Harmony Holiday – författare

An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.

In association with BLUM Books The first major monograph on a multifaceted self-taught artist whose work ranges from painting and sculpture to performance and sound. Lonnie Holley’s work has captivated audiences.“Lonnie Holley has held a cult status among the art cognoscenti for a long time as a visual artist and performer.”—New York Times Lonnie Holley’s widely admired practice spans painting, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and performance that combines experimental music and poetry. After decades of making art, he is now getting the recognition he richly deserves.The artist’s first sculptures were carved tombstones for his nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, a large all-encompassing outdoor installation that was eventually destroyed in 1997. The artist’s work continued unabated as he began to gain recognition and exhibit his work in the South and throughout the US.In his first major monograph, every facet of his practice is explored. Holiday considers Holley’s art and music as interconnected components of the artist’s overall creative vision. Beardsley focuses on the artist’s Birmingham roots connecting the cultural firmament of that city with other major creative communities in Alabama, most notably Boykin, more popularly known as Gee’s Bend, home of the famous quilters.

MAAFA is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. MAAFA undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed her father and been granted eternal life.Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry CollectionMaafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero’s journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.