Strange Fire

Q&A: Grace Aneiza Ali

By Rafael Soldi | December 2, 2021

Grace Aneiza Ali is a Curator and an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Her curatorial, research and teaching practices center on curatorial activism, art and social justice, art and migration, global contemporary art, and art of the Caribbean Diaspora with a focus on her homeland Guyana. Ali serves as Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York. She is an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. Her essays on contemporary art have been published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Wasafiri, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, Small Axe, and Nueva Luz Photographic Journal. Her recent book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora explores the art and migration narratives of women of Guyanese heritage. Ali was born in Guyana and migrated to the USA when she was fourteen years old.

Rafael Soldi: Hi Grace, thank you for taking the time to chat with Strange Fire.

Grace Aneiza Ali: Thank you for the invitation. 

RS: One important focus within your curatorial and research practice is art of the Caribbean Diaspora, especially of your homeland Guyana. I find that often BIPOC creators and curators are expected to explore and articulate their own identities. I'd like to begin not by assuming that this was an obvious path for you, but rather honoring the choice you've made to make this a focus of your work. Why is it important for you to expand this field and what have you discovered as you deepen your research into art of the Caribbean Diaspora and Guyana?

GAA: Thank you for framing the question in such a thoughtful way. And you’re right, it wasn’t an obvious path for me. I studied literature and wanted to be a professor of English literature. Although I am now a professor in departments of art and art history, grounding myself in the study of Caribbean Literature, African Diasporic Literature, Indian Literature, has proven to be the best curatorial training I could have asked for because in teaching me how to read  literature, how to seek and find the punctum—that elusive sensory, intensely subjective effect of a paragraph, or a singular line, or even a phrase—how to think about absence in the text as much as presence, and how to find the art on the page, I learned how to better see and think through the ideas and concepts in a work of visual art. I’ve committed my curatorial practice to art of the Caribbean Diaspora not only because it belongs to me and it is the part of the world where my roots lie, but equally because it is an incredibly rich, storied, dynamic, vibrant, abundant, and worthy body of work to invest my study in, to curate, and to create scholarship. 

RS: Your recent book Liminal Spaces is an intimate exploration into the art and migration narratives of fifteen women of Guyanese heritage. Tell me about how this book came together—I'm interested in the importance these stories carry and how you managed a project that combines memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, photography, art and curatorial essays.

GAA: In addition to writers, poets, and journalists, many of the contributors are contemporary visual artists who accompany their essays with compelling bodies of work informed by their unique experiences of migration.  I turned to my curatorial practice as a blueprint for Liminal Spaces and culled from my collaborations with the contributors, correspondences, and conversations between us that have unfolded over a period of time, exhibitions I’ve curated, and my published writings on their work. The book is conceived as a visual exhibition on the page, the fifteen contributors’ essays and artworks are curated as a four-part journey—one that allows the reader to trace the migration path of Guyanese women from their motherlands, to their moment of departure, to their arrival on diasporic soils, to their reunion with Guyana, and all that flows in between. 

RS: Beyond the diaspora-specific contributions this book makes, do you see it as a blueprint for probing more global homeland narratives and historical legacies of communities affected by migration

GAA: Absolutely! For anyone who leaves one place for another, impelled by choice or trauma, remaining connected to a homeland is at once beautiful, fraught, disruptive, and evolving. We’ve been able have to global conversations surrounding Liminal Spaces, from audiences in the UAE, Italy, the Philippines, to of course the Guyanese Diaspora itself throughout the Caribbean, North America and Europe—and it’s been so generative to see so many people find entryways into the migration narratives of this book, even though it is such a quintessential Guyanese experience. 

RS: Why was it important to tell these stories through the voices of women?

GAA: This collection—the first of its kind—is devoted entirely to the voices of women from Guyana and its expansive diaspora. The narratives featured in Liminal Spaces counter a legacy of absence and invisibility of Guyanese women’s stories. While the voices of Guyanese women remain under-the-radar, the women in Liminal Spaces, our literary and artistic practices, are shining ambassadors of Guyana’s multiple stories. More broadly, women are at the nexus of migration, more women than men are migrating globally. In doing so, they remake, reinvent, and rebuild their lives, as many times as needed. Collectively they reveal that we are all, in some sense, immigrants, embarking on the constant work, the hard labor, privately and publicly, of dismantling one life to make a new one.

RS: Perhaps now is a perfect time to discuss Encounters, an exhibition you curated at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning earlier this year. This exhibition features fourteen women from the South Asian Diaspora working in collaborative pairs or artist teams. I love that in your text you note that their shared bonds and histories “reveal personal and political narratives that may have been otherwise unknown or invisible, signal an economy of care, and envision an equitable future in which women thrive." What are some of the topics that emerged from these collaborations and what did you take away from watching these artists work together leading up to the show?

GAA: We forged through the pandemic still reeling through New York City in the Spring of 2021 to launch Encounters. It was a period when the act, or the mere intention of being together and to gather, was a radical act. I stayed in New York City while it was the epicenter and I felt the isolation, not the physical isolation as much, but the psychological isolation, what that kind of maiming does to the heart and soul. I wanted to know how we could still make, create, collaborate. I wanted to know how we still found each other in the midst of all that sorrow and loss. I was touched that underscoring all of the artistic collaborations among these women was friendship, love, and care for each other. We must create spaces in art where this impetus, this model for making, thrives. 

RS: What was the impetus for curating Women's Work: Art & Activism in the 21st Century back in 2019? Did your experience working on that show influence how you approached your most recent exhibitions?

GAA: I was struck when I came across this definition of women’s work in the Oxford Dictionary still in existence: “work traditionally and historically undertaken by women, especially tasks of a domestic nature such as cooking, needlework and child rearing.” I wanted to explore how this term could be reimagined for our contemporary moment and by women themselves. Women have already been doing the work; transcending these definitions and parameters of what women’s work is, but here we are with this definition still very much intact and still very much used. I wanted to use art to trouble that definition, call attention to it, provoke it and redefine it to include activism. “Women’s Work” as an exhibition began with interrogating language—that’s my study of literature always following me. Language can be used as a tool of liberation, and it can equally be used as a tool of oppression. So, when we ask people to shift the way they think about a particular idea, we have to start with language. For my curatorial projects, I am always trying to balance the visual with the literary, to have them be in conversation with each other. 

RS: What are you working on at the moment and where can we follow your work?

GAA: I am continuing my work examining the significance of visual art created by people who have experienced migration. It is of course deeply personal for me, as my experience of migration and that of my family, of those who leave and those who are left, continue to reverberate through my life. I am thinking through how art influenced by or created in response to acts of migration shape our understanding of the 21st century migrant experience.

RS: Thank you, Grace! Looking forward to your upcoming project.