A Living Archive: Curator Camille Brown and Photographer Clifford Prince King on Essex Hemphill’s Legacy
By Lia J. Latty
Published: June 13, 2024
Curator in Conversation: Camille Brown on Shaping Take care of your blessings
What was the curatorial vision behind Take care of your blessings, and how did Essex Hemphill’s writing guide your approach to selecting the works on view?
CAMILLE: The exhibition’s subtitle, “Take care of your blessings” is drawn from Hemphill’s personal signature and served as the organizing principle of the exhibition. Each of the included works can be directly linked to Essex’s writings, with some, like Visiting Hours by Shikeith drawing their names from titles or lines in Essex’s poems and others, like, Untitled (Stranger in the Village/Crowd #2) by Glenn Ligon referencing a published conversation between Hemphill and Isaac Julien. That explicit connection was important in terms of tracing how the writing Essex left behind (his blessings) were woven into the work of the artists in the show.
How did you navigate the balance between showcasing Hemphill’s contemporaries and introducing a new generation of artists influenced by his work?
CAMILLE: The intergenerational balance was something that developed naturally. The exhibition emerged after I discovered connections between Essex and two artists in the museum’s collection – Lyle Ashton Harris and Joyce Wellman. Because all the younger artists have created multiple works over the years related to Hemphill’s writings, the focus became finding and foregrounding those relations. THE BRASS RAIL (After Essex) by Tiona Nekkia McClodden is titled after a poem of Essex’s that he recited in the film, Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien— a still from which is included in the exhibition. In this way, the intergenerational dialogues extend even outside of the younger artists’ connections to Hemphill.
The show brings together powerful photographic imagery. What role do you think photography plays in translating and expanding Hemphill’s written voice into the visual realm?
CAMILLE: While some of the photographs are documentarian, others play with photography formally and materially in their engagement with Essex’s work. There are photographs of Essex by artists like Lyle Ashton Harris and Sharon Farmer, that serve as documents of his life and the artistic community from which he emerged. But there’s also the work of artists like Shikeith and Clifford Prince King, who are blending references to Hemphill’s writings with their own memories, experiences, and personal histories.
Nearly thirty years after Hemphill’s passing, his work is still generative across art forms.
Visiting Hours, 2022
Could you speak to the role of the advisory committee, composed of Hemphill’s friends and collaborators, in shaping the show’s tone and structure? How did that collective memory inform your curatorial decisions?
CAMILLE: Many of the participants on the advisory committee knew or worked alongside Essex during his life, so the history this exhibition touches on was shaped and formed, in part, by them. The committee provided invaluable feedback on the overall framing of the exhibition, while also helping to contextualize the various relationships and interactions between Essex, his contemporaries, and the DC (and national) arts scene during the 1980s and 1990s.
As a clarifying note, while the majority of the advisors on this exhibition knew Essex, two, Maleke Glee and Dr. Darius Bost, did not, but engaged with Hemphill’s writings throughout their own work.
What conversations do you hope visitors walk away with after seeing this show, especially as it relates to the intersection of queerness, Black identity, and visual culture?
CAMILLE: I hope visitors leave with a deeper knowledge of Essex’s truly groundbreaking work as well as an understanding of how interdisciplinary visual culture is. Nearly thirty years after Hemphill’s passing, his work is still generative across art forms. Essex wrote unabashedly about Blackness and queerness and it’s allowed for these incredibly rich material and conceptual interpretations of his work. Care can take many forms, and I hope that that the exhibition helps illuminate how the act of drawing artists like Essex foreword serves as a kind of care.
Pas de Deux No. 2 (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), 1989/2016.
Through the Lens: Clifford Prince King on Essex Hemphill and Black Queer Intimacy
What does it mean to you personally to have your work placed in dialogue with Essex Hemphill’s writings through this exhibition, and how do you see your photography extending or echoing the spirit of his legacy?
CLIFFORD: It’s a great honor and I feel very grateful for this opportunity. I’m a big believer in time and place, and this just feels very right. Heartwarming.
With my photography, I’m vulnerable and honest in ways that I can’t be with others and sometimes myself. The truth in Hemphill’s work set people free and allowed for growth and acceptance. Beyond his life, those practices I feel are crucial to continue through art, specifically Black queer art. I feel like I picked up one of the batons and continued the conversation.
Much of your work explores intimacy, Black queer desire, and tenderness. How do you see these themes resonating with or responding to Hemphill’s writing?
CLIFFORD: Much of my work is in home interiors, or in secluded areas outdoors, in my own world, and viewers are invited in. They are photos of moments stopped in time, that carry big feelings and become an offering. Things that often occur behind closed doors or in private spaces such as the mind. My work is a visual diary in most instances. These themes were very central concerns of his writing.
Photography, like poetry, can hold memory and vulnerability in complex ways. How do you navigate that overlap in your own practice, particularly when representing Black queer bodies?
CLIFFORD: Often in my work, I am paying attention to moments as spaces of memory. Photography can be a way for me to reflect on different lived experiences that I have had with those around me. My own vulnerability sometimes comes into the making of images. Black queer people are a part of my life and thus influence the lens that I see through.
I felt like I had found something I’d been missing for a long time.
Conditions, 2018.
What was your reaction when you first learned about Hemphill’s work? Has his legacy shaped your creative practice over time?
CLIFFORD: I remember feeling excited and wanting to know more, immediately. I felt like I had found something I’d been missing for a long time. I remember thinking, “How have I not seen this before?” His work has taught me to let go, to be brave, that my perception is my perception, and that has become part of my practice.
As someone working in a contemporary moment, how do you think your imagery adds to the ongoing visual archive of Black queer life that Hemphill’s words helped to ignite?
CLIFFORD: During Hemphill’s life, Black queer life was still so closeted and demonized, especially during the AIDS crisis. His work touched on being an outcast, acceptance, pleasure, risk, rejection, and heartbreak. These struggles are still present today, but they show up differently. Well, heartbreak may be the same. I’m just telling the story as it is now, in my truth, however it may be perceived, and he was doing the same. I take portraits of peers and lovers. I talk about my status, my body, and my desires in the present day where there is generally less fear among queer people than there was back then.