Allow Me to Gather Myself

Featuring the work of artist-in-residence Mildred Beltré, the solo exhibition “Allow Me to Gather Myself” is on view September 8 through December 7, 2023 at 20 Cooper Square, 4th floor. This exhibition is curated by The Latinx Project and Urayoán Noel. Learn more about public tour dates here.

Mildred Beltré tells the story of gathering black walnuts from Prospect Park near her Brooklyn home to make ink for her art. In her work, the gathering of disparate materials functions within an Afro-diasporic ecology, rooted in her experience as the daughter of Dominican migrants to New York City and in broader histories of mothers and daughters across the African diaspora creating and sharing knowledges.

In the spirit of Arturo Schomburg, Beltré’s work functions as a New York-based yet borderless counter-archive of Black knowledges and forms. Its eccentric world-making is informed by radically imaginative African American, Caribbean, and Latin American writers and thinkers, including Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and the late María Lugones, for whose classic Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes Beltré provided art and served as interlocutor. Gathering their texts and others, Beltré crafts speculative text-works that interrogate legibility and our practices of reading and viewing, while exploring, as she puts it “the power and limits of language.”

Beltré’s work builds on some of the most daring contemporary Black art: the sculptural semiotics of Sonya Clark, the eclectically spiritual fiber works of Xenobia Bailey, the processual and conceptual text-works of Glenn Ligon, the autoethnographic media experiments of María Magdalena Campos Pons. It brings together various practices in ways that blur the boundary between discrete works and multi-work installation, and between the personal and social across a field of differences. 

The gathering here is also semantic, as Beltré plays with texts and slogans to question what a revolutionary language might look and feel like. The materiality of walnut ink meets the materiality of languages and bodies in the geometric, multicolored grid of “Shine” (2017), which both summons and complicates a politics of visible identity, and in the irony-laced “Non-Hierarchy” (2017), where the phrase “to take turns” evokes not just how meaning is relational,  but also how a diasporic art requires we take unexpected turns, turning away from hegemonic languages and forms. In “Bendición, Mami” (2020) and “Mi’ja” (2021), the use of cross-stitching enables a new kind of legibility, one that brings together cross-generational Afro-Latina histories of mothers and daughters across and along the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its New York City diasporas. With their threaded cotton cloth, works like “We probably never,” “The World,” and “Remember” (all from 2021) extend Beltré’s poetics of materiality into an investigation of collaborative worldmaking and storytelling against the violent backdrop of racial capitalism. In the captivating “Portals” (2021), Beltré juxtaposes a series of multicolored ovals that function as inexact mirrors for a collective body while evoking what she calls “another space: a space of imagination, a space for something else,” conduits to “what does not exist yet.” In the new You and your people (2023), Beltré returns to walnut ink on a colored grid yet now leads us down to the floor, playing with scale and frame in ways that make us look again and again, a conceptual blurring of the line between the manual labor of cross-stitching and the virtual aura of today’s Instagram-ready art; as Beltré puts it, “the visual language of the ‘handmade’ works like the digital language of pixelation to complicate and obfuscate the image.” Whether working with homemade ink, hair, or natural fabrics, Beltré interrogates how art is made with, through, from, and between bodies, and how artworks and bodies organically make meaning together in time and space, at the limits of language.  

Having worked in community education for over 10  years, Beltré engages the city as a space of contestation, contradiction, and becoming, and visual art as a spatial practice that is individually and collectively embodied. With a background in organizing around the struggles of women, migrants, and people of color, Beltré understands art as a practice of freedom, including the freedom to play and experiment in a way that is not always possible in activist contexts. The works on display are mostly recent (three are brand new), yet they document a long and ongoing process of gathering amid dispersal, one as relevant to our chaotic present moment as it is rooted in diasporic histories and forms.   

Essay by Urayoán Noel