This project enters the world soon—! Honored to be a part of its publication (an excerpt below). Celebrating Linda Goode Bryant 🔥 ✍🏾: In Recognition (December 1976) Barbara Chase-Riboud, Shelly Farkas, Suzanne Jackson, Valerie Maynard, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Wendy Wilson This presentation of works on paper, photographs, and “small constructions” by eight women artists from the United States and Europe was conceived as an anti- dote to the fact that in contemporary art, as elsewhere, “the American female, particularly the Black American female, has not been given her just recognition.” Among the artists being celebrated for their “creative genius” was Valerie Maynard, who had, from 1969 to 1974, practiced and taught printmaking at The Studio Museum in Harlem as a participant in its now-renowned residency program. Maynard, whose work explores social injustice and the legacy of the civil rights movement, said of herself at the time, “I am a medium. Consciously seeking the essence of everything in my experience.” This sentiment is conveyed in her linocut The Artist “Trying to Get It All Down” (c. 1970) in which a figure is hunched over a piece of paper, surrounded by a phantasmagoria of spectral figures in varying states of torsion, vibrating with energy. The Black women featured in In Recognition had dedicated their lives to living within their respective practices, seeing their studios as sites of community and creative pedagogy, their lived experiences as embodied, somatic material to be centered and applied. This was exemplified by Suzanne Jackson’s Gallery 32, a self-funded arts space in Los Angeles that operated from 1968 to 1970. A predecessor to Just Above Midtown, it was inspired by the vision of artist Charles White—with whom Jackson studied at Otis Art Institute—who believed that art could be a catalytic tool for activism and social progress. Jackson’s drawing “Talk” (1976), included in the JAM exhibition, can be interpreted as a visualization of the type of exchange she fostered; its two abstracted figures appear face to face, their interior and exterior selves fluid, their bodies merging with each other and the landscape.