Byline: Christopher Michno

The profoundly moving installation Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine) (1991), positioned to be the first work encountered in Parrasch Heijnen’s career-spanning survey of Mildred Howard, imparts a sense of the Oakland-based artist’s interest in framing social and racial inequities through a personal lens. Hundreds of 9mm bullet casings are affixed to the wall in a grid pattern. On the adjoining wall, a banner with an enlarged news photo and AP Wire clip from the 1976 Soweto Uprising contextualizes this display of lethal power. The image captures one moment in the aftermath of the South African police’s brutal response to students protesting Apartheid policies. One student bears away a lifeless boy—a protester murdered by police gunfire.

The enduring relevance of Ten Little Children derives from how it speaks not only to the ongoing reality of racial inequity but also to the dynamics of power and political and social change—and for the artist, it operates equally on an intimate scale. Her comment, delivered in a lecture at another venue—that any of the murdered students could have been one of her own—illuminates the empathy evident throughout her practice.

The exhibition comprises selected works from more than four decades and reflects Howard’s experimentation across diverse media, ranging from color Xerox photomontage to sculpture and installation. The most successful of these are crisply realized installations that deftly merge message and material.

Another such example, the blown glass installation Parenthetically Speaking: It’s Only a Figure of Speech (2010) follows Ten Little Children by nearly 20 years. Created during a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School, the beguilingly sensuous, yet imposing series of punctuation marks is a collection of braces, semicolons, ellipses and the like that are nearly abstract in their elegance and sophistication. Absent of narrative, Parenthetically Speaking presents only the structures that shape thought and language. Howard describes the interstices as the spaces where individuals will write their own stories, thus inviting her audience to insert themselves into the work.

Similarly addressing questions of representation and voice, Volume I & II: The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing (2007) insists that we infer which parts are missing. Side-by-side atop a pedestal, the two volumes sit open. Holes have been drilled through the pages, leaving gaping absences in the texts. The visible sections on the Louisiana Purchase and immigration policy in the early 1900s, respectively, read like typical history textbooks—glaringly eliding accounts of the slave trade, the plantation economy, genocide, discriminatory immigration policies and ideologies of “unassimilable races.”

In many of Howard’s works, the symbols of empowerment and voice appear, often as mirrors, or more literally, in photo works depicting ordinary people, or even representations of the artist herself. Starting with her own experience and then expanding outward, Howard’s work asks the question of whose histories are deemed important? The response, found throughout her practice, is to center the experiences of those who have been written out or ridden over.

Hometown Proud, the debut documentary by Tyler Stallings and Naida Osline, speaks volumes to our current political and cultural environment. The project grew out of their interest in exploring social issues through their individual practices, for Stallings, as a curator, and Osline, as an artist. Filmed in 2018—a year in which the Trump administration worked assiduously to erode legal protections afforded the LGBTQ community, often in the name of protecting religious freedoms—Hometown Proud follows Archer Altstaetter, an openly gay Southern California man, back to his small, rural hometown of Botkins, Ohio, for a dance performance he has been invited to give in the community’s annual “Miss Carousel” pageant. Altstaetter, who left Botkins to pursue a career in dance, is former dance studio owner. He still designs costumes and produces shows that run the gamut—“Everything from nightclubs with go-go dancers and drag queens, to little kids running around in fluffy tutus.” For the sleepy, yet conservative community of Botkins, the place where he spent his youth—feeling acutely that he didn’t fit in—Altstaetter choreographs his dance number as an expression of Rainbow Pride.

The film quickly establishes through observations made by its subjects, cultural rifts that are reflected in communities across the country, large and small, and writ large in everything from our electoral politics and battles over Supreme Court nominations, to small business lawsuits over providing service to LGBTQ people. To its credit, the film never mentions the national stage or the larger issues being contested. Instead, it works to build a sense of import and the risks—of potential violence—LGBTQ people experience in America, through interviews with residents of Botkins. Many of these are with Altstaetter’s close-knit and supportive family: his brother Michael, who speaks fondly of his youngest sibling and composes the musical accompaniment for his choreography in the pageant; two nieces, one who is gay and out, the other an ally; and his mother, whose love for Archer is clear. Other interviews are with the mayor, the pageant chair, the historical society vice president, a retired history teacher, and a young LGBTQ person.

What emerges from these interviews, as the film moves from Altstaetter’s preparation, to the pageant and Altstaetter’s performance, and beyond, is the sense that acceptance in this small town is predicated on conformity, and centered on being straight, Christian and white. For every comment—from those fitting the “norm”—that Botkins is a safe place to live and folks there take care of each other, another, from someone within Altstaetter’s circle, complicates or refutes that picture. The reality emerges that it’s a frightening place to grow up if you’re LGBTQ. Hometown Pride shines in these moments, as it builds a nuanced portrait of what it is like to live in this environment.

There are times when the film wanders, covering more territory than it can resolve or cover in sufficient depth in its short 60 minute run time. There is, for example, the mention of Altstaetter’s father and domestic abuse. Altstaetter calls him a sociopath. After leaving his family, a dispute with a business partner in California ended with his body being found in a shallow grave in Angeles National Forest—a story that easily could be developed into another full-length film. But the filmmakers’ interest in this project centers on Archer, his experience of growing up gay in a conservative community, and the dichotomy between the professed values of care and the reality of anti-LGBTQ sentiment within that community. Ultimately, some of the anecdotes related in the film feel like digressions. It is tempting to think the documentary would have benefitted from additional interviews with people outside Altstaetter’s immediate circle, if only to illuminate the views of a broader cross-section of Botkins. One might imagine that in additional footage, the filmmakers would have uncovered what is only hinted at in a few interviews. Yet whether anyone would speak openly on camera about their own anti-LGBTQ views is dubious. But there is plenty of speaking in code, which is proof enough, reflecting a microcosm of the cultural and political divide that is playing out on a national level.

Los Angeles International Film Festival, Nov. 8-14, beginning this Sunday. Link for $10 tickets to the festival. All are online viewing in light of COVID. https://watch.eventive.org/la/play/5f8fe2f4606b56005be5fe92

Vimeo trailer for HOMETOWN PROUD, https://vimeo.com/452919122

“Materia Medica,” the summer group show at François Ghebaly, curated by Kelly Akashi, is more than a call to reconsider the relationship between humans and the natural world. The show pointedly issues a rallying cry of refusal against relentlessly destructive human systems that are connected with histories of colonial exploitation. A short introductory text—a mash-up of science fiction and manifesto—juxtaposes observations of human activity, as seen on an evolutionary scale, with a series of artistic intentions, such as, “To work from one’s own history… To record nature’s subjugation to human needs. To foretell the co-opting of all life in service to structures of power.”

The exhibition title references an early pharmacological text and millennia of botanical and medicinal knowledge—even as it exposes such knowledge as centered in human subjugation of all life. De Materia Medica, a definitive pharmacopeia by the 1st century physician Dioscorides that sought to classify plant, mineral and animal substances according to their medicinal effects, sits in the interval between traditional knowledge of the natural world and the scientific exploitation of nature.

But in the midst of our post-apocalyptic landscape, Materia Medica posits empathy and organic relations with the natural world. A number of works are allegorical—for example, Kay Hofmann’s hand-carved alabaster sculptures, featuring female figures entwined with organic forms. These reflect an idealized oneness with the natural world.

Several mixed-media works examine histories of colonization. Catalina Ouyang’s wronging wrongs (2019), shown previously in “fish mystery in the shift horizon” at Rubber Factory in New York, is part of her work on the parallels of species extinction and the transmission of knowledge in diaspora. In font III (2020), in which a raw egg sits in a carved soapstone sculpture resembling a head, and is bathed in vinegar each day while its shell dissolves, Ouyang addresses identity and whiteness.

Candice Lin’s Minoritarian Medicine (2020), a homemade apothecary fortified with various tinctures infused with substances like Astragalus, Echinacea, Reishi Mushroom, and Oxymel (for immune support), and hand sanitizer, alludes to both medicinals based in intimate knowledge of plants and passed on through generations, and to our current pandemic. It is one of the show’s ironies that medicine is needed in the pandemic, and that pandemic periodically disrupts humans’ self-appointed hegemony.

The dichotomous relationship between nature and culture is addressed most explicitly in works by Jessie Homer French and Max Hooper Schneider. Pastoral (1992), an oil painting by Homer French, depicts cows grazing in the shadow of nuclear cooling towers, which presumably fuel the electrical lines stretching above the pasture. Pastoral plays off Hooper Schneider’s installation of a flickering “Jesus Saves” neon sign powered by an aquarium of Black Ghost Knifefish (DIALECTRIX: DIVISION APTERONOTUS (JESUS SAVES), 2020). Electrical signals from the Knifefish are transmitted through copper embedded in the tank, thus illuminating “Jesus Saves.”

Akashi’s text concludes in a resolution: “To become one with nature, to bind with it, to emote from within it;” yet it dispassionately observes that proposals “for empathy, for defense, for action” remained unanswered. And so it dispenses with simple solutions and technological saves and leaves us to answer the difficult question of how to become one with nature. 

The urgency of revisiting an archive is found in challenging its presumed objectivity and totalizing vision, thus exposing cracks, biased ideologies, contradictions and gaps to make way for fracturing, reinterpreting, enlarging or otherwise revising our understanding. Gala Porras-Kim, an artist whose trenchant critique of the archive as a system constructed to sustain colonization has been central to her installations—Made in L.A. 2016, the PST: LA/LA exhibition A Universal History of Infamy, and the Whitney Biennial 2019—has undertaken to curate MOCA’s second “Open House,” a series in which Los Angeles-based artists are invited to curate from the museum’s extensive collection of contemporary art.

Even with Porras-Kim’s evident seriousness in curating, with help from MOCA’s Assistant Curator and Manager of Publications Bryan Barcena and Curatorial Assistant Karlyn Olvido, the results are mixed. Whereas her installation in A Universal History of Infamy, which mounted a critique of how knowledge had been constructed from incomplete information of objects in LACMA’s collection, was pointed, “Open House” remains diffuse, and even anticlimactic.

Porras-Kim’s curation of “Open House” is an open-ended inquiry into the mutability of MOCA’s collection that coalesces into a loose thesis about the permanent collection’s lack of permanence. The exhibition examines a series of ephemeral works that are transient because of the materials of their construction, alongside ones whose foreclosure is intended. In the first category, a collaged work on paper, Chris Burden’s Peace (1982) makes use of non-archival adhesives and unstable materials such as Polaroids, cigarette wrappers, newspaper and cellophane—focusing attention on objects in the collection that cannot be conserved, because their materials will crumble into dust.

Richard Tuttle’s 44th Wire Piece (1972/2014) falls into the second category. Unlike Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, Tuttle’s instructions state that he alone may install the piece. One can infer from its accompanying didactic that the museum might be considering approaching Tuttle to request an alteration, allowing for others to install when the artist becomes incapacitated or deceased. One can imagine internal discussions pursuant to avoiding the loss of never being able to exhibit the Tuttle again, after an indeterminate date looming in the foreseeable future, in distinction to the original conceptual parameters of the artwork.

Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70) presents a similar conundrum. Heizer’s original intent to allow the land art piece to recede into the desert as erosion requires that we orientate to a planetary, geologic time-frame and ask ourselves whether any of the monuments humans have constructed will remain after we have gone. As noted in the didactic, he has since changed his mind and communicated his desire to conserve the work. MOCA, perhaps tellingly, states that these kinds of contradictions “can be points of negotiation between institutions and artists.” 

Two additional works in “Open House” suggest ways this exhibition might have been pushed toward a more pointed thesis. The first, Walead Beshty’s FedEx® Large Kraft Box … (2009), a shatterproof glass cube and FedEx® shipping box, suggests a new kind of Vanitas object, in which an insider’s view of the international art circuit reveals the self-referential logic and surfeit of the prevailing system of exhibition and consumption of art.

Wolfgang Laib’s pollen field works, represented here by Pollen from Dandelions (1978), offer a reprise to Heizer’s referencing of geologic time and the implicit rebuke therein. Laib’s work involves a radical consideration and empathy for non-human beings; his process of gathering pollen and his deeply held respect for nature propose ways to decenter the human. The effect of understanding Laib’s process is likely to produce an understanding of the expansiveness of his gesture, which condenses the experience of interacting with plants in a ceremonial way, and its link to seasonal cycles and reproduction.

This final direction would fortify Porras-Kim’s “Open House” with a powerful critique of the archive as an index of institutional interests and the hegemony of human systems. Further investigation of MOCA’s thinking on the permanence of the collection would be instructive, especially regarding objects that may be the subject of renewed negotiation, as related to weighing MOCA’s interests and the value of the collection against the conceptual coherence of the works. But most compelling would be to make explicit the way the objects exhibited in “Open House” advance ideas of decentering the human, which would call into question the archive in its entirety.

“Blessed are the meek…” – Gospel of Matthew, 5:5

Has Theaster Gates truly “upcycled” his entire wardrobe as a spiritual gesture and a means of achieving transcendence? Perhaps he has. But in the most literal sense, Gates has taken the raw material of his sartorial well and turned it into a commodity: a series of elevated objects (ascots, mostly, and a quilt draped across a massive gantry) to be sold inside the white cube.

The verse from the Gospel of Matthew that inspired Gates to divest himself of habiliment deserves another look. Matthew 5:40 (“If someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”) appears within a larger passage that has long been co-opted and purged of its radicalism—a once subversive and liberating call to turn the prevailing social and political order on its head.

But Gates’ use of the “Shirt and Cloak” text is subversive and coded. It becomes instructive then to look at the objects, some of which follow the template of “upcycling;” for example, his use of tar—a familiar Gates theme. Three White Lines (2019), a tar-on-canvas tapestry, equates black labor (which, Gates has noted in previous conversations, reflects back to when African American craftsmen were highly skilled builders) with European high culture—fine tapestries, history scene painting, or the achievements of high modernism (cf. Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko). And though we know it was fabricated, it conjures images of a fragment that might literally have been torn from a Chicago rooftop in the historically African American Grand Crossing neighborhood where Gates launched Dorchester Projects, Rebuild Foundation and Stoney Island Arts Bank. (Roofing was his father’s profession, and as the story goes, he inherited his father’s tar kettle on the older Gates’ retirement.) Other works, which use rubber bitumen, similarly refer to roofing technologies and the independence the black working class enjoyed a generation or two ago (Long Run, Left with Guide Line; Long Run, Right with Guide Line; both 2018).

But the seemingly disparate collection responds to the call to resist power structures and dodgy hermeneutics and firmly anchors this body of work within Gates’ larger concerns around the African American experience.

In the smaller gallery, Flag (2017), made from a decommissioned fire hose (another reprised theme), alludes to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. Along with Diagonal Line for Roofing (2019), it is serenaded by Gates’ performance of the vocal score based on the Gospel verse, which sets the emotional tenor of the exhibit. A mournful free-form poetry spills from speakers embedded in Woah Dee Woah (2019), and one can’t help but consider the violence enacted by white supremacy: “When they come, they will come… give them your shirt, your cloak, go that mile… if the man ask me to go one mile down the road… my horse is tired, he don’ want to go… ”

Man Ray on My Mind (2019), like John Edmonds’ Tête de Femme (2018, exhibited in this year’s Whitney Biennial), references the Surrealist’s now notorious photograph Noire et Blanche (1926)—notorious for being implicated in directly promoting an ideology of European superiority. Both Edmonds and Gates turn that ideology on its head.

Gates follows this rebuke with a meditation on black cultural and literary achievement in Lerone’s Headrest on These Streets (2019)—likely in memoriam for Lerone Bennett Jr., a scholar and the editor of JET and later of Ebony. Gates’ Raising Goliath, (exhibited at White Cube, London in 2012), which balanced on pulleys an archive of JET and Ebony magazines with a 1967 Ford fire engine, similarly celebrates this legacy.

Yet it is imperative to view “Shirt and Cloak” against the backdrop of Gates’ engagement in the revitalization of Grand Crossing, wherein the cultivation of a public square and an extended community is wholly contingent on art—as a countervailing force against the leverage of private capital and an instrument to reclaim the neighborhood for those who live there. Two works (Half Circle with Pier, and Circle Form with Pier, both 2019) use building materials recovered from one of Gates’ projects in Grand Crossing, evoking his many forays into creating spaces for culture that generates social capital.

The economic realities of the commercial gallery place this exhibit uncomfortably between contradictory purposes. And while culture does not exist without investment, another way to understand this work is as a coded text that seeks to subvert the commercial gallery in which it sits. Gates’ insistence that his work be seen beyond the performative platform and the finished object, and instead reference process as aesthetic structure, is perhaps one of the most important reasons for his relentless push into the realm of possibility and his social and critical relevance.

In Brandon Landers’ debut solo exhibition at M+B, the Bakersfield-based, LA-born and raised artist delivers a collection of expressionistic and loosely narrative paintings that draw from his experiences growing up in South Central Los Angeles, yet the works retain an ambiguity that liberates them from a being a direct autobiographical recounting, leaving them open for interpretive possibilities.

Landers works intuitively, strictly with a palette knife, which gives his paintings richly textural surfaces; he frequently scrapes—sometimes to the nub of the canvas—to reveal layers of pigment beneath, resulting in a variegated chromatic effect, in which faces, skin, clothing and grounds take on a complexity that further enlivens them.

His paintings absolutely bristle with energy and exert a remarkable presence, which is perhaps a facet of the vulnerability they signal. Landers constructs scenes with precipitous content and varied and complex relations between figures—both spatial and social. The formal qualities—the impasto, the sensuous, figured surfaces—these effects are compounded by spatial distortions, wherein figuration and facial features convey a certain “wrongness,” giving the impression that things are slightly distorted or out of whack.

Consider these effects alongside his practice of including text or signage, in which words are consistently reversed as if the viewer perceives the scene in a mirror. These add to the representational distancing of the image from its ostensible source material—which has been distanced and refracted through the artist’s memory and imagination. Aside from the metaphorical mirroring, the formal aspect is that signs and other bits of text become graphic elements, adding chromatic and geometric verve. Compare The Joys (all works 2019) to Facin’ the World: the “Money Order” sign atop The Joys contextualizes the scene while it breaks up the figuration.

Though Landers never asserts an intention to create work that reflects the social or political climate, his deeply personal vision yields results that invariably do. In The Joys, a group of spectators looks on as a pair of boys in blue stop to interrogate a young black man. The composition of the onlookers—all white, save an African statuette, which stands as witness—place this narrative in a larger discussion of police violence against African Americans. The cops are ghoulish, their faces represented by a staccato of knife marks in pigment that conjures the reddish hue of tenderized meat. To me, these evoke images as widely disparate as Llyn Foulkes’ bloody head series from the 1970s, Francis Bacon’s terrifying studies after Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and even figures from James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels.

The pictorial aspects allow for inference about what the scene may mean, both to Landers, and to an observer. The young man’s arms inexplicably trail off and disappear. Are we to take this to mean he is unarmed? A toy transformer, which extends a weapon, is held aloft by three disembodied fingers and points toward the young man. The first cop’s arms, likewise, are not visible. Landers leaves this work and others in this collection, unfinished in places, leaving room for multiple reads.

Argentine artists Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone who together form the duo Chiachio & Giannone were painters at one point in their careers. Their combined artistic identity has since been forged working in textile, with such labor-intensive techniques as embroidery. The two have created an extensive body of lushly stitched, vibrantly colored hand-made textile works, the focus of which is frequently portraiture—specifically of the artists, who are a couple, and their dachshunds.

“Celebrating Diversity,” their exhibition and residency at the Museum of Latin American Art, is part of an ongoing two-fold project of textile mosaics and pride flags first shown in 2018 at the Kirchner Cultural Centre (CCK) in Buenos Aires, in “Democracy Under Construction,” a group exhibition that examined the future in the context of Argentina’s 35 years of uninterrupted democracy. Their project in that context reflected on the values that underlie democracy: community and diversity, which are at the heart of an open society. In this country, where recent history has shown how quickly those values can be threatened, their work takes on renewed urgency.

Working in craft media traditionally associated with femininity and domesticity, they complicate gender roles and assumptions of “serious work.” In a playful investigation of identity, the duo lightheartedly explores their creative partnership in which the discrete boundaries of the individual blur and shift—like binary stars, the two revolve, in each other’s orbit. Their series of textile mosaics, “Family in 6 Colors,” evoke ancient Roman tile mosaics and redefine and extend the boundaries of family—from the nuclear family unit to the social bonds that are the family of one’s choosing. These ultimately compass their artistic family as the duo devises lineages of LGBTQ positive artists that carry their artistic DNA.

Those bonds extend to museum visitors in their “Pride Flags,” created in collaboration with artist Cecilia Koppmann and visitors who contribute fabric or decorate swatches with messages of pride, acceptance, love and advocacy to be quilted in. Recycled cloth in both their mosaics and pride flags carries the histories of those who donate to their artistic enterprise, reminiscent of Joel Otterson’s quilts, reclaimed from his grandmother’s and sewn into new works.

The exhibit includes mosaics from the “Family in 6 Colors” series, made in 2018. The pièce de résistance, California Family in 6 Colors (2019), created in residence at MOLAA, derives from David Hockney’s double portrait, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968). In the role of Barchardy, Chiachio returns the viewer’s gaze, wearing a diadem fashioned after Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s ornate sculptural work. Next to Giannone’s Isherwood, is a “69” à la Lari Pittman. The imagery includes references to punk front man Tomata du Plenty, Patssi Valdez, Carlos Almaraz and others.

Primary in this lineage are Hockney and Sonia Delaunay, whom the duo describe as their artistic grandparents. Delaunay’s unfettered, lyrical use of color, in discrete geometric shapes, is evident in their gamesome sense of pattern, color and design, and Hockney’s influence is seen too, in their lush color, figuration and unabashed depiction of their lives together.

“The aim of the dreamer…is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world… But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”

This quote from James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country is on the wall of Fred Wilson’s exhibition “Afro Kismet,” where its interpretation is left open. One might expect the artist to identify with the dreamer because of his deeply researched practice into museum collections and the social, economic, political and historical knowledge that illuminates objects beyond the mere cursory glance.

But Wilson’s research aims to dispel illusions. For more than 30 years, he has deconstructed museum collections to address issues of representation and the erasure of people of African descent from the histories presented within those collections.

“Afro Kismet,” originally exhibited in the 2017 Istanbul Biennial and subsequently at PACE in London and New York, now at Maccarone, examines the Venetian and Ottoman Empires, and the slave trade, as it trafficked Africans into Venice and Istanbul.

Wilson draws from Baldwin’s novel, which the author wrote over an 11-year period while working in Istanbul, pairing excerpts as wall text with objects in the gallery. Another text, Shakespeare’s Othello, conceptually integrates “Afro Kismet” and a companion exhibition, titled “Glass Works,” of Wilson’s Murano glass mirrors, Venetian chandeliers and black Murano glass tear-drop shapes positioned as if seeping through and dripping along the gallery walls, or surfacing amid white structural glass laid flat on the floor. The underlying presence of Othello suffuses the exhibition with a meditation on literature’s power to create profoundly lasting impacts on culture, referencing representations of “blackness” as embedded from within a Eurocentric point of view.

Positioning objects from the Pera Museum (Istanbul) with other contemporary and fabricated objects invites reexamination. They Passed Their Lives Thereafter in a Kind of Limbo of Denied and Unexamined Pain (2017), an arrangement of engravings and an illustration of a scene from Othello implicates depictions of Afro Turks. Wilson covered the etchings with vellum, cutting out an ellipsoid to draw attention to each instance of a miniscule black figure in the distance, away from the central figures of the compositions. Other objects, like a stone Sherbro head are paired with text (…kept you here, 2018), evoking the displacement and enduring trauma of slavery.

In “Glass Works” Wilson again exposes racializing ideas by using lines from Othello as titles. One of these (A Moth of Peace, 2018), a white Murano glass Venetian chandelier, evokes an image of whiteness as a representation of the “purity” of Desdemona. It plays off the two Ottoman-styled black Murano glass chandeliers in “Afro Kismet” (The Way the Moon’s in Love with the Dark, 2017; Eclipse, 2017) and a black Murano glass mirror (I Saw Othello’s Visage In His Mind, 2013).

In these complementary exhibitions, Wilson reclaims object and narrative, calling attention to the ways the slave trade and the African diaspora permeate the histories of global trade and culture, yet have stubbornly been overlooked as if invisible.