Black Arts Advocacy as Carework

OPINION | By Dr. Donette Francis
Center of Global Black Studies, University of Miami 

This season I have been particularly attuned to and appreciative of a Black Miami Arts ecosystem of care. My natural instincts have been to see the persistence of everyday racial constrictions, the impact of gentrification on Black residents, and the pernicious attacks on epistemologies of Black knowledge across the state of Florida.  

While these restrictions remain, the filmmaker Faren Humes has taught me to also see and celebrate Black Miami’s durational presence in spite of the repeated generational facts of racial violence and constraints.  In this way, Humes is aligned with Kevin Quashie—who I also claim as a Black Miami theorist.  Raised in Carol City, in his most recent work, Quashie reminds us that “in a black world, the racist thing is not the beginning or the end of being… Anti-blackness is total in the world, but it is not total in the black world.”  Together both Humes and Quashie encourage us to inhabit and begin from a world of Black aliveness.  

Sitting in the Pérez Art Museum auditorium on the evening of November 15,  listening to its museum director Franklin Sirmans in conversation with NFL legend and sports broadcaster Desmond Howard, a light bulb went off.  I was moved by the care with which Howard talked about selecting the pieces for his collection of modern and contemporary Black Art.  Howard’s very studied and intentional collecting practice centered what the artwork and artists evoked for him in terms of personal relationships, recurring civil rights struggles, memory and immaterial value.  His was not a speculative practice that bet on the accrual of the art object’s financial worth, but rather the priceless appreciation—or value—of living with Black art. In that moment, I realized that these public-facing conversations are acts of Black worldmaking, as Sirmans curates a world that makes discussing Black art accessible, aspirational, and cool. These moments insist on the expansiveness of Black being. Such conversations during the orientation process as young student-athletes enter college campuses that bet on the potential star power of their physical Black prowess would reveal the value of a liberal arts education and the transformative power of the arts.

“Care is advocacy,” my Miami co-madre Coralina Rodriguez Meyer reminds me.  And this season, I have been both encouraged and heartened by the fact that from wherever we are institutionally located, Black educators and cultural arts professionals are each doing our part to carry the collective load to amplify and steward Black art and Black artists.  This is often a difficult line to walk.  There are risks involved in remaining steadfast to such an ethical commitment.  Black advocacy is present and future-facing work that seeks to ward off the isolation of being the only, or one of the few, in the many workspaces we inhabit.  We remain, nonetheless, steadfast to making Black space for future generations.  This is resistance work; these are everyday acts of imagining alternative Black futures.
__

Dr. Donette Francis is Director for the Center for Global Black Studies and past director of the American Studies Program at the University of Miami. Her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora.

Dr. Donette Francis, captured on film by photographer Ermol Clear at the convening Still Here: Generations of Black Miami Artmaking in September 2023.