At the opening reception, I spoke with several of the exhibiting artists.<\/p>\n
Dr. Li Sumter, for example, presented her short film Illadelph Dreams: R U Robot? Produced through Mythmedia Studios,<\/a> the film is a speculative exploration of earth on the brink of apocalypse where \u201ca spirited detective interrogates 5 unusual suspects after a late-night raid at Philly\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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\u2019s works and see what that might produce.\u201d \u2014 Toni Morrison Lab\u2019s Rich Blint<\/p>\n La\u00edya St. Clair,<\/a> a writer, radio host and podcaster, was representing her father, Ron St. Clair\u2019s<\/a> 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.<\/a> The photograph captures more than a moment: a President seated on grass, listening \u2014 absorbing \u2014 the cultural and musical force of Black artistry at the moment of its institutional recognition.<\/p>\n That image, and the broader installation, gesture toward one of Morrison\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Walking through The Source of Self-Regard installation, one senses the quiet insistence of Morrison\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n In his curatorial statement, Smith makes his purpose plain: \u201cThis show begins with the radical act of seeing oneself, and one\u2019s 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.\u201d The Source of Self-Regard<\/a> installation will remain on view through November 29, with special programming and artists\u2019 talks to accompany the exhibition.<\/p>\n Toni Morrison Lab <\/p>\n On the same evening of InLiquid\u2019s 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 \u2014 even when that collaboration must embrace dissonance, rupture, and creative tension. It is the kind of interdisciplinary cradle that Morrison\u2019s own career warrants: she was not only a novelist but a teacher, editor, thinker, and interlocutor.<\/p>\n \u201cToni Morrison believed strongly that art was an ancient need in the culture \u2014 it enables a society to express who they are and what they might need,\u201d says the Lab\u2019s Deputy Director, Rich Blint. \u201cWe 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\u2019s works and see what that might produce.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019 deep research into Morrison\u2019s life as an editor reveals an often-overlooked portion of Morrison\u2019s 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\u2019s entire imaginative project.<\/p>\n Her conversation with Professor Crawford traced how Morrison regarded herself as an editor \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cLiterature and Public Life,\u201d 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 \u201cpublicity\u201d supplants meaning, and in which the spectacle of news \u2014 quick, sensational, unreflective \u2014 crowds out the space for compassionate human inquiry.<\/p>\n Literature \u2014 and critique \u2014 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we have imagined it, the lab will be a very public-facing entity that just happens to be affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania,\u201d Beavers tells me. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Prof. Beavers is also clear on the timing and import of bringing this extension of Morrison\u2019s legacy into the community now. \u201c[Morrison] brings to bear a number of ideas that we need to keep constantly in front of us \u2014 the power of intergenerational interaction, the power of language, and her commitment to truth-telling,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n On the second day of the Toni Morrison Lab\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 and critique \u2014 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.<\/p>\n In a large classroom dedicated to music composition and instruction, members of the Toni Morrison Lab\u2019s advisory council (of which I am a part), were treated to an interactive experience featuring the poetry of LaTasha Diggs,<\/a> accompanied by Vijay Iyer<\/a> on piano, with a visual\/video backdrop designed by Carrie Mae Weems.<\/a> Their collaboration was majestic. \u201cAs I think about what transpired between Weems, Vijay Iyer and Diggs,\u201d says Beavers \u201cwhat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Toni Morrison\u2019s work always asks her readers for more than passive reception. She demands that we see ourselves \u2014 \u201cregard ourselves\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s interior life. She locates in memory and imagination a horizon of possibility, a ground on which to stand.<\/p>\n And so, as Philadelphia hosts these twin Morrisonian moments \u2014 the installation, the Lab \u2014 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\u2019s work still invites us to examine our inherited wounds, and to imagine the \u201cnext place\u201d that must be built.<\/p>\n May the city respond to her call.<\/p>\n Photo courtesy West Point military Academy<\/a> via Flickr ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761826085_460_nl_bolt600-copy.jpg\"\/)
MORE THINGS THE CITIZEN RECOMMENDS<\/p>\n