“They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin against the blue up there.” –Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly
Hannah Traore Gallery is delighted to present Turiya Adkins: More Than a Notion. This exhibition features the artist’s most recent works, which explore resistance through the legacy of Black athletes in track and field and the theme of supernatural flight in African folklore.
These two points of departure were inspired by James Meredith’s “March Against Fear,” the civil-rights activist’s landmark demonstration in 1966, during which he attempted to travel from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest voter discrimination and racism in the South. When he was injured by a gunshot on the second day of the march, three civil rights organizations—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—pledged to continue on his path until he could rejoin them. Even as participants faced threats, arrest, and violence, they bravely persisted to support the Black Power movement, Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act. Soaring from Meredith’s footsteps into imagined realms, Adkins’ works chart acts of Black transcendence—mapping abstract layers of personal, ancestral, historical, poetic, technological, literary, and psychic departure.
Adkins describes her practice as one that is “invested in conjuring visual threads between Black mythologies derived from historical phenomena that engage this tension between flight and freedom,” illustrating the societal leaps that intertwine discrimination, migration, and liberation. Incorporating images of runners, she shares her family’s photographic archive documenting her grandfather’s role as a track coach, connecting her personal experience with the sport to her research into the Fugitive Slave Act and the Great Migration. Depicting the motions of flight, she reflects on her great uncle’s role as a Tuskegee Airman—the first Black pilots to participate in World War II—drawing comparisons between the aspirational flight of Black bodies through a military airforce and the symbolic flight of enslaved Africans on Middle Passage ships who jumped overboard to escape the terrors of slavery in America. Through both individual and collective departure, Adkins recognizes connections to the Flying African stories that she was raised listening to, tales in which Black communities transcended gravity and geography to return to their ancestral lands.
Just as Meredith marched to contextualize his political beliefs in physical space, Adkins forges her own artistic pilgrimage—a canvas wherein metaphysical concepts are communicated through material investigations. She incorporates organic elements like salt and corn—foods described in African folktales to possess magical powers that allowed, or prevented, bodies from levitating. She applies loose charcoal and powder pigments in bright palettes that echo diasporic migration. She sands down and manipulates paint layers to blur personal narratives, inherited legends, and shared histories. Through every physical and theoretical resource available, Adkins challenges both what is expected of her, and what she expects from herself, striving to achieve thematic and compositional harmony. Her titles offer poetic anchors for her abstractions—at once clarifying her loose gestures, and coding the academic scholarship she references.
More Than a Notion is a phrase Adkins learned from her grandmother, a refrain which reminds her that within each person there are interwoven realities and mythologies. In her abstracted atmosphere, Adkins encourages these souls to ascend and roam freely.
“They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin against the blue up there.” –Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly
Hannah Traore Gallery is delighted to present Turiya Adkins: More Than a Notion. This exhibition features the artist’s most recent works, which explore resistance through the legacy of Black athletes in track and field and the theme of supernatural flight in African folklore.
These two points of departure were inspired by James Meredith’s “March Against Fear,” the civil-rights activist’s landmark demonstration in 1966, during which he attempted to travel from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest voter discrimination and racism in the South. When he was injured by a gunshot on the second day of the march, three civil rights organizations—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—pledged to continue on his path until he could rejoin them. Even as participants faced threats, arrest, and violence, they bravely persisted to support the Black Power movement, Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act. Soaring from Meredith’s footsteps into imagined realms, Adkins’ works chart acts of Black transcendence—mapping abstract layers of personal, ancestral, historical, poetic, technological, literary, and psychic departure.
Adkins describes her practice as one that is “invested in conjuring visual threads between Black mythologies derived from historical phenomena that engage this tension between flight and freedom,” illustrating the societal leaps that intertwine discrimination, migration, and liberation. Incorporating images of runners, she shares her family’s photographic archive documenting her grandfather’s role as a track coach, connecting her personal experience with the sport to her research into the Fugitive Slave Act and the Great Migration. Depicting the motions of flight, she reflects on her great uncle’s role as a Tuskegee Airman—the first Black pilots to participate in World War II—drawing comparisons between the aspirational flight of Black bodies through a military airforce and the symbolic flight of enslaved Africans on Middle Passage ships who jumped overboard to escape the terrors of slavery in America. Through both individual and collective departure, Adkins recognizes connections to the Flying African stories that she was raised listening to, tales in which Black communities transcended gravity and geography to return to their ancestral lands.
Just as Meredith marched to contextualize his political beliefs in physical space, Adkins forges her own artistic pilgrimage—a canvas wherein metaphysical concepts are communicated through material investigations. She incorporates organic elements like salt and corn—foods described in African folktales to possess magical powers that allowed, or prevented, bodies from levitating. She applies loose charcoal and powder pigments in bright palettes that echo diasporic migration. She sands down and manipulates paint layers to blur personal narratives, inherited legends, and shared histories. Through every physical and theoretical resource available, Adkins challenges both what is expected of her, and what she expects from herself, striving to achieve thematic and compositional harmony. Her titles offer poetic anchors for her abstractions—at once clarifying her loose gestures, and coding the academic scholarship she references.
More Than a Notion is a phrase Adkins learned from her grandmother, a refrain which reminds her that within each person there are interwoven realities and mythologies. In her abstracted atmosphere, Adkins encourages these souls to ascend and roam freely.
