Curated by Sasha Bonét 

100% Cotton. 

Please Note: This exhibition includes images that may contain sensative material for some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

Press Release

My maternal grandmother was a cotton tenant for twenty summers near Lake Bistineau in Louisiana. She told me she would often be punished for pricking her fingers and bleeding on the crop. I never knew the fluff was secured inside a brown boll until I saw this strange flowering plant inside a concept shop in SoHo. The white seeps out like a cloud. I wondered how the dark hardened shell birthed these soft peculiar insides.

                                                              Make money with cotton.

                                                              Make money with cotton.

                                                              Make money with cotton.

1880 ?

Angola, Louisiana

It is not entirely clear when Angola prison became a prison and stopped being a plantation named after the country its inhabitants were taken from.

The line between prison and plantation is obscure.

Money is made of Cotton.

Money is made of Cotton

Money is made of Cotton.
 

1932

Tuskegee, Alabama

You have bad blood, nigger! Let me drain you.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued an apology to the eight remaining survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that included 600 local Alabama Black men. The Public Health Service sent decent presenting white medical professionals in shiny automobiles to watch men deteriorate slowly, painfully, in the name of science. The observations from this study would be used to help cure paler Americans.

“The United States government did something that was wrong — deeply, profoundly, morally wrong,” Clinton said. “It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and the grandchildren, I say what you know: No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish. What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.”

Great Flood (1927) –––––––– Hurricane Katrina (2005)

The more I stare into the eye of a satellite image of Hurricane Katrina approaching the southern U.S. coastline, the more it looks like raw cotton in motion. On spin with vengeance.

In 1991 Aaron Neville remade Randy Newman’s song Louisiana, 1927. It feels like a new song entirely. The lyrics and arrangements are only slightly altered, but from the depths of Neville emerges an ancestral sonic experience that cannot be learned. The song grips you in the way he calls out the name of his homeland like a yearning for his mother. Home is inherently maternal, and only in the womb does submergence pose no threat. Perhaps when Newman wrote these lyrics in California after the Great Flood, he could not fully comprehend the perils that hover over the marshlands. The sticky breeze is a reminder that it’s never too far away. What Neville left unsaid but communicated between each breathe is the inheritance of resilience. For when we cannot float, we fly. Neville’s voice fades like the sea receding from a shoreline with a melodic wail, “they tryna wash us away.”

The American flag created in 1777 was made of cotton.

I have always believed that the stripes of the flag represent the white establishment alongside the blood of the Negro. And the blue, that’s twelve making sure that order sustains.

                                                            The fabric of our lives.

                                                        This country is threadbare.