Black Bibliographies: A Conversation and Workshop

Misty Sol

Misty Sol’s interdisciplinary practice is like a sepia-toned family photo album remastered in technicolor. Misty explores Black people’s connections to nature, wellness, and speculation. Her figurative paintings and portraits, stories, and eco practice are heavily influenced by the common histories, everyday stories, and culture of Black people, particularly, her grandmother’s history as a migrant farmworker, midwife, and gifted storyteller in early 20th century America. Misty’s work inherits a sense of narrative, sensuality, magic, timelessness, hope, the bucolic and fecund. But also contained are senseless abstractions, images of stark violence, and the weight of oppression. Ultimately she uses these elements to distill elements of dignity, legacy, humor, and connection. With acrylic colors as vibrant as her gardens, the gurgle of a stream, a hymn her grandmother used to sing, the smell of sauteed onions, and the coolness of garden soil, she creates a body of work that explores and affirms the nuanced experiences of Black people. 

Misty Sol serves as the director of Tiny Farm Wagon, a fiscally sponsored project dedicated to public art and wellness. She is also in training for the art and medicine program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art where she leads workshops for med students to improve their observational skills. 

Her paintings have been exhibited at Burlington College, Headlong Theatre, The Moore College of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi, Bartram’s Gardens, the Philadelphia Airport, Widener University, and Ultrasilk Gallery. In 2021, her paintings made their international debut on the set of the NBC sitcom Grand Crew now streaming on HULU. And in 2022 her work appeared on the Oprah Network show, “All Rise”, now streaming on Amazon. You can view 2 of her paintings at the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia.

Destiny Crockett

Destiny Crockett considers archival reading methods such as Hartman’s critical fabulation, and seeing the “wayward,” as Hartman would later put it, in the creation of a triptych collage (18×24 inch all-paper collages, framed) to ask about the lives of the four enslaved children. The first child on the far left is Charles Merchant, who died in 1743. The child in the middle died in 1734, and their record keepers listed them as “Negroe child from the Strangers ground” instead of by name. Crockett named this child Mercy for the purposes of referring to them in this work, after the titles of Toni Morrison’s novel set in the 18th century. The third figure is inspired by William Richards, who died in 1742. The final child, Violet Plumstead, was buried in 1744 at age eight. This collage is made entirely of paper, some of which includes copies of pages from the archives in which the children are listed. Their clothes are temporally mismatched from their lives: they are modeled after late 1890s attire with the bright colors and bold patterns of the 21st century. These enslaved children would never have been dressed this way, and Crockett’s clothing choices signify care against a backdrop of disregard.

Theodore A. Harris

Theodore A. Harris is a Philadelphia-based visual artist and poet. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in private and public collections such as Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Saint Louis University Museum of Art, La Salle University Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, McGill University Visual Arts Collection, Center for Africana Studies; University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center Rare Books and Manuscript Library; University of Pennsylvania, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and the Winston and Carolyn Lowe Collection. Harris is the co-founder of the Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Harris has also co-authored and authored books including Our Flesh of Flames (2019), Malcolm X as Ideology (2008) with Amiri Baraka, TRIPTYCH with Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (2011), I ran from it and was still in it with Fred Moten (2007), and Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism (2017). He is the Founding Artistic Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics. He is a 2022 Visual Artist Fellow CFEVA (Center For Emerging Visual Artists).

Photo by Daniel Madoff

Intisar Williams Hamilton

Intisar Williams Hamilton is a Black, Indigenous, born and based Philadelphian. Her art practice probes the fundamental question of what it means to be female, free, and Black in this contemporary American context. Using every medium at her disposal, Hamilton builds upon the expansive vernacular, intersection, and anthropological universe of biology, race, geography, and time. 

Photo by Daniel Madoff