Sleight of Figure [for Gladys], 2024
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Philadelphia, PA
August 30, 2024 – Dec 7, 2024
Sleight of Figure [for Gladys], 2024
My practice has often explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography within a Black Queer genealogy to repair or bring light to obscure histories of Black queer figures through the use of queer poetics. In thinking about how to situate this within the context of place or location in relation to North Philadelphia, where I have lived and worked for 17 years, I wanted to pull up a figure that has been of interest to me for many years: musician and performer Gladys Bentley.
Glady Bentley [1907 – 1960] was a Philadelphia-born and raised blues singer, pianist, and composer active during the Harlem Renaissance. Bentley performed in Harlem, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles at the end of her life. She was a self-identified Black lesbian masculine woman who frequently performed risqué songs highlighting her desire for women at nightclub locations such as the Clam House, Ubangi Club, and Cotton Club. Bentley was a victim of the “The Lavender Scare,” which occurred during McCarthy Era politics and targeted members of the LGBTQ community as a result of the more extensive campaign against Communism known as “The Red Scare” [1947 – 1957] that swept the country while targeting a range of citizens. This created a moral panic enforced by the US government, which resulted in the harassment of many well-known LGBTQ folks, losing their jobs under the guise of being a threat to the country. As a result of this targeting by the government, Gladys took to wearing more feminine clothing and went on a press run declaring that she was a "woman” again and had been cured of her “affliction for desiring women.” Unlike many of her peers, and like many within the Black LGBTQ community, Bentley was not able to fully recover her career once the McCarthy Era came to an end.
In prior works, I've invested in visual mapping to try to close the gaps in historical narratives wrought with neglect. In this case, with Gladys Bentley, I'm interested in the ephemerality of the material culture she produced in her lifetime. With Bentley, she has often been an accompanying figure to the larger grouping of Black Harlem Renaissance figures such as Langston Huston, Zora Neal Hurston, and others. A limited number of images have been made of her, and minimal references to her have been made in writing. Even her childhood home no longer exists as the street where it stood was razed to make way for what we now know as the Temple University main campus. Bentley’s musical recordings are also limited as the vinyl printings are so fragile that most archives that hold them will not allow them to be played.
I arrived at a deep study of the concept or action of sleight of hand, a gesture often seen as a form of a trick to deceive the eye in its pursuit of a simple or innocent gesture in relation to an object but shifted through misdirection or deception of the body. This led me to think of how to produce a sleight of the figure in a series of art studies; in this case, the figure is Bentley and the legacy she holds, and the opportunity is to play within the frameworks of eluding legibility within presentations of figuration.
I engage with photography, film, painting, and sound in this suite of works. With a new series of leather paintings, I've continued my investment in a method that challenges the ability to view an image clearly by employing a range of leather shine and polish techniques to a series of archival reference, images and texts.
I created two new moving image works for this presentation. A 16mm film VIII. Eminent Domain which documents the North Philadelphia neighborhood that Bentley was born in that is now Temple University’s campus. A video VII. Looking North which features the cartographic elements of North Philadelphia from the early 1900s featuring 1900s images from the city of Philadelphia alongside maps and surveys. I also present a rare image of Bentley from my personal art collection that possessed her signature that was produced in the late 1920s which serves as the central figure of the entire presentation.
For this presentation I commissioned new sound improvisation from composer and pianist Courtney Bryan. Bryan produced three new improvisations based on a prompt that I provided her with that included giving her access to split audio of Bentley’s music separating her vocals from her music. I invited Bryan to produce new sound from the memory of both of these isolated tracks. The result is a series of beautiful improvisations that haunt the space of the work.
I commissioned a new poem by Cheryl Clarke who reviewed archival aspects of Bentley’s archive and in conversation with my interest in leaning into the more difficult edges of Bentley’s legacy and how language was used as a weapon to figure and condemn her throughout her life. Clarke shared a memory of seeing the Ebony Magazine which featured Bentley’s essay and that prompted this collaboration and new work. The poem was edited by artist and writer Rhea Dillon in the spirit of creating an intergenerational dialogue between poets.
In looking for inspiration and guidance to produce this body of work, I looked deeply to a film theorist whom I have long admired, Maya Deren, who has centered the notion of a “vertical cinema,” a type of film production that favors poetics over the presentation of linear narratives. I found her practice and language highly encourage in examining obscurity as a thing itself in relation to Bentley.
In engaging with Bentley’s figure in this manner, I am actively participating in a discourse about the difficulty and the elusive elements of what is left of her legacy.
