Featured Cover Art: “Enuf Tears to Outweigh the Ocean”
Title: Enuf Tears to Outweigh the Ocean
11×17, 2020; Medium: Digital
Title: The Beginnin’
11×17, 2020; Medium: Digital
Artist Statement:
These pieces are two of four digitals works in the series: “MASK OFF: an understanding of slavery thru blk fem bodies."
These pieces are inspired by Christy Clark-Punjara, my professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in her course: History of Women and Slavery in the United States. These pieces attempt to highlight the pivotal moments of the violent migration of Black Africans to the Americas. I view this through continued violence of Black Womyn, their bodies used as a means of production, profit. I choose to honor the beauty of Black Womyn, to force the viewer to look into the gazes of these Womyn and listen. To bear the discomfort of our hyper-sexualization, our bodies bend for labor, into delivering generations of enslaved children, all for the sake of the white supremacist machine, manifest destiny, and her consumptive mission.
The Beginnin’
The discovery of the Continent, the cattle of people. This piece depicts the origin story of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean Islands. Thief of Africa and its people. How a whole nation is housed inside a woman's body. There is a market in blackness, there is capital in birth.
Enuf Tears to Outweigh the Ocean
The machine behind displacement, voyage through dark waters. This piece depicts what can be imagined as an unsettling spell surrounding the migration of slave ships to their designated plantations. One can only wonder what the sea has opened her mouth to hold, what children she grieves over.
Isha Camara is a Gambian-American poet and visual artist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Masters at Randolph College in Creative Writing. Her work has been featured in MUZZLE Magazine, Poets.org, The Mahalat Review, and Southeast Review. She has performed for the Madison Public Library, the Walker Art Center, and the American Composers Forum. Isha seeks to sate her curiosities by layering myths with modern desires, questions, obsessing over these old stories by polishing them inside poetic forms and digital art.
