Past/Present/Future

Moriah Shumpert is a PhD student in the University of Minnesota Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) Department, having completed their undergraduate and master’s degrees at Old Dominion University. Moriah’s research explores Black and indigenous artistic and cultural production, with a special focus on queer and trans artmaking within Black and indigenous communities. Their academic interest is driven both by their own artistic practice as a photographer as well as emerging works in Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist thought and theory. These latter works, as Moriah describes, “create spaces for Black people and Black artists who engage really deeply and meaningfully with ideas about time, and time slippages, and how that is directly connected to how we imagine ourselves in the future, and how we imagine liberated futures.” Moriah sees the concept of time slippages occurring more and more frequently in contemporary Black and indigenous art and literature. While artists often have individual notions of time slippage, the concept is usually represented through depictions of time as cyclical, rather than linear, allowing for engagement with ideas such as gender and indigeneity in ways that allow for both ancestral and futuristic perspectives to cohabitate and dialogue. 

Immersion in Art, Auto-Archiving, and Photography

Moriah knew from the start of their PhD program that they wanted their research to surround them with dedicated artists’ visions of liberated futures because engaging with and uplifting such works provides both intellectual and spiritual nourishment. During their GRPP Fellowship, Moriah conducted archival research into the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s collections of Black/African and Indigenous art and photography, viewing and analyzing works by artists such as Gordon Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Zanele Muholi, Kara Walker, Meadow Muska, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Jim Denomie, and Cara Romero. This research provided a greater understanding of global Black visual cultures while simultaneously placing these aesthetic practices with artists working in the Twin Cities and US more broadly. Moriah also works to create their own archive of art they make and find outside of traditional archival spaces, which rarely prioritize or include materials speaking to the wide range of Black, indigenous, queer, or other marginalized people’s experiences. 

The South African photographer Zanele Muholi has been especially inspirational in informing Moriah’s practice. Through a long career of photographing Black South African queer, trans and nonbinary people, Muholi is able to curate their own archive and not only provide representations of their own experiences, but also intervene into and reinterpret historical representations of Black femininity and  queerness. Muholi’s photographs were a key inspiration in Moriah’s landing on their research topic in the first place, as Moriah was struck by the queer artistic sensibilities in the photos which mirrored Black lesbian art in their own community in the United States. This was the link which led Moriah to seek out and find similar kinships across time and space. 

Research Approach and Inspiration

Moriah supplemented this archival research with ethnographic visits to the museum, during which they observed patterns in museum goer behavior, assessed layout and accessibility, and attempted to document how the structure of the museum itself influences viewer engagement with the works on display and use of the space overall. They conducted several interviews with artists and curators, about their relationship to their own art and the creative spaces they occupy. Moriah would oftentimes photograph interviewees, helping to imbue the interactions with a spirit of artistic exchange. They have also been exploring the role of photography in ethnographic interviews, finding that photos can offer different and nuanced information which may not get caught in the transcript of a conversation. Many of these conversations helped Moriah grapple with broader questions about the very role of Black art and the tension between Black art becoming less accessible as it gains greater public and commercial recognition. 

Moriah worked closely with GWSS Associate Professor Rachmi Diyah Larasati to compile a literary review of the subfields most pertinent to their work, including the subfields of Black visual culture and aesthetics. In particular, the work of Kara Keeling has helped Moriah expand their analysis from still images to film, providing a framework through which to consider representations of Blackness in film as well as how filmmakers uniquely use cinematic time to experiment with time slippage. They have also been reconsidering the ways in which Amiri Baraka’s writing unsettles notions of a Black past. Much of Moriah’s approach to archives, artistic representations, and time is underpinned by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “Critical Fabulations,” which provides guidance to scholars whose efforts to intervene in historical or representational gaps cannot be fulfilled solely through traditional archives.

The Writing and Creative Process

This work resulted in the completion of a dissertation chapter draft which considers  representation of Black queer artworks within public arts spaces in the Twin Cities and attempts to construct a lineage of queer kin and ancestors that have helped to influence the emergence of a Midwest Black queer aesthetic. Moriah is reflective about how the outline of the chapter changed and was shaped over the course of the research. They initially approached the chapter with a very spatial structure, informed by Katherine McKittrick’s notion of “Black Geographies.” As they pulled together various strands dealing with time slippages however, a member of their dissertation committee suggested that time, rather than space, might be a more suitable frame for the project. The chapter still retains McKittrick’s ideas of contested landscapes, which inform Moriah’s writing about the influence of diaspora on the art they study.

Throughout the remainder of their dissertation project (and their career beyond), Moriah will continue exploring works of art, conversing with creative people with unique perspectives on the creation and use of art, and contributing to their own auto-archive, all of which provide mental and spiritual sustenance and help them most effectively illustrate core idea that Black art is important because it reflects the past/present/future. Speaking with undimmed enthusiasm and an enviable clarity of purpose, Moriah describes their life plan as “more teaching Black art, more making Black art, and more curating Black art.”