Barber
Barber uses interdisciplinary practice to articulate testimonies within and surrounding Black America.
Watch Barber’s Performance
Barber uses interdisciplinary practice to articulate testimonies within and surrounding Black America. He is recipient of a Stanley Grant and MA/MFA from University of Iowa, Alonzo Davis Award from Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and a Residency from Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE. His performance and visual art have been shown at Englert Theatre, Levitt Gallery (Iowa City, IA); Museum of Science & Industry, Ignition Project Space (Chicago); Rialto Theatre, Mason Murer Gallery (Atlanta, GA); Lexington Theatre (Kentucky); Gallery 4731 (Detroit, MI). His works address the fluidity of personhood and oneness of humanity. His formative influences are Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015), feminist activist and philosopher, and Devon W. Carbado, constitutional law and critical race theory scholar. In choosing interdisciplinary art, Barber is interested in the viewer personifying the figure, altering the personal narrative for a shift in the culture that moves beyond race and gender constructs.
Barber is a founding member of the collective Propelled Animals, which organized in 2014 and includes Esther Baker-Tarpaga (performance artist/choreographer, Philadelphia), Raquel Monroe (interdisciplinary performance artist/scholar, Chicago), Boubacar Djiga (composer/musician, Burkina Faso), Heidi Wiren Bartlett (performance artist/designer, Pittsburg). They create site-specific work to facilitate conversations around anti-racism, gender inclusivity, and environmental justice. Their process encourages audiences and collaborators alike to consider the efficacy of the body, resilience, protest, and radical tenderness as strategies against institutional racism.
Above photo by Catherine Bosley
About the Performance
Barber performs a talk, which moves from constructing a new three-dimensional work to the reveal of the true purpose: to show the progression of truth telling to healing. This “work-talk” is among several projects in which Barber examines creative spaces for collective knowledge. Much of Barber’s art production is a method of commemoration and memorialization, for holding and allowing multiple histories and interpretations in the act of engaging others. This talk examines revisionist history for its open forum and performative nature. It specifically contends with monument art. It asks if the means of memorializing can be other than fixed mass, such as stone or metal, and instead something more intimate, human scale, more tentative, non-heroic. If it can be portable or mobile, if it can live in the domestic space as well as the public square. The work-talk includes sharing plans for an interdisciplinary project, unveiled 2022 by Barber in conversation with Alison Saar’s Monument to the Great Migration, which the City of Chicago installed in 1996 on Martin Luther King Drive to honor the courage of millions of Black Americans to pursue opportunity—some under great persecution.
BLK Flag Pole (Atlanta BeltLine, 2013), photo courtesy of the artist