Complex Textures: Visual Art, Play & Aesthetics of Black Girlhood

Begin instruction    play       be                                                                  Black girlhood                                                                                     experience taught us                                                                   how to sense it again                                                                   hope is coming after                                                                   my/our mistakes                                                                   won't be yours.

We believe that meaningful collective work inspires art, aesthetics, and education. We cherish art, art making, and critique that deeply consider Black girls' wants, dreams, and experiences. We know that art and aesthetics of Black girls, Black femmes, and Black women create movement from which life and living become otherwise and always already experienced with texture, complexity, and joy-justice. This special issue of Visual Arts Research (VAR) emerges from making spaces for Black girlhood celebration with Black girls in our own work and with Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective labor and play-making scene of liberation devoted to the celebration of Black girlhood (Brown, 2009, p. 13). Since 2006, we continue to build, create, enjoy, and struggle in this community of practice and art making. There is more space to create, home to make, study to grow, words to write, and cyphers to expand with Black girls.

The urgencyis      love                                                  and how it lets go                                                        in different places                                                  to create it again                                                  with dance and walksand recorded sounds                                                  we listen in the deep                                                  for a feeling.

We believe in this current moment that there is more space to be made, where we can dream with artists and thinkers also invested in Black girls and our collective imagination. We look to museums like the Colored Girls Museum (a memoir museum), artists like Mickalene Thomas, Tiye Johnson, and Deborah Roberts, and multimedia filmmakers like Cauleen Smith and Roni Nicole Henderson, and art criticism journals like ARTS.BLACK, deeply committed to intergenerational relationships and experiences of Black girls, women, and femmes. We also look to SOLHOT's legacy and current practices of art making and curation.

Without the weight of a disciplinary gaze, we center Black girls in the center of Black girlhood. As we organize and work in community with others, questions about what we mean by Black girlhood remain to motivate us to return.

To Black girlhood Studies   through      care                                    to care some more.                                            Care haunts                                   stays awake                                    wonders aloud                                    through texts                                    a juxtaposition.

What there is in the study of Black girlhoods are different ways, approaches, beings, claims, propositions, sources, and interpretations. All of the time, so many of us are willing and dreaming Black girlhoods. Find each other through song, and share this conversation between us to keep it moving in difference, refraction, and against just one thing.

We are joyful to include a range of research, writing, and art that documents, engages, and analyzes the social lives and artistic creations of Black girls, Black women, and Black femmes. We sought contributions that invite new dreams of Black girlhood that engage arts and aesthetics as transformative practices that play with, manipulate, and/or disrupt status quo arrangements and relations as a matter of politics and the intimate. This special issue is about Black girls, Black women, and Black femme's preferences, tastes, and values as ways of being that inform and influence art making, community organizing, and new-world making/dreaming. We include a range of risk-taking and experimental submissions from scholar-artists, practitioners, organizers, museum educators, scholars, and artists who are in pursuit of justice and being for Black girls, women, and femmes.

A distinct feature of this issue is the inclusion of manuscripts as multimedia texts (poetry, film, sound), art critiques, intimate theoretical explorations, analyses of art/performance, creative nonfiction, and experimental studies from scholars and artists deeply invested in Black girlhood, art making, aesthetics, and education. The following are some of the questions/themes that contributors to this issue of VAR explore that we hope educators, artists, curators, critics, adults and others loving Black girls, femmes, and women might consider:

• • Contending with interiority in documentary portraits of Black girls by Black women artists (Thompson)

• • Focusing on collective work of the Art Hoe Collective (AHC), Black queer curators exhibiting artwork from Black girls/children and women featured on their Instagram gallery (Wade...