Tokie Rome-Taylor “Reclamation”   

I am a mixed-media, photo based artist. I examine the creolization and hybridization of African cultural traditions, and those brought to the New World through portraiture. My work provides a space for subversive rebellion and cultural autonomy. Found objects act as, and are repurposed as artifacts and conduits of personal and cultural memory. Common Western symbolic elements of wealth and status like jewelry, lace, velvet, etc. are interwoven but repurposed to cause a psychological shift within the pre-existing internal narrative of the viewer. The work inverts perception and expectation. I am driven to challenge the narrative that descendants of the Diaspora are only resigned to distorted histories of subjugation, suffering and second-class humanity. Despite having most signs of their history, status, spiritual and cultural practices erased when they were brought to the Americas, Africans in America endured. My offering to our collective history is to explore the spiritual connections, the imagined status, and the dreamed humanity that was denied us but that we kept alive - in plain sight.

Offerings of artifacts were part of ritual means when conjuring and connecting to the spirit and ancestral world. Artifacts are also means of establishing and passing on traditions and status to the next generation. As artifacts, they are used in my work to create a kind of factual fiction. My art is the mirror being used to capture and reflect back the soul of my culture as society, and within the larger society where we exist but are very often not seen. Mirrors and visual magnifiers are used to look back at the past and to also confront the present and future. Embedded cultural materials such as pearls, lace, cotton, bowls, feathers, along with old world artifacts of spiritual practice become a New World means to have some control over the elevation of the Black body, mind and spirit. Feathers in my work for example, are foils for flight and metaphors for intelligence and freedom. The heavy use of pearls, replaces the traditional african cowrie beads used as currency and to anoint status and wealth. European status and wealth are being used literally and symbolically to revisit cultural and ancestral traditions of lavish adornment.

My subjects are the forgotten legacies of value and possibility. I’m not interested in “recreating the past,” but in weaving bonds to past traditions of diasporic practices into the present and future. It is my way of speaking from the past, about the present while imagining a more vivid Black future.The work is meant to be a constant reminder for people of European descent, and specifically my own people, that we are holy on our own.

The children in my works act as the conjurers, welcoming with their innocence and purity, a spirit open to ancestors and a rewriting of their history. Offerings of artifacts were all ritual means of conjuring and connecting to spirit and ancestor, as well as a means of passing on tradition and status in plain sight.  I make no attempt to recreate the past, rather to connect to diasporic practice. Through cultural material within the work, such  as pearls, lace, cotton, bowls, feathers, old world artifacts of spiritual practice become a new world means to have some control over body, mind in spirit in a hostile new world.  Feathers act as foils, for flight and freedom, passed down as factual fable between Africans trapped in the Americas. Mirrors and visual magnifiers are used to look back at the past but to also confront the present and future. The heavy use of pearls, replaces the traditional african beads used to anoint, represent status and wealth. Lacking access in the Americas, the hybridization of European status and wealth have been co-opted in to connect to spirit and ancestral tradition of lavish adornment.