August 2024
Key Jo Lee
Key Jo Lee has much to share, and it’s no wonder—she’s a PhD candidate at Yale, the author of the culturally pivotal work Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, and the curator of Unruly Navigations, a poignant group exhibition currently on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), which explores global experiences of displacement and identity. Through my conversation with her for Curator, it is clear that Key Jo Lee is illuminating vital voices and ideas, shaping our understanding of art and the world around us.
—Sabrina Roman
SABRINA ROMAN: Anyway, shall we get started?
KEY JO LEE: We shall. Let's go.
SR: It goes without saying that you yourself have accomplished numerous feats within this space, whether through Perceptual Drift: Black Arts and an Ethics of Looking, and now within Unruly Navigations, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Where have your earliest days in this space been spent developing exhibitions and navigating themes of race and identity, determined by the ones you're presently living through now?
KJL: I will say that my training as an interdisciplinary scholar was the beginning. I was able to take such an array of seminars, from thinking about the metabolization of violent histories in art in a course with Erica Moya James or working with Kobena Mercer, who's so well known for his work on in transnational art, which allowed me to more deeply understand the specificities that surround things like Black British art making.
This combined with my trajectory into African American performance historiography and literature that also inform this work. Alongside my studies, I worked as a museum educator at the Yale University Art Gallery. I was a Wurtele Gallery Teacher teaching elementary school kids through to seniors, as well as, and groups with special needs. All these different methodologies for entering into an artwork then contributed to my desire to appeal to a really broad audience with the work that I do, but also to draw them into a particularly nuanced conversation once there.
SR: With Unruly Navigations, I've read that this exhibition ”testifies to the urgent, disorderly, rebellious, and nonlinear movements of people, cultures, ideas, religions, and aesthetics that define diaspora.” In which ways do you believe it, firstly, recognizes the world as it is, and then also envisages it as it could be, particularly when it concerns the people it showcases and the experiences it showcases?
KJL: Well, of the 10 artists that are featured in Unruly Navigations, each of their works and/or installations is directed toward this network of experiences. I think that even the selection of the artists who represent 10 different communities, global communities, from the Caribbean, from the African continent, from the United States, and from Europe, already dismantles the notion that you can only find Blackness in one place.
And then the sheer variety of facture, or of making, points to this way in which they are deeply involved and embedded in a contemporary conversation about art, but they also have a specific anchor to place and person and personal history. Also, the exhibition starts on the first floor, but the introductory text doesn't begin until the second floor because I didn't want to force you into a pattern of movement, even in upon entering the space. Instead, I wanted it there to be a sense of discovery.
Oluseye, Eminado Series, Reunion 12, 13, and 17, Variable assemblage, Installation view, 2018 - Ongoing
Oluseye, The value of my dreams will not drown me, Bronze, Variable dimensions, Installation view, 2023
SR: For me, it's incredibly interesting because when people hear about Blackness, they immediately associate it with Africa. Africa is a part of it. I think that this exhibition, which I was fascinated to read, actually runs beyond that. It goes beyond the continent. It addresses every part of the world, and it speaks to a universal experience in that sense. You don't have to be living in Africa to relate to the exhibition. You can live in Europe. You can live in South America. You can live in China. You could be anywhere in the world and feel a deep intrinsic connection as a person, first and foremost, as a BAME person, even more so to what this art show talks about.
KJL: The African continent is a significant part of any discussion of the diaspora, but it is equally important to me that at MoAD, we're touching upon a truly global sensibility. The way that I've often explained it is, of course, that while the Black experience is never one thing, there are these gossamer tethers that link us across space and geographies and time that these are worthy of note. I'm interested in those contingencies, like where we adhere and where we break apart. Where does class enter the building and disrupt everything? When does colorism enter the building? I'm interested in intercultural stickinesses. I think a perfect example would be the works by British born, Nigerian-Canadian artist, Oluseye, who is in the exhibition, and showing this series called Eminado. They are these small sculptures that he calls Reunions made up of “diasporic debris” He collects things like the flange of the top of a set of plastic bags that you get at the grocery store or a plastic hair clip and keeps meticulous notes about the locations of his finds which he brings together to mark both his volitional travels as well as the involuntary migrations of those trapped in the transatlantic trade of in enslavement.
In this way, he's bringing the personal and the historical together into these “reunions”. I hope that it’s as compelling for audiences as it is for me to hold space for those navigations, those movements through space and time, such that his self-directed migrations and the involuntary migrations of his ancestors all get mapped in these surprising ways through the serendipitous picking up of what other people might see as trash.
SR: From this perspective, especially, it seems that observers are deliberately encouraged to actively live through the projects on display as opposed to passively observe them, whether they chose to do so through Oluseye’s Eminado series, which ”embodies the movements of the Black diaspora” or Nafis M. White’s Self Portraits that culminates into a large grouping of jars filled with licorice to represent their identity over time and space. Was this an intentional aspiration on the gallery's part, on your part, to play it out in this manner?
KJL: Absolutely. I wanted people's bodies involved in their experience of the exhibition. I've selected objects that are highly textured, that your hand and eye are drawn to. Then again in the didactics, the text on the walls, you'll see questions embedded. Thinking of Nafis White’s Self Portrait, black licorice is so polarizing, people think they know what they're going to get and they either love it or hate it. But there's 30 different varieties in Self Portrait each taste, corresponding to a different element in the adopted artist’s genetic makeup as well as to different experiences in her life, is vastly different from the other in the most surprising ways. The artwork, which allows people to taste inside the galleries, also breaks the frame of the traditional museum in which you're not supposed to touch, taste, really move too quickly, breathe too hard (laughs). And trying to dismantle that to a certain extent was also part of the curatorial thinking. It's meant to draw you back and forth across the galleries in a conversation with the works. For instance, there's an installation in our theater by Anina Major, in which she has an experimental film in which she's walking across these shards of broken shells and pottery. But in front of the screen, we’ve placed the real shards such that you get both the push and pull between two and three dimensions, like a mediator between the screen and yourself. So yes, it was absolutely purposeful.
Then there are the sightlines. Consider another self-portrait, this time by Vanessa German. The spray of beads in Self Portrait with the Universe in my Mouth speak to the cascade of beads and sequins in The Spiritual Life of Haiti by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant. When you're standing in the gallery, though you may not come to consciousness, I maintain that your body notices this shine and shimmer reflecting upon each other. We also have a little interpretive corridor, a space in our gallery that is a bit too narrow for art to hang, but which creates the perfect space for interpretation where we can ask questions like: what would you create to make visible your own unruly navigations?
Unruly Navigations, Installation view, 2024
Doucet, Morel, Black Maiden in Veil of Midnight, 12.5 x 8.5 x 16”, Slip-casted white earthenware, 2022
Doucet, Morel, Ebony in a Veil of foliage #3, 15.5 x 13.5 x 9”, Slip-casted white earthenware, 2022
SR: What you're speaking of, it really emphasizes the intimacy of space and also the multifarious experiences of the people who move through it. I say this because I remember there was this one video that's really stuck with me throughout, I would say the months. I was doing some research for an exhibition feature, and I came across this video that explained the history of traditional African braids. It was explained in this video that during the times of slavery, and colonization, the women would braid their hair. The popular styles we see today, such as the intersection of the braids, the crossing over of the braids, and the braids that meander around the head, were inspired by escape routes that African women used. So the crosses would represent soldiers that they would encounter along the way. And then the ones that meandered around the head would represent the rivers they would have to cross. And to me, that really speaks to not only the way that Blackness has come to occupy space, but that there is such a deeper level to it that perhaps is unknown to people who may even belong in it. And I believe that perhaps even some visitors to your exhibition didn't know about the intricacies of their culture before they walked through the gallery's doors.
KJL: Nafis’ eight and a half foot in diameter Oculus also navigates a deeply personal journey. It has all of these interconnected lines that cross over and under that she has compared to the search for her biological parents. How you're on this journey, and there are places where you're like, “Oh, it's going to happen,” and then it stops. But somehow you can slip underneath or there's a little space and you find another route. And so, it speaks a little bit to what you're saying about the weaving and braiding of hair reflecting movement and travel and telling a very particular story.
SR: At the same time, it speaks very much to the journey of the artist finding themselves whilst also inviting others to join them. But as an observer, you are so engrossed and you want to desperately understand the arts on display that you don't recognize that at the same time, the artist is trying to understand themselves through it to the same or even to a greater degree.
KJL: Absolutely. I think that's where curators come in. There are ways in which there are always mechanisms in our work that are invisible, even to ourselves. I spend a lot of time thinking about perception and trying to pull it apart. When I was teaching, the first thing I would have students do is select a work and spend at least an hour in front of that work alone. I wanted them to mark down everything, every sound they heard, what the temperature was like, were people speaking loudly or softly. All of those things function as part of the interpretation of the work for you, whether you are recognizing it or not. I always know that there is something invisible to myself in all of my writing. I'm hoping that sometime, 100 years from now, someone will read Perceptual Drift and be like, “Oh, no, here's what really was going on” because they'll be able to, in hindsight, see all of the societal historical circumstances that created that volume. And so, yes. But I also am excited when people are so drawn into the materiality of the work that other things fall away as well. There is a tactility to all of the works that I selected for that reason.
Vanessa German, Installation view, Unruly Navigations, 2024
SR: So there are ten global creators spread throughout the two floors that the group exhibition presently inhabits until the first of September. What drew you to their approaches in particular, and how did you see them as embracing and/or confronting the perspectives that are omnipresent in our society, similarly as many of the artists grapple with marginalization, but also community?
KJL: What drew me to their practices was that each of them is very informed by archives, whether that be traditional written archives or embodied archives. And there's a particular rigor around research and technique that draws them together. To my mind and eye, their works are both beautifully conceived and beautifully created. I think that synthesis is what seduces people into a conversation that they might not otherwise want to have. But also, each of them is driven toward understanding how we've survived, thrived, and created, even with these globally oppressive circumstances. I think that when I say Unruly Navigations, I mean, what are the ways that you have defied convention, whether it be through scale, through material, through using or creating something that had been wholly outside of or is completely not thought of as Black practice, like Morel Doucet's beautiful slip-casted porcelain busts, which speak directly to the ways that he's trying to understand climate gentrification and colonialism through this very, very European medium of slip-cast porcelain. As well someone like M. Scott Johnson, who has been at the Schomburg for 20 years, trained in Ghana, and is using this 250-pound piece of blue Italian marble to talk about African American folklore hero John the Conqueror. He’s drawing together all of these spiritual practices and completely undermining the idea of the supremacy of European sculpture by creating this multi-surface, sweeping curved lines, figurative and abstract bust of a figure who was able to defeat or defy his enslaver by shapeshifting. Who cheated the very devil of his own daughter, Lilith, by stealing his horse and whisking Lilith away. How else do we bring those powerful palpable stories into presence in these spaces?
SR: I'm so fascinated by what you said about the artists, about what you said when it concerns the artist working with marble because when people understand Africans creating, they usually see them as creating beadwork or even mud huts. Black people by and large are not perceived as being as talented as craftspeople as their European counterparts. How do you believe the material aspect of this exhibition challenges the box that Black people have been placed into for generations when it concerns what they can do with their hands?
KJL: Certainly. An artist like Nadine Hall, who's from Jamaica, is addressing oppressive histories through sugar. The sugar plantation system in Jamaica was rapacious, and by creating these cinder blocks out of a candy recipe for coconut drops, that has been passed down through her maternal line for generations and which are very popular in Jamaica and not necessarily considered something noble or elevated. The story that Nadine tells is multifaceted in that she wants to change her relationship to sugar as well as that of others. She told me that, “The stories that are told about my people being enslaved and inferior and all those things, those are the lies. Let's transform that because they took that same sugar to create these coconut drops, which was part of our economic uplift.” They are shaped like cinder blocks because they were the building blocks towards familial stability. For example, her grandmother had one of the first cement houses in their neighborhood, which was a major deal because it meant a solid foundation upon which to build their lives. She's able to create this methodology for what you do when the material of your oppression becomes the material of your liberation. Even thinking about it, can the master's tools dismantle the master’s house? We continue to try, to attempt to break that frame.
Nadine Hall, Installation view, Unruly Navigations, 2024
SR: Cultures, ideas, and religions are also omnipresent facets within this exhibition. I'd love to ask you, how do you believe religions are sustained by ideas and ideas are sustained through culture?
KJL: I think that religion is a cultural artifact in that religious doctrine gets visualized in order to make it accessible. I think about Myrlande Constant’s, The Spiritual World of Haiti, in which she's thinking about the landscape of Haiti as this syncretic landscape, that it's this kaleidoscope of religions and rituals and societies. She shows two versions of Vodou Iwa, La Sirène, which is this mermaid-like figure at the bottom of the composition. She shows both a light- and a dark-skinned figure and in doing so displays how this figure gets translated by depending upon the doctrine. I think that if we think about religion as a cultural artifact, then we can think about how it moves shapes and evolves alongside culture and how new ideas inform religious ideology and can then transform culture. I think about how religions can progressively evolve and expand, while simultaneously other things stay so imbricated that they can't be released. I wonder what idea will it take to dismantle that, and can art participate in that? I don't think of religion as somehow separate from society. I think that it is constituted by society.
SR: Where do you see yourself through this exhibition? And how do you perceive it as being realized through your life and the lives of others belonging to the demographic, largely when it concerns the historical, familial, and communal accounts it addresses?
KJL: That's a big question! Maybe one of the best ways to describe how you find me in this exhibition is the restlessness that motivates it, the intellectual restlessness that motivates it. I think that each place that you land in the exhibition is like a gesture toward a larger idea. It's the way that I think, but it's also the way that I move through the world. I think that there's an adherence to the minute detail as a symbol for larger aspects. I think that the desire to move at one's own volition is part of it. Not anchoring you to a particular path. I think that the way that it lives in my daily life is that in my encounters with people, I am endlessly curious, and I have no idea what anybody else's experience is. I also know that I am only the star of my show, and I'm a bit player in all the others. I want to understand from their perspective, what is the star? What is drawing you through the world?
My favorite question to ask is, “What is exciting you right now?” You'd be surprised how few people know how to answer that question! What I'm hoping for is that this show inspires curiosity about the nature of Blackness, that it undermines the notion that it is a singular thing, but also denies the idea that there is no connection, right? And that part of that connection is the one that you find within your own body.
Myrlande Constant, The Spiritual World of Haiti, 59.25 x 72.5 in., Mixed media, c. 2003
Unruly Navigations
March 27 - September 1
Museum of African Diaspora
San Francisco
Key Jo Lee is chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. In this role, Lee oversees the strategic direction for the museum’s exhibitions and programs; leads globally on identifying and promoting emerging artists from the African diaspora; and works to expand MoAD’s reach and influence locally, nationally, and internationally. She is responsible for the overall management and execution of the museum’s curatorial vision, including its exhibitions, publications, and public and educational programs, and plays an important role in the organization’s outreach, communications, and digital strategy. Lee has a master’s degree from and is PhD candidate in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. Her first book, Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, was published by Yale University Press and The Cleveland Museum of Art in January 2023.
Sabrina Roman is an author and cultural thinker who has interviewed the minds behind high-octane creative projects, and has walked her feet off in pursuit of subjects that have chosen to position themselves across the furthest reaches of London. Impressively, within two years of graduation from the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London she has relentlessly pursued tight deadlines (and coffee) whilst writing for the pages of numerous independent arts and culture publications inclusive of Curator, Émergent, ODDA, Elephant, COEVAL, Trebuchet, METAL, and Whitehot. Currently she finds interest in conceptualisations around identity, cultural production and subcultures.