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we back on The Brown Pages to do what we do.
imagine and share and
slow the fuck down
this edition focuses on our time sitting under
a cedar frame draped in donated quilts called
The Linen Closet, created by architect and artist Jason Campbell
we were commissioned to create a performance in response to his exhibition for South Side Home Movie Project, Quiet Still.
this edition we open our artist journal to you dear reader
to share meditations on beauty
and bts media
as always, thank you for being here
this ain’t any ol’ webpage
this brown paper land was created for you to
explore and play, my friend.
enjoy em.
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"Mmhhmm.
And when I finish my quilts, baby girl,
I like to wrap myself in ’em before I give 'em away.
So you know I had to wrap myself extra tight in this one.”
My ma says, over the phone,
talking about the latest quilt she made for me,
fbrown and yellow patchwork
with hand embroidered butterflies
cut from my childhood dance costumes.
As we prepared for our activation of Quiet Still.
We circled the Linen Closet,
fingers grazing quilts and comforters,
thinking of our ma’s hands
pushing needles through fabric,
making beauty outta scraps and grief.
My ma doesn’t consider herself an artist,
though she was the first I ever knew.
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The first day inside the Linen Closet,
we pulled from our rehearsal bag a tangerine
and our journal,
where we found a zine
compiled for a past Reading Room
at House of the Lorde.
In it, we paired excerpts from
Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes,
Zora Neale Hurston’s How It Feels to Be Colored Me,
and journal entries from Gathering Blossoms Under Fire
by Alice Walker.
Our makeshift anthology
came from a tug we felt toward Zora’s life and work.
Her brazen act of wearing a gun,
hoisted on her hip,
while driving from New York to Florida in 1936,
funded by her Guggenheim Fellowship,
to capture and record Black life and language.
Much of what we know of Hurston
comes to us through Walker,
who found her by way of an overgrown, unmarked grave
and insisted that Zora got her flowers.
We placed Sharpe’s notes on beauty in the mix
because they felt like an echo
of Zora’s insistence
on capturing the everyday texture of Black life.
These texts became our companion as we watched
footage projected inside the Linen Closet
from the Ramon Williams collection,
a time capsule of Black life in Bronzeville.
Parades. Pageants. Parties.
Black folks adorned,
their gaze meeting the camera.
Some blurred by motion,
or held partially out of frame.
On our second day in the closet,
as we draped an arm over a folded quilt,
a memory came forward.
I must have been no more than fourteen.
My ma woke me with a gentle shake
and an excited whisper.
“Sissy, I had a vision.”
She dropped stacks of Jet and Ebony magazines on my bed.
“We gonna make wallpaper.”
We dipped neatly cut pages
into a mixture of water and Elmer’s glue
before smoothing them onto the wall.
Water dripping from our elbows
as morning broke through the living room window.
I remember us stepping back
to take in her vision made real.
Blue Magic ads next to Maya Angelou,
Jada Pinkett, Coretta Scott King.
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We thought of Walker
searching for Zora Neale Hurston.
Arriving in Eatonville, Florida,
where Hurston was born
and lived much of her life,
to find her resting place unmarked.
Disguising herself
as Hurston’s niece.
Going door to door,
speaking with neighbors and teachers,
asking after Hurston,
only to find that many
had not read her work
or did not remember her,
though some appeared in her books.
Purchasing a small grey headstone
so we could find Zora.
In her journals, Walker teaches us
what it means to encounter an ancestor
whose legacy
has gone unattended.
She teaches us that shaping an archive
is sometimes a labor
carried by your own hands,
at your own expense,
without institutional support.
A way of creating beauty
out of something left unattended.
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Our time inside the Linen Closet,
with the South Side Home Movie Project archives,
with Zora and Walker and Sharpe and our ma,
became a space
to sit in stillness
while holding Sharpe’s question:
To be a steward of beauty
is not an act of escapism
but a will to survive in spite.
It is a way of making visible
what might otherwise go unseen.
Like our ma,
wrapped in her newly completed quilt,
exhaling possibilities into stitched fabric
before releasing it.
APRIL
12 | New Session of Burlesque & Drag Classes
14 | Notes on Masculinity
21 | New Session of Drag King 101
MAY
14 - 16 | Women's Weekend Russian River
19 | TBA
23 | Nudie Nubie Chicago
26 | Film Screen at MCA
30 | Omaha Nebraska
JUNE
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Here's a video of us reading from Ordinary Notes. Feel free to allow it be the soundtrack to a part of your day.
