Fly | Drown

FLY | DROWN is a month-long installation at the Detroit Artists Market that includes a series of performances, workshops, salon talks, and meals showcasing the ways Black domestic spaces provide sites for Black womxn to exercise acts of pleasure and self-sovereignty. The exhibition simulates Harge’s grandparents’ home in Highland Park, MI where they landed after traveling north during the Great Migration. Audiences sit in a living room on household furniture installed throughout the gallery to witness Harge’s choreography, becoming participants in the space and invited guests into the home.

FLY | DROWN uses historical Black migration routes as points of departure from which to invoke the lineages of Black domestic spaces in the Midwest and gesture toward practices that both honor and queer our ancestral legacies. Aldridge and Harge invite scholars, friends, family members, and other artists to illuminate the personal and communal vernaculars of historical Black interiors.

The project celebrates the often modest but ritualized site of refuge that belonged and belongs to African Americans that migrated directly from the American South or have ties to those migration routes. Black Americans activated these spaces while simultaneously working to reclaim their own bodies after Jim Crow, reconstruction, and chattel slavery. FLY | DROWN suggests that the memories embedded in the artifacts and architectures of historical Black domestic spaces enable fellowship, grieving, archiving, and the embodiment of queer genealogy.

Date: September 13, 2019–October 19, 2019
Partner: Detroit Artists Market
Location: 4719 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201
Coordinates: 42.3548, -83.06347

About the Artist

Jennifer Harge is a Detroit-based educator and movement artist. Her physical syntax embodies an ever-changing relationship to gravity, Blackness, and a teetering between surviving and thriving. Her creative research is committed to Black and queer vernacular gestures, codes, and rituals as ways of writing from and exploring histories that have been misnamed or gone unnoticed. In 2014, she founded Harge Dance Stories to create a movement and performance platform centering Black subjectivity. Harge has been recognized by various institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Washington National Cathedral, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Queer|Art, the University of Michigan, Duke University, and Wayne State University.

Taylor Renee Aldridge is a writer and independent curator. In 2015, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Taylor has held a curatorial position at the Detroit Institute of Arts and has worked with the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, and The National Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution). She is a 2016 recipient of The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing. Taylor has written for Art21, ARTNews, Contemporary And, Detroit MetroTimes, SFMoMA’s Open Space, and Hyperallergic. She received her MLA from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and her BA from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.