There was a moment when writer and artist Elizabeth Salaam first moved to New York City and felt a glaring difference in her presence in a place. She was lost, standing on a street corner, and a car drove past as some young men leaned out of it to yell, “Hey shorty!” Sure, men usually notice most women they see in public, but it was such a stark contrast to the way she had been rendered nearly invisible growing up as a biracial child adopted into an all-White family in Idaho.
“I just felt like, ‘I am here,’ for the first time in my life. I felt like, ‘I am here, I am among people,’” she says of that experience. “I had been to Atlanta, but I was kind of crunchy, you know? I was kind of earthy and Atlanta was very fancy, so my Black was still a little bit unusual. Being in New York, there were just so many different ways to be Black, so many communities to be a part of.”
These multiple depictions, experiences, and stories of Blackness, specifically of Black women, are featured in a dual-themed exhibition at the Mesa College Art Gallery this month. “We are Women: Jean Cornwell Wheat and Elizabeth Salaam” features paintings, sculptures and mixed media work. Wheat, a painter, sculptor and art history professor who moved to San Diego from Harlem, N.Y., in the 1960s, offers a look at the ways the famously Black enclave helped shaped her point of view. “Beautiful, Brilliant and Brave: A Celebration of Black Women” is an accompanying display from 2014, featuring biographical s of 20 Black female leaders with connections to San Diego. This exhibition opens Monday and continues through April 18 as part of Women’s History Month. A reception is scheduled for 4 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the gallery (with a musical performance by Mariea Antoinette) and an artist talk will be held April 17.
Salaam, a senior writer in advancement operations and campaign at UC San Diego, also spent a decade writing cover stories for the San Diego Reader and has a master’s degree in fine arts. She took some time to talk about the works she created for “We are Women,” using synthetic braiding hair and plaster-cast body parts, and the power of womanhood, community and belonging she found later in life among other Black women. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: How did you go about conceptualizing the new pieces you’ve created for “We are Women”?
A: I’m using a lot of synthetic hair and plaster-cast body parts, so this is kind of an evolution of what I was doing before [her previous work has taken her writing from her journals, letters and published articles and used them as the basis for her visual sculptures, live performance writing and installations], getting off of the page and into the world. Now, it’s a little bit more embodied and into a little more of the experience of the body, the experience of what it is to be disconnected, to be a Black woman in the way that I am and the way that it connects to the stories of other women.
I love the art of Wangechi Mutu and she uses elements from Kenya, earth elements from Kenya, to build these warrior women. I was watching a video about her work and how she’s really connected to the land, the earth, that she’s using to build these women. I just felt such a deep longing and searching, and I always kind of have a feeling of your ancestral blood going really deep, deep, deep down into the earth where you are, and we don’t have that here. So, I kind of wanted to have a conversation with her, a little bit.
I was using synthetic hair, I was using these plaster-cast body parts, I was playing with materials. When I brought in this hair, it kind of started to pull these materials together and I really, really loved the way that synthetic hair kind of connected to this idea of building something, creating something beautiful, building community in a place where our ancestral roots don’t go all the way deep down here, but we’ve created culture and community, and we’re absolutely inextricable from life here. It made me think about being adopted by a White woman, my mom, and living in Idaho was very White everywhere, and my mom just cut my hair. She cut my hair short and I looked just like a boy. Hair, obviously, is a big, big topic; hair is not just hair, so as I started to braid and come together, I had braiding parties to prepare for this and came together with a lot of women. As we would braid together, I felt like it was a weaving together of community, it was just very symbolic. I could see the ways in which what I was missing from my mom not doing my hair, and not having a Black mother to do my hair, I was missing a lot more than just cute hair. I have a daughter now and in doing her hair, it’s like this conversation, it’s this lineage, it’s this community, so a lot of it is about connection. I’m using the synthetic hair as connection, and in some places as disconnection. As we came together to braid the braids, we had some people who didn’t know how to braid, some people weren’t great. We would lengthen and extend the braids with additional hair and that was challenging for some people; you can see these links in all of the braids, where the additional hair has been woven in, and you can see these places where the braids are really tight, you can see places where the braids are loose, and you can see a lot of connections. I really love the way that that symbolizes the various ways in which we’re connected, the various ways in which we’re imperfect.
Q: In the description from the Mesa College Art Gallery about the show, it says that your pieces in “We are Women” are inspired by moving from a childhood in which you were a biracial child adopted into a White family and raised in a White town in Idaho, and the disconnection and invisibility you felt in that environment, to an adulthood where you found yourself in conversation and community with other Black women in hair salons and living rooms. First, can you share a bit about what those conversations were about with those other Black women?
A: I think what I meant by that is just having a similar language; not having to explain things, just walking into a room and knowing that there’s so many things you don’t have to say. For example, at a job, I might be asking myself, “Am I being too Black at work?” Or, I when I worked at this daycare in Boise one summer and I was so excited about this poet that I had been reading. This girl that worked with me, I said she should read this poet and showed her the work, and she was like, “Ah, OK. Wrong color, but OK” because it was a Black poet. So, [years later] in these conversations I was having with other Black women, it was more like we could just talk and not have to navigate things like, “What is this person going to understand? What is this person not going to understand?” We didn’t have to avoid topics, we didn’t have to avoid race.
Q: Are you comfortable talking a bit about that distance between the invisibility of that childhood environment and experience, and what it sounds like might be the experience of seeing and being seen in your adulthood around other Black women?
A: It’s so interesting because that process was really fast. I went to school in Washington state and it was just a continuation of high school that I was always the one overlooked. There was a guy in high school who [said that he’d engage in one kind of sexual act with her, but not intercourse] “because she’s Black.” That was the experience, so it was just being always unchosen. Then, I moved to New York and I the day I just came out of the subway and I was completely lost, and this car drove by and these guys leaned out of the window and they were like, “Hey shorty!” I was like, ‘Oh my God, New York gave me a nickname! They see me, I’m here.’ I mean, of course they see every single woman, but I just felt like, “I am here” for the first time in my life. I felt like, “I am here, I am among people.” I had been to Atlanta, but I was kind of crunchy, you know? I was kind of earthy and Atlanta was very fancy, so my Black was still a little bit unusual. Being in New York, there were just so many different ways to be Black, so many communities to be a part of. Here’s a good example, are you familiar with June Jordan? She was very much a hero of mine when I first moved to New York. I loved her and I was a poet, and when I got to New York, I started going to the Brooklyn Moon where all of these Black poets would do spoken word. They had a very different tone, a different vibe. I’m very West Coast, sort of academic, so I was like, ‘OK, if I’m gonna do spoken word, I’ve got to take on this voice, this Brooklyn Moon voice,’ and I kind of tried it on a little bit. It was a big failure. I just did not suit me and it was not my voice, so I think that is part of the journey, is finding, ‘Who am I?’
Q: I want to ask you about displacement and what you wanted to say through these works about the experience of being removed from, or forced out of, a space (especially as it relates to the experience of being Black in America)?
A: So, I’m going to start with my relationship with Idaho, where I grew up, where I have this very strong relationship to the natural landscape. When I’m driving, or when I fly in, I get really excited. I actually feel, biologically, like my body is reaching for it. Then, as soon as I get to the airport, or as soon as I stop at the gas station, I feel completely foreign. I feel like, people-wise, I have to justify why I’m there. It’s like, ‘You don’t belong here. What are you doing here?’ It’s just a feeling of otherness, but I was born and raised in Idaho. So, it’s just this feeling of not belonging and I really feel like that is the sort of universal experience of being Black in America. It’s like you’re from here, but you have to justify your existence everywhere you go. You have to justify your existence just being on this street right here, you have to justify your existence on your own stoop. It’s this idea of never really being able to just be at home, and I had this idea of the motherland. I had that idea when I was younger, and then when I went to Senegal, I was like, ‘This is not what I was expecting.’ I was expecting to feel like I was home. I did not; we’ve been separated and there is a disconnection. So, it’s this idea of, ‘Where is home?’ So, I have a couple of pieces in there and one is called, “Bitch, I’m from here” and another is “Mothership,” which is this idea of a mythical mothership touching down and seeking home, a little bit. Some of them are pieces that are defiantly claiming the space. There’s some defiance; being disconnected, but claiming what we can anyway.
Q: In this moment, when you hear the phrase “We are Women,” what comes to mind for you? And what do you hope audiences take from the experience of seeing the works on display in this particular exhibition?
A: I think that claiming womanhood is a powerful thing. For example, “The Woman King” is my favorite movie and I feel like there’s a very strong surge of women claiming the power of womanhood. Not the power of a woman to do what a man does, but the power of womanhood, itself. I think that is a beautiful thing and the women who are in this space, their art and in these s highlighting them and their work, is really powerful company to be in. I’m really honored to be among these women, in a really big way, to the point of tears.
What I hope that people come away with from this is a really strong sense of community. I just really hope that people come away with a strong sense of wholeness. I honestly hope that’s what people feel from the whole show, and when people see my work, what I would like them to come away with is a sense of defiance and strength and just claiming their own existence. Defiance and being able to just exist and be together.
