If you could live with just one work of art, what would it be?
I would live with a David Hammons body print. When I saw the work for the first time, it clarified what the stakes of creating could be for an artist. Pressing his body on paper was such an intimate act. The impressions of his skin are at once him and not him.
Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?
When I visited the House of Slaves on the island of Gorée in Dakar, Senegal, I didn’t expect to see so many children. They ran and laughed through the prison’s corridors. Their happiness seemed defiant in such a place. They reminded me of African peoples’ resilience.
Which writer or poet do you return to the most?
I read A Poem Off Center by Nikki Giovanni recently. This poem affected me because it gives form to what I have felt as a woman and a mother. I also return to Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s essays and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. I often think about James Baldwin’s essay On Being White… And Other Lies. These writers unlocked my curiosity early in my education and helped me form questions I still pursue today.
What music or other audio are you listening to?
I’m listening to Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou with my one-year-old in the morning. We like to make breakfast and dance to her music.
What are you watching, listening to or following that you would recommend?
I recommend watching Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, a documentary about the history of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Belgian film-maker Johan Grimonprez exposes how the Eisenhower administration manipulated jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong to distract from the murder of Lumumba. I was impressed how the film-maker used the spontaneous, fragmented language of jazz as a visual strategy.
What is art for?
To open us up to each other.
• Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until 3 August
