Happy Black History Month!
As part of TUR’s programming, I attended a roundtable discussion at school with Black artists based in Rome. It was a small group, but I walked out with something I hadn’t had before: language for a feeling I’d been carrying, and a clearer understanding of what art can do.
Art is resistance, I knew that. But the way it resists is something that I’d forgotten: by making us feel.
Hosted by Tameka Baba, the conversation featured Heather Scott Peterson and TJ Dedeaux-Norris, both fellows at the American Academy of Rome. Their practices looked very different, but they seemed to be reaching toward the same goal named in the roundtable: creativity as resistance.
Heather spoke about abstraction. For her, art connects people by loosening the grip of individual identity and inviting viewers to search for shared experience. She spoke about attempting to separate herself from the work so that the audience does not view her work with pre-conceived notions of what it should look like, coming from a bi-racial black woman. As someone who doesn’t study art, I asked what she thinks about the accessibility of art. She said she wants her work to be legible even to people like her brother, who isn’t an artist. But understanding, she added, is not always the point. Feeling is. She offered the example of a black cube. You might not like it. You might not “get” it. But you will feel something in its presence. And sometimes, that feeling is precisely why the work exists. To feel is to be moved, and to be moved is to be unable to remain entirely unchanged. There is resistance in that.
TJ approached resistance through the body. One line I scribbled down immediately: What does mobility look like in this body? As a black queer person, TJ’s experiences in primarily white institutions questioned how and what resistance can look like underneath historically oppressive structures. Their questioning of what art can look like, of what it can do, and of the significance of the artist’s identity and experience in art also struck something I had been circling myself. In a country where bodies like mine are not the majority, what does it mean to move, to make, to exist? For TJ, the body is not separate from the artwork. I refuse to address the frame before my own frame, she said, recalling a moment when their piece was flown with great care while she remained in economy on a long-haul flight. The statement was cutting and clarifying at the same time. Care for the art must include care for the artist. Otherwise, what are we preserving? In that way, art is resistance, because the artist becomes the art and refuses to receive any less than they deserve.
Despite their different approaches, however, both artists returned to community. TJ spoke about “code-meshing,” building shared language so art can travel between people. Heather described the audience as the generous party, the final component that completes the work. We are participants. Our feelings finish the art. Meaning is made together. And through that meaning, both artists challenged mainstream narratives of identity and refused to let history become distant or abstract.
Listening to them, I began to rethink my own time in Rome. I had felt blocked, unable to articulate my experience. Heather named something I recognized: sometimes the obstacle is not absence of thought, but absence of language. But TJ and Heather pushed me further. Maybe I was demanding articulation before sensation. Maybe resistance could begin earlier than explanation. Maybe it could begin with permission to feel. Especially during Black History Month, during trying times now, this invitation feels particularly urgent. To honor history is not only to learn it, but to let it make us feel and to refuse the numbness that makes injustice easier to ignore.
So if you can, when you’re able, take a trip to Florence. Go to the Murate Arts District, where Heather and TJ are hosting a gallery. Enter the space. It’s an amazing venue: formerly a convent, then a prison, now a place for art and resistance. Sit with what you notice. Let confusion, recognition, discomfort, and, hopefully, empathy rise.
Art is resistance. And so is feeling.
Awesome!