Hi! Welcome to this pedagogical curation. A few "to know" before engagment:
Things can get spooky, macabre, gory, melancholic, uncomfortable, hilarious, angry, joyful, proud, insightful, & profound during this (web) excursion.
Prepare for bouts of discomfort or other emotions.
This curation openly addresses, discusses, probes, and demonstrates gendered, racialized, systemic, social, and political violence.
There is a haunting that follows- not haunted but a haunting.
Be minfdul & take care of yourself.
Learn something about something.
Michelle Browder promised herself she would "change the narrative" after seeing the Robert Thom painting as an art student. (See figure as header and in Learn tab).
I am building a collection that is in conversation with the Mother of Gynecology Monument. It is an intersection of aesthetics, rhetoric, medicine, and Blackness. The monument is dedicated to three young women, teenagers to some as they were ages 17-19. The monument redefines the aesthetics of medical history and challenges writing Black people out of history and erasing Black people’s contributions to societal progress. The texts in this collection draw a direct relationship between this monument and a broader understanding of aesthetics, urging us to rethink the visual, symbolic, and cultural forms through which we understand both the past and the present. Through this lens, aesthetics becomes a means to not only reflect but also to reframe history, identity, and power, particularly within Black cultural contexts.