Smack Mellon is thrilled to host an online conversation between exhibiting artist Miatta Kawinzi, along with Archive Liberia’s founder and steward Bilphena Decontee Yahwon and Anthology co-Editor Essah Cozett Díaz. This event continues ongoing conversations sparked in the collective study groups and convening activities held by Archive Liberia, through which the participants initially met, and extends these conversations to Smack Mellon’s audience. The discussion will explore notions of memory and history in relation to Liberia and its place in the African Diaspora, themes present also in Kawinzi’s concurrent exhibition, as well as the socio-political forces that shape memory, and the liberatory potential of reclamation.
Essah Cozett Díaz is a Liberian-American writer, scholar, and community organizer. She received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Valdosta State University, an M.A. in English Literature and a Ph.D. in Caribbean Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her research is rooted in African migration, memory, oral traditions, and spiritual practices. Díaz is currently the Project Manager for the Rooted and Relational Research Initiative at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College. She is also a senior research fellow of the Taller Entre Aguas, a micro lab of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a multi-institutional Black feminist digital humanities partnership. Díaz serves as the editor of the Archive Liberia Anthology. In 2016, she founded Hermanas del Agua to create a safe space for women and non-binary people to practice strategic self-care. She is also an alumna of the Obsidian Foundation and the Young Scholars of Liberia. Her published work can be found in sx salon, Wasafiri, Tout Moun, The Caribbean Writer, Diálogos, and Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.
Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her work explores practices of re-imagining the self, identity, place, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in Tennessee and Kentucky and has been based in NYC since 2010. Her work engages interior and exterior landscapes to illuminate themes of inter-connectivity, hybridity, diaspora, and queered temporalities. Recent exhibitions include “Mami Wata Afrofuturism: 500 Years Back to the [Afro][F]uture” at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, TX (2024), “States of Becoming” touring with Independent Curators International 2022-27 and presented at Des Moines Art Center, IA (2024) and the Africa Center, NY (2022-23), “in pieces…” at PS122 Gallery, NY (2023), and “Soft is Strong,” solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, NY (2021). Kawinzi’s work has screened at the Pan African Film Festival with LACMA, CA (2023), Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI where she received the No. 1 African Film Award (2022), and New Orleans Film Festival, LA (2021). Recent residencies include Residency Unlimited (NY), Smack Mellon (NY), and MacDowell (NH). She is a recipient of the 2024 Creative Capital Award, 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant, 2021-23 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and 2021 NY Artadia Award. She received a BA in Interdisciplinary Art and Cultural Theory from Hampshire College and an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College.
Bilphena Decontee Yahwon is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and restorative justice practitioner based in Baltimore. Born in Suakoko, Bong County, Liberia her work focuses on individual and collective memory: how we inherit it, how we preserve it, and how we pass it down. Yahwon is the steward of The Womanist Reader, a free online library, a collective member of the interdisciplinary publishing initiative Press Press, and a founding member of New Generation Scholars Intergenerational Institute. She served as the Washington Project for the Arts Summer Artist-Organizer-in-Residence in 2021 and as a Transforming Communities Peer2Peer Fellow in 2018. Currently, Yahwon is a Processing Fellow at Afro Charities, where she assists in preparing the AFRO American Newspapers Archives for public access. She also serves as a 2024 Community Fellow for the Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL), curating Archive Liberia’s anthology, a compilation of various mediums, including short films, poetry, recipes, essays, digital mixed media art, and photography exploring Liberia and its diaspora. Yahwon launched Archive Liberia in 2020 as an invitation and site for recovering, holding and organizing the collective memory of Liberia.
Archive Liberia, a project founded in 2020 by Bilphena Decontee Yahwon, is an invitation and site for recovering, holding and organizing the collective memory of Liberia. Through various offerings, Liberians at home and across the diaspora are invited to organize memories disrupted by 14 years of civil war and gain new memories about what happened prior to the civil wars. It’s important to stress that this project goes beyond the mere recollection of memories; its goal is to dissect and analyze memories about Liberia, seeking to understand how colonialism, imperialism, and other dominant narratives have influenced and distorted our recollections.
Header image: Miatta Kawinzi, to trust the ground might free us (begin again) , 2024. Color video, single channel projection with sound, TRT 12:50 min. Courtesy of the Artist.