NinaJohnson

Dear George,

Nearly eight years later, my memory of this day is as crisp and fond as ever.

I lived in Downtown Brooklyn at the time, in a loft up on Gold Street. I still remember playing the local television news as I paced and puttered about, getting ready for the workday. In this season of my life, the realm of black aesthetic history and theory (at least their formal study) was a freshly encountered discipline–one in which I had already begun to lose myself, spending whole evenings devouring whichever books or internet reservoirs I could lay my hands. Neither luck nor fate, in that moment I believe I somehow conjured you. The news segment abruptly switched to an interview on your extraordinary collection of Modern, Contemporary, and Classical African Art. I found your phone number online and gave you a call, anxiously explaining my profound interest.

And then you answered, “beware beware, the Bight of Benin: one comes out, where fifty went in!” Despite my tragic resume, I got the job.

In fact, what had aroused the very fascination of mine was time spent living in Benin, where I had become first familiar with the lexicons of Afro-aesthetics. At the age of sixteen, glimpsing the horizon at the Port of Ouidah, I could hear our ancestors speaking and knew I had been invited in a sacred conversation. Every weekend, I begged my father to take me to the Port of Ouidah, to the ‘Door of No Return’ passageway monumentalizing the coastline’s grave history. Entering Ouidah I would pass the black mamba sanctuary on the left, then stroll down the sandy coastline whose salty air carried long and far the scent of dried fish. I felt the rapture of the current and often I would wish to remain there until dusk.

Years later I would come to meet you again. At the beginning of January 2017, I invited you to exhibit your paintings at artist and my then partner Henry Taylor’s lofted living room. The five paintings and collages on display were gleaned from different moments in your life. The earliest was a ghostly self-portrait from 1959, of a young (ostensibly yourself) on a flight to Ghana, where you later became Chief NaNa. The latest was an abstract landscape of torn paper with acrylic, graphite, and masking tape, composed after an ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil. The show was spare, loosely and profoundly elegant. Like all of your work, it exuded tender dedication to the histories and presents of the Black Atlantic.

Horizons rendered in long linear brushstroke and loose depths depicted as endless ocean waves are enigmatic of our past. The absence of light suggests a distraught, forlorn memory as though recounted in dreams. Eerily engrossed ships remind us of the truest danger of the sea, whose very thought sends shivers down our spines. We are reminded of our ancestral bodies that served as cargo without preciousness to the colonizers. We are reminded of the volatility of vastness, and in those blank spaces in the landscapes of your paintings there nurses a soft fascination, as though for to reclaim some cradle, some safe space (no speaking, just listening) as you empathize with the depiction. Here, the proverbial is sequestered in languid poetry.