THE BRASS RAIL (After Essex), 2017
Brass with steel
Courtesy of the artist
Named after the predominantly Black gay bar in Northwest DC, Essex Hemphill's "The Brass Rail" was a call and response choral poem performed by Hemphill and artist Wayson Jones. In her readymade sculpture THE BRASS RAIL (After Essex), Tiona Nekkia McClodden reimagines a rail used by the patrons descending and ascending into what Hemphill referred to as the "raunchy Black gay club" where "drag queens ruled." Throughout McClodden's research-based practice, she utilizes archival materials, rituals, and ceremony to combat the erasure of queer Black creators, forging a kind of posthumous dialogue with the work of artists like Hemphill and poet and writer Brad Johnson.
Operating from 1967 to 1996, the Brass Rail, like many gay bars throughout the country during this time, was one of the few spaces where LGBTQ people in DC could find community. McClodden's sculpture then functions as an extension of her restorative work, a totem imbued with the
"possibility of memory" monumentalized in time.
