Strange Fire

Q&A: Shabez jamal

By Jessica Baran   |   May 6, 2020 

Shabez Jamal’s (b. 1992, St. Louis, MO) interdisciplinary practice interrogates physical and historically imagined space by challenging the dominant narratives that define racial and sexual identity. Recent work has focused on the cultural legacy of Kinloch, Missouri's first Black incorporated city located in St. Louis' North County. A once-flourishing community, Kinloch suffered aggressive disinvestment in the 1980s as a result of St. Louis City acquiring much of its land in a proposed expansion of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. While the expansion was never realized, the plan forcibly displaced the majority of Kinloch's residents.

Jamal's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Old No. 77 Arts Hotel, New Orleans, LA and Erica Popp Gallery, St. Louis, MO as well as group exhibitions at the Griot Museum, St. Louis, MO, Pearl Conrad Gallery at Ohio State University, Mansfield, OH, Granite City Art and Design District, Granite City, IL, projects+gallery, St. Louis, MO, and Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, among other venues. Jamal has been awarded residencies at Paul Artspace, St. Louis, MO and the Old No. 77 Hotel, New Orleans, LA and an #InTheCity Visual Arts Fellowship through Harvard University’s Commonwealth Project. Currently, he is a Mellon Community Engaged Research Fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA, where he’s pursuing his MFA. He holds a Bachelor of Liberal Studies, with an emphasis in Studio Art and Western Art History, from the University of Missouri St. Louis and an Associate of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Photography from St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley.

Jessica Baran: It's great to have the chance to speak with you, Shabez! I'd like to start by hearing more about some of your recent projects, such as the series of photographic collages that's included in the current group exhibition curated by De Nichols at the Griot Museum, "In the City: Memories of Black Presence" and also the works-in-progress in which photographs of your body are affixed to domestic objects, such as a refrigerator door, or framed like family photos. Do you see these as related in some way?

Shabez Jamal: For sure. The work on view at the Griot that uses imagery taken from my grandmother's photo albums is kind of the mid-point to what I'm working on now, which began with the work included in the 2018 group show at projects+gallery, "Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom" that Modou Dieng curated in collaboration with For Freedoms. For that exhibit I made a series of self-portraits and a video interview with my grandfather that included layered audio and video taken in Kinloch, Missouri.

All of this work revolves around Kinloch, but it's also an interrogation of my understanding of home and where home is for the Black fat queer body — coming out of years of housing insecurity and fear of my queerness displacing me from homes I'd grown accustomed to, and never being able to fully settle myself in my body in a space because of my identity. So I go back again and again to the places that I've been told are home, the places that I've always named home. The place that's remained most consistent, and which I revisit the most in my work, is my great grandmother's house in Kinloch.

After my great grandmother passed, it became a house for our family to reside in when we fell on hard times. At one point when I was growing up, my mom, sister, and I had been living in a very unsafe environment, so my grandmother and her two sisters opened up the house to us, and we stayed there for maybe five years during my high school and early college years. Coming of age in that house where my mother and grandmother had also came of age felt like a spiritually settled moment. And so I return back to that moment and to that place that functioned as home for me, as it had for several generations of my family, and that now no longer exists.

The only way that that house, and places like it, do exist now is in photographs. Revisiting a home through photographs and reframing the people who took these images as not simply hobby photographers but as archivists, as people who actively and intentionally documented the history of a place for the purpose of preservation, is an important part of what I'm doing. I'm reframing my grandmother as a conservator and my great grandmother's home as a kind of museum of my family's history, which is also a historical record of a public place and community that's no longer there.

And while nostalgia may take me back to that place, I also recognize that, at that time, I was running away from that space. I wanted to leave so I could be queer, so I could be out, because I felt like the whole of me couldn't exist within that space. The work I'm doing now, where I'm taking photographs of my body and putting them in old frames or attaching them to a refrigerator door — it's a way of imagining a space that resembles my grandmother's house but that can actually hold my body and my full existence. This work makes a home for me. And I can pack that home up and move it from gallery to gallery, place to place. It's a home that I'm creating for myself and my body to be revered in all of its thoughts and greatness. I think all of my work up to this point has led to what I'm making now, as I've always been trying to find a space for myself and body to exist, both in the world and within photographs and photographic history.

JB: Do you see your work as being in conversation with some of the other recent projects being done about Kinloch — such as the "Kinloch Doc" by Alana Marie, who's in the Griot show with you, or Amanda Williams project "We're Not Down, We're Over Here," which is included in the group exhibition "Black Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America" that's currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art?

SJ: Definitely! I actually met Alana after learning that someone else in town was working on a project about Kinloch. I reached out to her and we had dinner and, by way of multiple conversations, we began to call each other cousins. We were like, "We have to be related in some kind of way — even if we don't have the biological proof, we have to be related!" So many of our stories are similar; so many streets were walked by both of our parents. And sharing stories about these places that neither one of us were able to visit but have existed as stories that have been passed down from our families just felt so familial. Working parallel to her has been great because our approaches are so different, which aids in our ability to bounce our projects off one another.

I'll also say that this body of work is about Kinloch but also my existence as a kind of Midwestern Black experience. I know that a lot of Black spaces and neighborhoods within the Midwest were decimated just like Kinloch, so Kinloch's history is one that's shared with many communities across the region. Missouri is this weird space between the North and the South that feels Northern when I'm here in New Orleans, but feels Southern when I'm in Chicago. So that confused regional identity also influences the way that I'm working and thinking about space. Because I don't know, where am I from? Am I from the North or the South or neither?

JB: There are many layers to what you're talking about with this work, including, at least as I see it, a degree of institutional commentary about what's missing from histories and canons and also about how we're taught to look at art and where we're taught to find it. Does that factor into your thinking?

SJ: Yes and no. One of my motivations for making this work is a desire to simply go back to what originally inspired me to get into photography. Knowing my first experience with a camera was when my grandmother gave me a Kodak she'd bought from Walgreen's probably an hour before she arrived at this one family event, and how she then allowed me to document that event, along with many others after. And how going to her home and seeing photos of family members on the walls of her house was my first gallery experience …

I never really had an issue seeing myself or people who look like me in spaces considered prestigious, because I've always looked at my grandmother's house as an elevated space. It was the space I could always go to be fed, to be protected. And it was always a space of wonder. When I go to museums now, I feel like I did at my grandmother's house, where I would always find something new, where she would pull out a photo album I'd never seen or I'd discover something in a cabinet — buttons, a pen, church fans and church programs. The place just held so much history, so much potential for discovery. Being in grad school now and having to go through archives and dig through libraries feels reminiscent of how I would search through my grandmother's home.

JB: I love that. That's really moving to me — and upends, or reveals, some of my own art-institutional skepticism. I know that you've described your practice as embedded in image-making, predominantly photographic image-making, but you're also a performer who has also made installations. I'm curious if you still see your work as rooted in photography.

SJ: When I got into grad school, my goal was to try everything outside of photography. I felt like I already knew how make a good photo, and I wanted to push myself. So I started some things that didn't make sense, and it just ... was not good. I then felt like I had to go back to what I knew and build around the photograph. Photography will probably always be something that finds its way into my image-making and even my performances and video work, as I think about all of it from the perspective of composing a photographic image.

But I definitely shifted away from calling myself a photographer, as that language was too limiting. Now I feel it's more accurate to just call myself a lens-based artist, as I work with various lenses — videographic, photographic, or simply my eye, and how I see.

JB: You alluded to going through other archives earlier — are you doing additional research beyond the Kinloch project?

SJ: I have a two-year Mellon Fellowship for Community Engaged Research, for which I am to develop a community-based project in collaboration with a local partner to benefit New Orleans in some way. The project is to be structured live beyond the fellow/fellowship, to prevent it from being something that leaves its collaborators high-and-dry once they've become dependent on it. My idea was to create some type of digital public archive for queer Black folks in New Orleans. I feel like a digital archive is something that can be built to sustain itself, with or without me.

JB: I remember you mentioning having an interest in a project like this, prior to entering grad school. I believe you wanted to create a photographic series of queer Black folks in the Midwest and South. Is this related in some way?

SJ: I think subconsciously, yes. But I came to realize that the act of going into and photographing a community that wasn't mine was something I struggled with ethically, especially in a city like New Orleans. A lot of folks come into this city regularly and pillage it — pillage its culture and people. Even more so post-Katrina. The Black folks here have been continually taken advantage of, and I don't want to be a part of that. I've had to really rethink my project in a way that centers the people of New Orleans and de-centers myself — privileging what they actually need and how I can serve to fulfill that need. Because that's what I'm here for — to be of service to the community. Hearing the stories of Katrina's devastation, how whole communities lost everything, including their own documentation and imaging of themselves, resonated with my love of my grandmother's photo albums and the work I've been doing around them and Kinloch, and instilled in me this deep desire to rectify those losses or help prevent additional ones. I feel like it's important for me to assist the people who live here preserve their own stories.

The aim in working with a community partner is to get us grounded, so we can hear directly from the community members what they need. Which is to say, if I end up hearing that they need or want a different project form one I've been imagining, then I'll toss out my idea in order to pursue theirs. It's important to be pliable in that way — to center these people and decenter myself, which, in the end, makes the work much more fulfilling.

So far it's been an eye-opening experience but also a familiar one because of all that I witnessed in Ferguson. When the protests were taking place after Mike Brown's murder, people swooped into the St. Louis region and profited off of all that pain, which was the community's pain, and then left. And Ferguson still looks the same. Even though Ferguson and Katrina couldn't be farther apart, I feel like they share some similar dynamics.

JB: I had not realized until just recently, when I was looking through your website, that you'd documented Ferguson during the Uprising. Do you feel like that was a turning point in your art practice?

SJ: It was. I'd started off thinking I was going to be a photojournalist. I was a student at St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley — and it was the precipice of cellphones and digital cameras and camera phones. I felt like, "I still have a chance! I could be a photojournalist!" My intention in going out to Ferguson the first night was just to document. I wanted to see what was going on. But the more I was out there, and the more people I talked to, the more their stories resonated. I was still living in Kinloch, so all of this was happening a half-mile away from where I called my home. I could hear everything that was happening. I would could hear it on Florissant Road at night, as I was heading home from school. I was filled with all these questions as to why all of this was happening in Ferguson — a place near to where I'd spent my entire life. Why was this happening there?

I'd then be at home, having conversations with my grandparents about how it was all reminiscent of the Civil Rights Movement. To be living alongside people who existed in Jim Crow era, and for them to tell me that it was all eerily similar to what they'd experienced, and in the middle of the Obama years ...

I finally thought that I could become president, and then there's this shocking revelation that no, things have not changed as much as you thought. That intrigue — "Why Ferguson? Why right now?" — pointed me back to home and Kinloch and made me think about what was happening there that could culminate in a similar event; and finding out about the formation of Kinloch and the way Kinloch and Ferguson interacted; and learning about Ferguson's long history as a sundown town, and people having to go though Ferguson in order to get to Kinloch, before the sun went down, from, say, their cleaning job; to know that that history existed in the same spaces where my grandparents and grandmother found a life and had joy.

As much trauma as there is in these spaces, I'm more interested in the joy people cultivated there. I think of Kinloch as this utopian space for Black folks at one time. My mom talks about being able to walk within a mile and go to the candy store and get chili fries and go to a movie theater. And all these places that existed where people could experience leisure without fear. I guess underneath everything was fear, all the time, imminent fear. But not as much, at least, in Kinloch.

For me, photographing Ferguson and having this connection with it that a lot of folks there didn't have was revelatory. I was taking pictures alongside photographers from CNN and seeing how removed they were from the situation, and how they were able to pack up their vans and leave. And I would have to walk past it all afterwards, every day, to get back home. I wasn't able to remove myself. These subjects were real people and people who are also experiencing the same shock of "this is happening in a space that we call home" as much as I was. That's what took me away from photojournalism. I felt much more passion about what I was shooting than the folks that I saw on from these major networks who just came in to document this moment and go home. This was home for me, and I couldn't just leave.

JB: Thank you for sharing that; that's incredibly powerful. As you're now moving forward with your work and looking toward realizing your new projects, what's your vision for how they might live in the world?

SJ: I want them to feel like home. I want my projects to feel like home. I have that written down in my journal and in my sketchbooks. When I have studio visits, I always say that. And the person visiting will always be like, "What does that mean?" And I'm like, "I don't know. I'm still figuring it out!" But I do know I want it to feel like home. I want it to be warm. I want it to be inviting. I want it to be a place of joy, a place of peace. I want my body to be able to rest. And I'm thinking about some of the performances I might do in that space, once I've made it. I just want my body to be able to feel at ease. I've been reading Nelson Goodman's "Ways of Worldmaking" and using his idea of worldmaking as a way of thinking through the queer experience. And how the worlds we make are built from worlds we already know. So I'm just trying to think about the worlds that make me comfortable and make me feel safe and warm in order to make a space, a new space, that embodies all of those things.

JB: That's beautiful, Shabez. I can't wait to visit that space. Thank you so much for taking the time to catch up and discuss your work! I look forward to seeing all that you're going to make.

SJ: It was so good to talk to you too, Jessica! Thank you!