2024/25 MCAD–Jerome Fellow Interview: Namir Fearce

Yi Wang
Your work is deeply engaged with Black Mississippian sites of memory. How do you navigate the tension between uncovering traumatic historical events and futuristic reimagination in your practice?

Namir Fearce
The navigation of that tension between the homeland/foundational home/womb being a place that can both nurture and kill is integral to my practice. This dance between subjugation, liberation, ecstasy, endurance, joy, and pain is the technology of survival that I have inherited from my lineage. I carry on in the tradition of subverting, making life and meaning of the materials, geographies, and conditions I’ve been given. This is the way I’ve seen all those before me live and create a practice of life. In my film Salacious Sanctity there is a crocodilian trickster deity and a baby riding atop the alligator's back. These images reference the brutal historical practice of using enslaved Black children during the antebellum period as ‘alligator bait’. In an act of visual reclamation, the baby is riding the gator’s back as a chariot to subvert and resynchronize the alligator as an indigenous symbol of wisdom and cunning precision.

YW Your work engages multiple mediums—film, assemblage, and sound. How do these different elements communicate with each other in your work or in a specific project?

NF All of the mediums inform the use of another. I make a film to document a sculpture or mask that I’ve made, then I create a sound work to score it, then I activate the sound work with a live choir. I feature the sculptures and mask as costume and set design for the live activation. The mediums weave together like this so on and so forth to create a lush textile of experience that can be felt. In the work My Baby, the story starts in Natchez Mississippi. I was visiting my eldest great auntie I’nell Williams. She was the historian of our family. She gave me a bunch of pictures of my grandmother, my mother, my aunts, my uncles, cousins, newspaper clippings, and other things that I could find. When I brought them back to Minneapolis, I printed them on a risograph machine, and the ink at the time in the printer was red. When I printed these images, they began to cry at me very loudly. It was unavoidable to feel the mourning and the pain in the images. I began to try to figure out how I would soothe them. I was making these small black wax figurines modeled after a lot of the figurines you'll find in Black elders homes, pieces of Americana. I decided to bring these things together. At the time I was singing a lullaby and interpellation of D’Angelo song, “My Lady” but instead, I sang “My Baby”, and I began to sing this lullaby to the images and model, soothing and caring through these figurines. This is the loop of material interest and information in my practice.

YW Ritual, ceremony, and the trickster archetype seem central to your work. What does ritual and ceremony mean to you, and what does the trickster symbolize in your work?

NF Coming from the blues tradition—ritual is life. In daily meditation, seen and unseen, the rising of the sun, the push and pull of tide—these are all rituals. It is understood in the theology of the Blues and beyond that what is up is down that what will make you laugh will make you cry. The ‘trickster’ is an energy that rests in between these polarities, in the subversion, between the sanctified, and the salacious. This is why images and modalities of the trickster are used in my work. In the Black Gospel and Blues traditions both the vulgar and holy ride a line through the cultural rights and production of the community and church. Through intense colonial psychic and physical violence these worldviews were replaced by much more rigid and dogmatic principles via christianity and other abrahamic faiths. Under these new doctrines our beloved trickster folks, our brer rabbits, anansis, and esu’s were coded as savage, immoral, and unholy. It's imperative in my work to reconnect and venerate the trickster as a positionality and fugitive identity.

YW You describe your work as somatic—how does the body function as both a tool and a site in your art?

NF The measure for if I’m aligned in my practice, and if the work is “working” is if it moves my body viscerally—where and how am I called in and out of presence by the work. Oftentimes my body is involved deeply in the work as well, whether it's developing my own film or activating installation spaces I’ve made through performance and curation. In order for the christo-fascist imperialist cognitive schema to work it must fragment and alienate the mind from the body. This fractaling continues until the body/mind can no longer think, nor express itself; instead it is hijacked by the colonial impulse of domination. It's important for me in my practice to resist this hijacking by reintegrating and revering the knowledge of the body and all other indigenous ways of knowing.

YW What is the most challenging part of your practice?

NF The most challenging part of my practice is that it rejects legibility. The art world/market hinges a lot on how legible you are to systems of commerce and capital. My work is conjure based, mixed media, and very wild in how it renders and materializes. So I find myself often creating my own context and opportunities to properly house my work. This has strengthened my practice in a lot of ways, but a question I often have is how sustainable is this?

YW How has the MCAD-Jerome fellowship impacted your practice?

NF The MCAD Jerome fellowship could not have come at a more pivotal time for me. I’m at a spot in my practice where I’m in great need of resources to really invest in the hard work of organizing and creating systems to best archive and support the production of my work. This fellowship is indicative of the work doing what it needs to in the world and encourages me to continue.

YW If you could describe your work in one word, what would it be?

NF Conjure