I don’t really have anything to write about this week! I feel terrible about it! Last week I posted something but it was like a couple of hours late! Am I in a rut?! I don’t know! Life as been busy and full of a range of stressors and not-so-stressors and I mean generally good but I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to do things that feel narratively satisfying to discuss! Lots of little things, no big thing! You know?! But the other weekend my super amazing wife and I went to the most underrated Smithsonian because it is the best Smithsonian, the National Museum of African Art! We went just to pop in and when we were there we discovered that From the Deep was open! This exhibit is sublime! Fantastic! Magnificent! A tour de force!

I have just complained about having nothing to write about but then I said we went to From the Deep and I would have just opened with writing about it but it is hard to describe and I am a writer of very limited means! Extremely hard to capture in photos, despite the fact that the bulk of the exhibit is actually photos. From the museum’s page:

Drexciya’s founding myth has inspired numerous artists, among them Ayana V. Jackson who, in this exhibition, brings to life an immersive, feminist, and sacred aquatopia where African water spirits from Senegal to South Africa both midwife and protect the Drexciyans. Jackson asks that we reckon with the brutal history that cast these beings to the sea while simultaneously envisioning a world of powerful, resilient women.

I just absolutely loved how she has put these costumes together, using the meaningful detritus that would be associated with enslavers’ use of the sea to traffic in their fellow humans. I mean the above dress is made out of fishing nets with a belt of rope! Fantastic! And the below dress, I think the use of the fans as the top is inspired, and also frankly I just go gaga over anything made with banknotes!

You should go see this exhibit!!!! That is the only message I have for you this week!!!! Ayana V. Jackson has assembled an extremely powerful and enveloping series of imagines, motifs, and metaphors that force you to confront an evil history by thinking not about the men that perpetrated it but instead about the women that faced it and the embodiment of their resilience, strength, and future that never was but instead could still be!!!!!