📽🎨#ArtIsAWeapon Reposted from @tmagazine #TPresents: The #Artist and #Filmmaker Envisioning a Safer World for Black Women @j_______g_______ Interspersing found footage with original interviews, Ja’Tovia Gary makes poetic video works that elucidate the realities of racial injustice — and how the country might change... For her experimental film “The Giverny Document” (2019), the artist and filmmaker Ja'Tovia Gary interviewed Black women and girls in Harlem, asking those passers-by — who differ in age, ethnicity and spiritual identification — if they felt safe in their bodies, and in the world. The roughly 40-minute feature, which includes their wide-ranging responses, was part of a three-channel video installation presented at both Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles this year (both shows closed early because of Covid-19), but has also been shown as a stand-alone project at film festivals, garnering Gary awards and critical acclaim. As she sees it, part of her mission as a Black Southern queer artist is to help shape a world in which Black women do not live in a state of precarity, forever teetering between violence and safety. Indeed, Gary has been engaging with themes of power and representations of Black womanhood in her work since 2010. Her films are painterly and essayistic, combining seemingly disparate archival footage. “Healing is at the root of the work,” she says. “Making art is a transformative process that transmutes pain or trauma into something beautiful, useful, functional, instructive for those who can engage with the work, and for me.” Click the link in our bio for more. Written by Lovia Gyarkye, imagery by JerSean Golatt (@jersean_). #BlackArtists #BlackArt #BlackWomen #TraScapades #BlackGirlArtGeeks https://www.instagram.com/p/CEDoVq0AcB7/?igshid=875k0sznijys