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Author Profile
Chenoa Baker

Chenoa Baker is a curator, wordsmith, and descendant of self-emancipators. She empowers a range of clientele to elevate their publication and exhibition projects. In addition to her associate curator role at Beacon Gallery in Boston, she has worked on Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Peabody Essex Museum; Simone Leigh at ICA/Boston; Simone Leigh: Sovereignty at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia; and Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas at MFA/Boston. Her autobiographical-style art criticism appears in Public Parking, Material Intelligence (June 2023), Boston Art Review, Sixty Inches From Center, Helena Metaferia: Generations, Art For This Moment, and Burnaway.

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Articles

Simone Leigh, "Jug," 2014. Photo courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York.
Evidence of Things Unseen
What I learned while centering the clay and obsessing over the clay-to-water ratio in class for weeks is that clay particles are like platelets; water and earth dance around and are compressed in the process of sculpting. While the goal is cohesion, it starts as a suspension. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not to oversimplify it, is in suspension, as it is multiple different ideologies pulling apart rather than binding together. I learned this profound lesson from Simone Leigh’s "Jug" (2014).
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Simone Leigh, Trophallaxis, 2008-2017. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami. Copyright: © Simone Leigh. Photo: Farzad Owrang.
The Dynamics of Transfer
Trophallaxis focuses on the breast as a site of labor. In that, there is the juxtaposition of comfort and discomfort, familiar and unfamiliar: the cracking nipples and boot prints showcase bodily violence and the physical impact of breastfeeding. Fecund breasts with gold-plated areoles and nipples, constructed from terracotta, porcelain, antennae, and epoxy, suspending from the ceiling.
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Artist Once Known, Memorial Head, circa 17th–mid-18th century. Ghana. Akan peoples. Terracotta, slip. Collection of Cheryl Olkes Collection at Chatham University. Photo by Chenoa Baker.
Elegy For The Yard That Once Smelled of Ghosts
The final resting place of these effigies became an ancestral grove, "till the yard smells of ghosts," until it was disrupted by colonialism. For that, I grieve for the disturbed lost souls but rejoice that a child of the diaspora reconnects with the echo of home.
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