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print this pageA Darktown Cakewalk
Montenez Lowery
Friday, March 20 - 2:30PM to 3:30PM
Georgia 7
A Darktown Cakewalk is a pinhole camera project that takes its name from a minstrel show. The history and performance of the show were rooted in both mockery and resistance, a cycle of appropriation that remains central to my project. A Darktown Cakewalk critiques the history of the photographic medium as a tool used to reshape, erase, and exclude, and asks what it means to hold space for Black identity on our own terms.
The work begins with a question I ask each of my collaborators: What object represents your Blackness, but has either been appropriated or lost to the mainstream? Each object offered is then transformed into a functioning pinhole camera. Through this process, photography becomes more than a tool of representation, it becomes a site of ritual and reconnection.
Historically, the camera has been used to define, distort, and control Black identity, from the racial classification images commissioned by Louis Agassiz to the countless photographs that have served to reinforce systems of oppression. This project asks: What does it look like when the same tool used to erase us is turned into a means of asserting presence?
I love my culture, and through this work, I aim to make visible not only the deep connections we have to these cultural symbols but also the ways so-called "ordinary" objects hold memory, meaning, and history. A Darktown Cakewalk is both a response to the present moment and an invitation: for Black viewers to rediscover and reflect on their culture in new ways, and for others to feel, even for a moment, what it means to be connected to it.
speaker
Montenez Lowery
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