I cried the day Toni Morrison died in 2019. The news came early in the morning, incongruous in its quiet. I wept for the loss — though not the end — of a literary giant whose gravity shaped my formation as a scholar, thinker, and reader. Her absence felt intolerable, immediate, and irrevocable.

Years later, I still pause to reckon with the weight of that moment.

It’s my mother — an avid reader long before she became “the mother of a future scholar” — who first introduced me to Morrison. She had read Beloved around the time of its publication in the late 1980s, and her abiding engagement with Morrison’s fiction became a kind of force field in our home. In my teenage years, I attempted to follow in the footsteps of those readers of my household — my mother, my brother, my sister — and tried to take up Beloved myself. At that point, it was unreadable to me. I could not process or digest certain passages. Beloved was resistant, unyielding.

Over the last few weeks, I have grappled again with Toni Morrison’s huge legacy through two different ventures in Philadelphia: The Source of Self-Regard installation at the InLiquid Gallery, and the quiet but powerful soft launch of the Toni Morrison Lab at Penn. Each — the installation and lab — signal, in their own way, the power of Morrison’s enduring legacy in arts, culture, and her impact on all of our lives.

The Source of Self-Regard

In The Source of Self-Regard — the eponymous essay in her 2019 essay collection (after which the InLiquid installation is named) — Morrison reflects on the brutal “bit”: the handmade tool of torture and control used to prevent the enslaved from speaking, while forcing them to continue laboring.

What I needed then, to deal with what I thought was unmanageable, was some little piece, some concrete thing, some image that came from the world of that which was concrete. Something that was domestic, something that you could sort of hook the book on to, that would say everything you wanted to say in very human and personal terms. And for me that image, that concrete thing became the bit.

The “bit” is a radical instrument of silencing — of severing voice, identity, humanity. In Morrison’s aesthetic, Beloved is not about the institution of slavery (in the abstract), but about those who were enslaved within it; her focus is on persons, memory, suffering, repair. To read Morrison is to confront an inheritance of pain — but also the possibility of restoration. In this sense, the very title The Source of Self-Regard (the essay and the installation) points us to how one might reclaim voice, dignity, and — Morrison’s understanding of —inner sovereignty.

The installation at InLiquid is curated by the extraordinary cultural worker Tayyib Smith, whose work in Philly also includes a branding agency and a development company. It gathers local Philadelphia artists — painters, photographers, mixed-media practitioners, craftspeople — whose work expresses, honors, or wrestles with Morrison’s legacy. InLiquid itself is a labyrinthine suite of interlocking gallery spaces, and to walk through it is to walk a kind of pilgrimage: you move from one chamber to another, encountering each artist’s offering as a fragment of a larger whole. It’s like walking through Morrison’s corpus, composed of interlocking texts, echoes, and refracted voices.

At the opening reception, I spoke with several of the exhibiting artists.

Dr. Li Sumter, for example, presented her short film Illadelph Dreams: R U Robot? Produced through Mythmedia Studios, the film is a speculative exploration of earth on the brink of apocalypse where “a spirited detective interrogates 5 unusual suspects after a late-night raid at Philly’s most popular underground club. His questions uncover a radical plot uniting Earthbound humans and rogue cyborgs in a last chance to escape off-world before the planet is destroyed.”

“We are trying to call on the powers of the musician, the poet, and the thinker, and see what might happen if you gather them together for a week and give them a theme that animates Toni Morrison’s works and see what that might produce.” — Toni Morrison Lab’s Rich Blint

Laíya St. Clair, a writer, radio host and podcaster, was representing her father, Ron St. Clair’s legendary photographic collection. One photo features a striking image of then-President and First Lady Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter seated on the lawn during a celebration of Black Music that was a direct precursor to Black Music Month commemorations, organized by legendary media strategist and producer, Dyanna Williams. The photograph captures more than a moment: a President seated on grass, listening — absorbing — the cultural and musical force of Black artistry at the moment of its institutional recognition.

That image, and the broader installation, gesture toward one of Morrison’s preoccupations: the tension of Black art being at once profound and undervalued, expressive and at risk of being overwritten by the structures of a nation that has long attempted to erase Black identity.

Walking through The Source of Self-Regard installation, one senses the quiet insistence of Morrison’s voice, refracted through artists across generations. The installation itself becomes a site of inquiry: How do we continue the work of self-regard, especially when dominant (and these days, political) culture seem dedicated to erasure?

In his curatorial statement, Smith makes his purpose plain: “This show begins with the radical act of seeing oneself, and one’s people, with reverence. Self-regard is not a luxury. It is not ego. It is an imperative, especially in this regressive era of backlash and weaponized nostalgia.” The Source of Self-Regard installation will remain on view through November 29, with special programming and artists’ talks to accompany the exhibition.

Toni Morrison Lab

On the same evening of InLiquid’s opening reception, the Toni Morrison Lab at the University of Pennsylvania held its soft launch. The Lab, conceptualized and spearheaded by Founding Director Herman Beavers, is envisioned as a space for incubation of Black artistry at the intersection of writing, music, poetry, visual arts, and more. The Lab is intended to foster collaboration — even when that collaboration must embrace dissonance, rupture, and creative tension. It is the kind of interdisciplinary cradle that Morrison’s own career warrants: she was not only a novelist but a teacher, editor, thinker, and interlocutor.

“Toni Morrison believed strongly that art was an ancient need in the culture — it enables a society to express who they are and what they might need,” says the Lab’s Deputy Director, Rich Blint. “We are trying to call on the powers of the musician, the poet, and the thinker, and see what might happen if you gather them together for a week and give them a theme that animates Toni Morrison’s works and see what that might produce.”

As a part of the soft launch, Penn Professor Margo Crawford and Howard University Graduate School Dean Dana Williams, author of Toni at Random, held a conversation that was at once edifying, luminous, and generative. Dean Williams’ deep research into Morrison’s life as an editor reveals an often-overlooked portion of Morrison’s legacy. Before Morrison published her own fiction, she nurtured, shaped, and birthed dozens of Black books through her editorial work. In Toni at Random, Williams does not merely offer biography; she teases out how the editorial impulse undergirds Morrison’s entire imaginative project.

Her conversation with Professor Crawford traced how Morrison regarded herself as an editor — how she worked with authors, how she positioned her own creative voice in relation to others, and how she held a vision for a Black literary genealogy that could extend beyond her own fiction.

The Toni Morrison Lab seems committed to preserving that same tension: the visible and the invisible, what must be said and what remains under reverberation. In a short but potent speech/talk entitled “Literature and Public Life,” Morrison anticipated many of the difficulties we face now: She critiques how private and public life have atrophied under technological spectacle, mass media, and the erosion of interiority. She warns of a culture in which “publicity” supplants meaning, and in which the spectacle of news — quick, sensational, unreflective — crowds out the space for compassionate human inquiry.

Literature — and critique — provide for us a means to reflect, resist, endure, and remember ourselves, even under the advance of monstrous forces: systemic erasure, authoritarianism, the flattening of nuance.

“As we have imagined it, the lab will be a very public-facing entity that just happens to be affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania,” Beavers tells me. “I understand the power of collaborating with the West Philadelphia community, and I see us sponsoring a number of activities that bring us in direct contact with the West Philadelphia community.”

Prof. Beavers is also clear on the timing and import of bringing this extension of Morrison’s legacy into the community now. “[Morrison] brings to bear a number of ideas that we need to keep constantly in front of us — the power of intergenerational interaction, the power of language, and her commitment to truth-telling,” he says.

On the second day of the Toni Morrison Lab’s launch, I found myself walking the renovated hallways I once traversed as a grad student under the supervision of the chair of my dissertation committee, the very same Herman Beavers. In passing through Fisher-Bennet Hall’s renewed classrooms, I felt a surge: My return to that site was, in part, a reckoning with the value of Morrison in this moment. Literature — and critique — provide for us a means to reflect, resist, endure, and remember ourselves, even under the advance of monstrous forces: systemic erasure, authoritarianism, the flattening of nuance.

In a large classroom dedicated to music composition and instruction, members of the Toni Morrison Lab’s advisory council (of which I am a part), were treated to an interactive experience featuring the poetry of LaTasha Diggs, accompanied by Vijay Iyer on piano, with a visual/video backdrop designed by Carrie Mae Weems. Their collaboration was majestic. “As I think about what transpired between Weems, Vijay Iyer and Diggs,” says Beavers “what people were immersed in were three artists who are all committed to their respective forms of truth-telling. And we want to replicate that and normalize it so that communities in and around Philly can experience that and be empowered by it.”

Toni Morrison’s work always asks her readers for more than passive reception. She demands that we see ourselves — “regard ourselves” — with deeper eyes. Her editorship, her fiction, her essays: They are all directed to a project of collective reclamation. In The Source of Self-Regard, she writes not only of trauma and memory, but also of how one might reinhabit one’s interior life. She locates in memory and imagination a horizon of possibility, a ground on which to stand.

And so, as Philadelphia hosts these twin Morrisonian moments — the installation, the Lab — we are asked, once again, to become readers, creators, interlocutors. We are asked to practice self-regard, to see and be seen, to hold silence and to wield voice. Morrison’s work still invites us to examine our inherited wounds, and to imagine the “next place” that must be built.

May the city respond to her call.

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Photo courtesy West Point military Academy via Flickr