The Brief: Winter 2026
New writing from Harmony Holiday, Blair Ebony Smith, and Joshua Segun-Lean
Ways of Seeing
a personal experience with an artwork
On American Artist’s Shaper of God: Apple Valley Autonomy (2025)
I had two choices. I could become a writer, or I could die really young. Because there wasn’t anything else that I wanted — Octavia Butler
Are you trying to create a new black mythology? Charlie Rose to Octavia Butler
No was her answer. He followed by saying he’d read that somewhere, and you could detect just a hint of regret in his tone then, as if he’d realized the question he thought sounded the smartest came off pedantic and naive. Since time is omnidirectional and the observer collapses all possibilities to create the reality she observes based on her beliefs and vision — and Octavia can see me seeing her right now — I don’t want to recreate that exchange. I don’t want to sit here and project lofty, academia-flattering intentions onto Octavia Butler; instead, I’ll bask in the interval or octave in her, as what we call her, the inevitable ineffable of her, how she occupies the space between one note and its double with dangerously accurate predictive fantasies that echo the destiny of octaves.
For this reason, to pick her apart, to possess her archives, is to possess the undecipherable sheet music of a great composer — notations and annotations between her and herselves. She speaks, in that same interview with Charlie Rose, of arguing with a book on tape about Heidegger while getting ready for the very press day she is fulfilling with him now. She speaks with the no frills ease of a writer who has made it after years of living at the mercy of mercenary labor and sneaking to the page between 2AM and 6AM before reentering the proletariat. She is disarming, making no claims to enlightenment and more focused on practical pleasures, again, those that live between notes, worrying less about money now that she’s a famous author, and gaining readers who used to dismiss her as a genre writer with little literary merit and now see her, for better or worse, as a “genius.”
As for the adoration, especially in Los Angeles (she was born just outside of the city, in Pasadena), it’s the responsibility of we who think with and about her, to not pawn her into the empty glamor just around the corner from this loving attention, to not fashion or ripen her for the Hollywood slaughterhouses — make them earn it, make them bend their rituals for her, make them rethink themselves as she did Rose. Daughter of a housekeeper and a man who shined shoes for a living, Butler’s work ethic is rooted in real work and modesty, the sound and rhythm of her first Remington typewriter harmonizing with the sounds of cloth and leather or rags on linoleum or consciousness expanding and contracting against the dictates of the economy.
She gets in between the mundane and the impossible on the page because that’s where she existed; her books are songs of herself that way. American Artist, in Shaper of God, an exhibition devoted to Butler’s maternal line, has endeavored to capture the unadorned domestic work that may shape the writer’s approach to storytelling and elaborating the mysticism in the everyday. Artist uses her archive — housed at the Huntington Library in Pasadena — and AI, which is tasked with rendering a chicken coop in the style of one owned by her maternal grandmother. Instead of chickens, file boxes labeled Octavia Butler are housed there.
The room is haunted with negative space, with quiet. On one side, a vitrine not unlike those you’d see at a public library, filled with hand-copied material from the public archive, ranging from a notebook labeled “walk thoughts” to portraits made of words, to a school ID. The materials try to enter into conversation with the large wooden structure just across the room, but they might as well be in different dimensions.
One is a wake or elegiac presentation, another is a rebirth into a more quaint destiny, where the writer retrieves her land but is also farmed herself, becoming the asset that allows its reacquisition, she must produce. She has quotas to meet not unlike a day laborer, not unlike me.
The scene is relatable and alienating, incriminating and just, as it calls into question that one wish Butler confides in us by way of Charlie Rose. Nostalgia for struggle is a scam, a false myth. I don’t think her spirit longs to return to grueling thankless labor or see her parents working for ungrateful white families again, but nostalgia for simplicity and the sublime agency of producing one’s own food on one’s own land or one’s own ideas and worldview in the privacy one’s own home is an intelligent reaction to bureaucracy and every woman writer’s secret dream for creative freedom.
It’s just that we defer it or defer to it sometimes and become its puppets. Octavia Butler has become one of the dead muses we turn over and reconsider in museums and the academy, eventually in pop culture and Hollywood too. American Artist finds a way to suggest that putting her to use this way is not unlike cooping her up in our territory and watching her work accumulate and accrue value, a tendency we have to interrogate both in ourselves, and as a trope which allows its practitioners some minor glory as stewards. In the liminal space, without us observing and digging her up for shows, she is left alone to daydream and depart and return as she pleases. I imagine myself asking her: Are you trying to be resurrected by the living archive? And she might say no, as bluntly as ever, I’m just trying to enjoy it.
Harmony is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker, and the author of five collections of poetry, including Hollywood Forever and Maafa ( 2022). She’s working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a memoir, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
Report From The Field
intimate looks at unexpected art worlds
Blair Ebony Smith taps in from Champaign-Urbana
Late fall and early winter days spent at two of my favorite record stores in Illinois. 1: post-record store day at See You CD & Vinyl in Urbana, IL. 2: DJing with vinyl during Selector Saturdays at Miyagi Records in Chicago, IL (credit: Kamari Smalls)
Images from Jameel Bridgewater: Deep End opening at the University YMCA in Urbana, IL. Joined friend and DJ, Norman Hernandez with a B2B vinyl set to celebrate Jameel’s first solo show. (Credits: Obáyomí .A. Anthony)
Champaign-Urbana is small and special. I got a pedicure at Anna’s, combo fried rice from Lanxang Thai-Lao Cuisine and waited in the sun with Les and Olly while painting Lanxang’s window for the holiday season.
Stayed home and slowed down with the music collection more as it got colder. Thankful for my late father’s 20+ year 100-disc CD changer. Filled every CD slot with my familial and personal archive. The random play function is life changing.
Images of art seen during winter at home and homes of artists I love dearly. Top L-R : Mythic Series, Kamari Smalls (1 of 5) (2023); reflections on collage at home; Bottom: Always in process with NOLA-based, paris cian; Kamari made art with a broken Minnie record.
Blair Ebony Smith is an artist, scholar and lover originally from Richmond, Virginia and based in Illinois who attempts to go where the love is. Find more of Blair’s work here.
Tough But Fair
let’s talk about things we don’t like
A Curatorial Proposition
Joshua Segun-Lean
While the prevalent conception of curatorial practice as ultimately, if not primarily, concerned with (re)presentation is by no means without basis, it is deeply insufficient. This focus on presentation obscures an aspect of the practice that demands much stronger emphasis: the fact that curating is a practice of critical judgment. By this I mean that it is work defined by the creation and evaluation of criteria, by processes of selection and elimination, by the assessment and disputation of varied claims, by the comparison of systems of value, oftentimes aesthetic, historical, cultural, commercial and political at once.
It is, in essence, an exercise in the magnification and distillation of negotiations. The risk run by a ‘presentationist’ view of curating is that far too often, rather than being treated on their own terms, the contentions at stake in any given curatorial direction become, eventually, questions of display.
What might be gained from foregrounding this element of judgment, this capacity to confront and work through contention, in our discussions about and practice of curating? I think, for one, it would allow us to move beyond approaches to curating that insist on a distinction between the research phase of exhibition development and the exhibition proper, and which also, in placing the exhibition proper after the research, understands the former to be the latter’s resolution. What if, instead, we considered the exhibition as an opportunity to extend and scrutinize the research’s proposed aims, rather than an opportunity to resolve, contain, or merely illustrate them. Too frequently, the predominant feeling at exhibitions I attend is that the concerns that inform them are settled rather than active ones.
It would also give us a reason to defy the expectation that the relationship between artworks in an exhibition, as well as the relationship between the artworks and the exhibition itself is—or should necessarily be—a positive one. Against the tendency to provide explanations for how an artwork supports or justifies the thesis of an exhibition, it could be just as meaningful, if not more so, to learn how the artwork diverges from, challenges or complicates it.
By making visible the frictive movements of curatorial judgment—its passions & dispassions, reservations, antipathies, pointed antagonisms—as a fundamental part of the practice’s public manifestation, curating rediscovers its function as a mode of inquiry. One which allows its practitioners to pose serious questions about their own assumptions, the limits of their methods, and help more deeply connect the contentions raised by and through curatorial work to broader debates.