Letter From the Editor: Holding Space For Past, Present, and Future
By: Tessera Arts Collective
Tags: Women Artists, Contemporary Art, Personal Essay, Black Women Artists, Abstraction

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking on a couple of panels during Black Girl Basel, an annual gathering for Black womxn creatives to discuss issues specific to their careers and strengthen the bonds that exist within the art community. Toward the end of the first panel discussion, our moderator (and BGB co-founder) Kesha Bruce asked us to share what visions and hopes we hold for Black womxn artists in the future. As a visual artist who works in abstraction, my answer came primarily from this perspective, as I’m always looking for a way to connect abstraction to these types of conversations and assert its relevance.

Me in my studio wearing our Black Womxn Abstract Artists t-shirt from our collaboration with Art Girl Rising, Black Women in Visual Art, and Philaprint.

In part, I said that I see us reclaiming abstraction as our own, having our decades-long contributions to the canon properly recognized, and finally being centered in the conversations about abstraction in modern art instead of being treated as an anomaly to white artists. I see us using the language of abstraction to express ourselves in new ways and to craft entirely new narratives for ourselves and life experiences.

Going further, I see abstraction as an infinite space of possibility and potential for the expansiveness of our Blackness, our humanity to exist in its fullness. In both style and form, I view abstraction as a portal to decolonizing our imaginations and beyond the white gaze. I view it as a means to explore what embodies the Black experience without capitulating to whiteness’ demands that our creative expression in visual art focuses solely on pain, trauma, and their subjugation of our personhood. I believe it can push our ideas of representation further while simultaneously freeing us from the boxes representation and tokenism places us in. In the future I see us as exponential, unacquainted with limitations in our lives, practices, and art.

I believe, see, and hope for these things because I’ve been living within them for years now. Being an artist who believes in the future of Black people — and people period — is so hard, especially in moments of constriction and moral crisis, but working in abstraction offers me space to seek, find, craft, and build upon that belief so that it endures. For me, the future is now, and I — along with other Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Latinx abstractionists — are already embodying it through our lives, practices, and work here in the present.

This is why Abstractions Magazine exists. At its core, this magazine is really the evolution of our desire to create and hold space for Black and Brown womxn and non-binary abstract artists, which we previously experimented with while operating our gallery for two years. When we closed the gallery permanently this summer, we shifted our focus to making this our container for that experimentation to continue. Just as we did in the gallery, we’ll continue to highlight these artists and help Black and Brown people develop a more accessible, personal understanding and connection to abstraction through the content that’s shared. We recognize that when nothing about our lived experiences under oppression is abstract, it can be difficult to engage with art that is. This is also a space for scholarship to be shared by the Black and Brown arts workers studying abstraction, as well as for artists to share their own ideas, commentary, and narratives about it as well.

Our upcoming print issue is one that I hope offers grounded and personalized perspectives on abstraction that pay homage, bear witness to the shift around it happening now in the present, and points us toward the future of this art form that is already taking shape. It’s a future where what we’ve long perceived about abstraction’s origins being born solely from Western, Eurocentric imaginations and ingenuity, is instead expanded to include its roots in African, Eastern, and Indigenous culture, traditions, and practices as well.

This has been a labor of deep love for me personally, even when the learning curves feel too steep and feelings of overwhelm start to take over. I’m grateful for our creative and art directors as well as the writers and editors who are working through this process with me. While the development of the issue is still in progress, we wanted to end this year and begin the next one by sharing with you a glimpse of what’s to come. We hope you enjoy this preview and look forward to sharing more with you very soon.

Love, strength, health, and safety to you all,

A’Driane Nieves

Editor-in-Chief