Weathering

In 1992, public health researcher Arline Geronimus, Sc.D., coined the term weathering, or the theory that the psychological burden of racism has biological effects on Black mothers’ health. While weathering, in a public health sense, is scientific and physical, weathering in a broader sense also addresses the sheer mental, emotional, and creative, consequences of Black women’s exhaustion, heightened by raciel stress. Weathering (2022) is a visual manifestation of this exhaustion, simplifying the theoretical term into a relational experience not unknown to the Black female experience. Weathering asks the viewer to consider the causes of this pressure, but also imagine the possibilities for Black women’s care. 

Gabrielle Mitchell-Bonds is an artist and writer studying Art History and History & Literature at Harvard. Gab's interdisciplinary artistic practice centers the Black female body, often utilizing archival and historical research of Blackness at large. In 2023, she won third place in the Congressional Art Competition in St.Louis, MO, for her piece “Why is the child crying?,” a work inspired by Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. This spring, her work was featured in We Own the Night, an exhibition curated by Harvard’s Black Arts Collective, which brought together 30 Black artists based in New England.