's fine. I love it. I love it. I have more questions for you, but I want to be respectful of time. We have about 15 more minutes. And I know that there's a question in the chat. And if anybody else has other questions, again, I have more questions so we can continue the conversation. But I want to make sure that we get to this, at least this one question that's in the chat. Yeah, hi, there's one question from an anonymous attendee. Are there particular materials that show up often in your research or figure into your work as in fabric styles, cotton, silk, etc? Yes. Oh, I love this. I love this. I love this. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. So various forms of cotton show up in the work. In fact, one of my colleague friends, Britt Russard, is like, we need to co-author a piece on cotton, you know, that take more of a black studies approach to histories of cotton. You know, there have been books that have been written on this, but they take more of a new histories of capitalism approach. And so we're thinking about like ways in which we can take a, you know, a black studies, queer of color critique, black feminist approach to cotton. So cotton is definitely, definitely shows up, whether that be through its production as denim, whether it be through other ways that it shows up in versions of African printed cloths, you know, and the various, I say that you don't put up the quotes on that because, you know, a lot of this fabric has been imitated and, you know, sold mass produced. I also think about boutique prints. Those showed up, especially in liberated threads and the, you know, those global circulations of this material, particularly across the Pacific world. And I think this is an important point too. I want to, I would be remiss if I didn't shout out Katherine McKinley in her book, The African Lookbook, which again is thinking about, you know, materials, material culture, black women as image makers, black women as subjects of photography and really looking at the continent, West Africa in particular, to think about how black women positioned themselves and styled themselves outside of the gaze or beyond the gaze of the white anthropologist who was coming to the continent to photograph black women and their nude bodies or, you know, their bodies that are adorned through body paints and scarification and so forth. So I definitely wanted to shout out that book. I don't see any more questions in the chat, but this is a great segue to the, to another question that I had for you, which was about your writing process, the actual, like, you've been on the road, you are one of the most traveled person just in terms of your, your leisure and pleasure, but also in terms of your work, and especially on this last book tour for the Mali Moon project, you have been everywhere and anywhere. So I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about how do you maintain a writing practice in that? And like, how do you, how do you choose which threads to follow? Because like, I know they got the savage thing is crystallizing into a project and when it came through the Mali Moon project. So I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the, the, the, the, the threat, the threats that, that unravel while you're working and how you maintain a writing process while, practice while you're on the road. Yes. Yes. I do love to travel. And when I had that dissertation fellowship at the University of London, that was larger because one of my good friends and colleagues, Ebony Utley, I told her, I really want to travel, I really want to travel abroad. She's a professor as well. At this time I was a graduate student. She might have been an assistant professor, but I was still a graduate student. She found this fellowship. She sent it to me. And so what that meant was that I now had a legit reason to travel for work, right? Like, my, so my scholarship is always going to be scholarship that takes me across the United States, but beyond the United States to really, I want to travel anywhere that black people have touched ground. And of course, that's in most parts of the world. So I, I want to be there trying to understand something on the local or community level about black life and black cultural production. And this is something that you and I have in common, like our love of, you know, the arts and also travel, you know, and so we didn't get to do our Paris rendezvous last time, but we're going to make up for that soon. So yeah, I, my family makes fun of me because I recently did a podcast where I, it was about writing and I was like, yeah, I can write anywhere. I can make it happen anywhere on a train, on a plane, on a bus. I can ride my bike and write, you know, but it is true to a certain extent because if you want, I really, I'm not a photojournalist or a journalist, definitely not traditionally trained, but in many ways I see myself as something of an ethnographer meets, you know, a field reporter who's you have to learn how to find the story and bang out the story, whatever you happen to find yourself, you know. And so I take that kind of approach to my writing. In terms of what kind of threads I follow, part of it is, you know, I'm, I think the academy tries to break down who we are and who we were raised to be and the kinds of forms of knowledge production that we learn in our own home to teach us this other value system that they deem most important is the colonial project that is embedded in academia. And so for me, part of my, my journey has been becoming undisciplined in many ways. And that means turning more to a spiritual understanding of, you know, of how I should approach my work. And so there's many ways that I do let my spirit lead, you know, where does this, where should this story go? Well, what do I think, not only just me as a historian, but me as a black girl, right? Like where, where does this story need to go? So entrusting my own storytelling instincts and from that, I've been able to develop an authorial voice that I can confidently stand behind. I love that. I love that advice. And it really, it actually relates to the next question in the chat. There's two that came in. I love this. And one of them is from my student Chanel Cox. I love that. I'll let Shauna read it. But I know she's interested in these questions about discipline and undiscipline, art, aesthetics, and social, social, social cultural context. So I'll let Shauna read this question. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Barber. Which one of your books, Dr. Ford, if any, focus on the diasporic black aesthetic and do any connect diasporic resistance through self-fashioning? Yes, yes, yes. So I would say Liberated Threads was my first foray into this. It's my first book. It's based on my dissertation. And for that book, I traveled to, I traveled to the UK and even lived in the UK for a while on my dissertation fellowship and also to Johannesburg, where I made subsequent trips there doing, you know, doing ethnographic research and stalls, which is where a lot of places where they, you know, fashion designers kind of sell their wares, high-end malls, flea markets, interviewing, activists, fashion designers, models. So I think that book most directly deals with the, you know, a circulation of ideas around the black dress body across the African diaspora, particularly in these three nodal points. I mean, and I borrowed that framework from Carol Tullock. I was definitely inspired by the way she triangulates from London, Johannesburg, and New York City. So I kind of built on that framework for that first book. In the Molly Moon book, it actually moves me into an earlier time period. So if liberated threads was mostly situated in the 1960s and 70s, the Our Secret Society moves us to the 1930s and 40s, and really thinking about the relationship between black travel abroad and the formation of an expansion of a new Negro movement. So, and a lot of this becomes fodder for a black internationalist approach to the freedom movement, to, you know, anti-capitalism and the solidarities, you know, across the global proletariat, so to speak. So in that book, it's not so much that the African continent is the focal point, but I am thinking about how people of African descent are creating black solidarities, both in terms of like racially black, but also politically black, and like, what does that mean in the depression era? So in this next book on Augusta Savage, I want to, it'll definitely start in that 1930s moment, but I'm really interested in the 1950s in that book. And again, taking an internationalist approach to think about radical arts institution building in the 1950s, which I think is an understudied moment because we tend to focus on the quote unquote, Harlem Renaissance or the new Negro Renaissance of the 20s and 30s. And then we jump to the black arts movement of the 1960s. But I really want to think critically about that interstitial moment and in the kinds of radical black political thought that is very global in its mindset that is fueling the institution building across the United States. I love that you mentioned the new Negro Renaissance because it's a great plug for tomorrow's conversation, even though I don't work for the San Francisco Public Library, but I'm a huge fan of Dr. Jacqueline Francis and the exhibition that is on view here in LA at the Huntington, the Sergeant Claude Johnson exhibition is not to be missed. It is incredible. So if you do have time to tune into that, she brings California and Sergeant Claude Johnson into the new Negro Renaissance in a really profound way that shakes up the region, the regionalism that gets attached to the quote unquote Harlem Renaissance. So I love that you mentioned that. And we have one more question, I think just a time, yes, time for one more question for the evening. And I think it's a great question to end us too. Yeah, here it goes. Have you been able to experience any events that were reminiscent of the time period in which Molly Moon lived? And as an Afrofuturist, do you think that we're entering into a new black art slash Harlem Renaissance? Also, thanks for your comment on undisciplined, it really resonates. Well, thank you for this question. So Dr. Barber, I actually want to hear you answer the second part of the question. But as for the first part of it, I would say yes. And here's a story that if people who might have heard me say this before, it just indulged me because it still hits me. I kind of feel like I'm in a perpetual state of living through what it was like and Molly Moon hosted because I moved into her building. I moved on her floor while writing this book. Unbeknownst to me, this was not a plan, it was not a strategy, but I was looking at some documents and was like, why does that address look familiar? Oh my God, is that my address? So I feel like because of the African cosmologies that I espouse that Molly Moon and I are currently neighbors. Y'all might be kin too because when I read every page, I'm like, this is Tenisha, this is Tenisha, this is Tenisha, her Midwestern route. I was just like, this is wild, it's such a mirror of anyway, keep going. So that's it. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I'm also trying to recreate some of this stuff. It's why if you go to my website, ourseekersocietybook.com, you can find a downloadable recipe book that I, let's see this chat, the comment, that I, yes, there she is. Here she is. I curated these recipes based on things that Molly Moon loved to cook and other women of her national urban league guild. And it's a part of what I want to do more of is actually starting to make some of these recipes. And so one of my friends wants to hold a party at my house where we come together and make some of this food from the era. So on the other part about like, what is this moment we're living through Dr. Barber? Is this some other kind of renaissance? Oh my, I, you know, I think that there is something about the market and the economy in terms of capitalism and the engine that demands Black visualization. And because it's trendy or because it, I don't want to say distracts us, but it's like, it's, it's its own cultural capital and cachet that gets circulated. It's a commodity. And that's something that Black image makers have been confronting from the beginning since images have been a thing that we've created. But I don't, I don't know about renaissance because I'm curious. To me, a renaissance seems, the way I think about a renaissance is something that does undo something or that it solidifies a new paradigm. And I'm not sure where they're yet. I would like for us to be as an Afrofuturist who also is a little bit of a political pessimist. But I would love for that to be, to be something that we realize together. I do think there's much, much, much more work to be done. But I hesitate to say that we are in an era of new Black art renaissance because so much of the art that I see is also gallery driven. Like I said, it's market driven. It's the art world and the arts and culture sector wants to gobble it up in a particular way. And there are pros and cons to that in terms of economic and franchisement for Black folks. But yeah, I hesitate to say that we're there. We'll be talking about that when I interview you for this Augusta Savage book. Wonderful. I can't wait. Yeah, we're waiting for that book too. And, you know, everybody, thank you for that amazing conversation. Dr. Ford, Dr. Barber, was great. Do get Dr. Ford's book, Our Secret Society. This is the new book. I have a copy of Dressed in Dreams. Unfortunately, Liberated Threads was out, so I couldn't show that. But that's also a worth of read and check out Dr. Tiffany Barber's website to see some of her amazing writings. Thank you all so much for being here today and come to the San Francisco Public Library and see the toward the Black aesthetic exhibit. All right. And tune in tomorrow for Dr. Jacqueline Francis and I love that. Yes. Yes. Shout out to my mom and dad who are in the room too. All right, y'all. See you later.