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• 1 media/Absconded_Labor_Day_2020_2_Dragonfly_Robin_LaVerne_Wilson.jpg 2020-12-12T00:17:42+00:00 DRAGONFLY 115 Robin LaVerne Wilson image_header 2021-02-18T19:19:23+00:00
  DRAGONFLY / ROBIN LAVERNE WILSON
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  DRAGONFLY [she/they, aka Robin LaVerne Wilson] is a multidisciplinary artist who creates media and performance rituals for collective liberation. Born in Detroit and raised in Texas, she descends from enslaved Africans who rooted themselves in Alabama and Georgia after the end of the first American Civil War. She is the Gen X daughter of a career US Army combat medic (Korea and Viet Nam), and a military wife / homemaker / non-domestic cleaner. The unresolved intergenerational traumas of race, class, gender, religion and sexuality inform Dragonfly’s work as an artist/activist. 
  
  Dragonfly has studied with Linda Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Sharon Bridgforth, earned a BA from Rutgers, and is completing an MA from CUNY in Applied Theatre. Recent appearances include collaborations with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens at NY MOMA and in the San Francisco Pride Parade, environmental street activism with Al Límite Collective and Sane Energy Project, debut of her solo show Black Queer Madness is/as Hypersanity at Theatre Neumarkt in Zurich, as well as a decade of leadership and performance with Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. 
  
  Her current project is ABSCONDED, featuring embodiment of historical fugitive and forgotten founding mother Ona Judge. ABSCONDED is a recurring site- and context-specific public performance on streets and social media. Archival performance of #UnpaidLaborDay was co-produced by Grace Exhibition Space, and #EjectionDay was supported by Hemispheric Institute. ABSCONDED has received coverage by Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail and Ecumenica.
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  ABSCONDED
  
  
  
  
  ABSCONDED is a hybrid street performance/public ritual that honors the life and legacy of ONA MARIA JUDGE STAINES through the creation of a living monument that moves through the streets of New York City. Ona Judge was born into slavery before the American Revolution. She was a seamstress and Martha Washington’s body servant and “pet.” During Washington’s second term, on May 21, 1796 at age 22, Judge quietly absconded from Philadelphia on a ship to New Hampshire as the Washington’s ate dinner. With the help of Free Black and abolitionist communities, she evaded capture for the rest of her life. In the work, DRAGONFLY (Robin LaVerne Wilson / Miss Justice Jester) embodies Judge in moving-monumental form as she walks the streets, interacting with historical figures and markers, as well as unscripted elements encountered in the procession. The work is a meditation on the perpetual state of fugitivity as freedom for the marooned members of the African Diaspora, offering a voice from the past to unbuild the mythologies surrounding the United States’ celebrated tyrants.
  
  
  The project is deeply inspired by Never Caught, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, as the foundational academic text for this work.
  
  
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  Notes from Curator Danielle Cobb
  
  
  
  In ABSCONDED :: #EjectionDay2020 Frederick Douglass encounter, Ona Maria Judge Staines is bringing herself into dialog with Mr. Frederick Douglass and through this encounter her voice is amplified. Her story echoes through the streets of New York for all to hear. She identifies herself as his friend even though they have never met. This is most likely due to both being born into slavery. They are connecting through a shared struggle. Their connection is unlearned, untaught, it is inherited. Their struggle is the struggle to be mentally and physically free. By teaching themselves to read and write, I see this as a symbol of their mental freedom. Ona encourages the viewer to never neglect the power of reading and writing. I am amazed by her confidence and courage to take back her power as both escaped from their slave owners. Their bodies are physically free. It is this dialog between the two that is most powerful. Ona is connecting with Douglass on a deeper level by directly touching his chest. As a living monument, she is touching the soul of the man which is another signifier of their physical mental and physical freedom. Through this powerful encounter Ona is bringing us into dialog with Mr. Frederick Douglass as well. She brings to the table a call to action that we dialog with Mr. Douglass too. I will wrestle with the ways in which I dialogue with Mr. Douglass. The wounds obtained by my own struggle as a black woman in America are fresh. I’m not sure how to engage with the state of the world today. So, I look to Ona as a symbol of black womanhood, freedom and black power.
  
  In ABSCONDED :: #UnPaidLaborDay2020 :: City Hall + Cops I am reminded of the important role that black people play in this country’s collective memory of slavery and the exploitation of black bodies. Ona Maria Judge Staines is the personification of this memory as she moves through the streets of New York as a living monument. Accompanied by the recorded commentary of Adam Clayton Powell IV speaking about the history of an African Burial Ground in New York. It is a shame how easy they were forgotten. It is a shame how easy it was to cover up the bodies of people who labored, most likely for free, for this country. Black bodies covered up for the benefit of white people's guilty conscience at the time still haunts us today. Had they known, maybe things would have been different. Had they had known, maybe the legacy of the dead black people would have been preserved. Was their labor in vain?! It makes me wonder if we were to excavate the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean how many bones of my ancestors would be found. Ona Judge is also seen as the personification of liberty as she walks through the streets of New York.  As she peacefully confronts three cops on mopeds who pretend not to see her, but they know she is there. They pretend not to hear her demand for freedom, but she takes her freedom anyways. She does not wait but rather she quietly absconds. She breaks the cycle of bondage and unpaid drudgery and takes her freedom anyways.
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  #PRECEDENTSDAY STATEMENT
  
  Ignorance of the past haunts the present, as we witnessed at the precedented and deadly United States Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. This work is not an incitement to new bloodshed but a condemnation of the quotidian violence towards Black and First Nations Americans. The imagery of #PrecedentsDay aims to render visible the blood shed by enslaved Americans at the hands of the enslavers and rapists that we've been indoctrinated to revere. The presence of the blood marks the past rising up and the wounds unhealed.
  
  While Presidents Day lionizes the founding fathers, #PrecedentsDay challenges the selective memory of patriotism by pushing forward the truth and counternarrative of the Black American experience. Black history is white history is American history as it is white hands and leadership that enact and perpetuate these systems of violent oppression. 
  
  George Washington, his family, and other founding mothers and fathers rationalized the abuse of enslaved people for their enrichment, and embedded it into the structure of American culture, politics, and economy. Washington’s Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 essentially made slavery hyperlegal in the sense that an escapee is still deemed a slave regardless of their location within the United States--and the Mason-Dixon line of North/South is a false dichotomy. While in office he exploited a loophole and broke the laws he helped write in order to keep humans of all ages in bondage where they could be further exploited. Furthermore, he secretly appropriated federal resources in attempts to regain self-emancipated Ona Judge (his wife’s “property”). 
  
  As a forgotten founding mother, Ona Judge’s story epitomizes the cognitive dissonance between America’s claims to liberty for all and the violent social death systematically embedded into law upon non-white people across the continent. The thorough scholarship of Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar and the embodied critical fabulation [Dr. Saidiya Hartman] of ABSCONDED PROJECT serve as a gateway to our collective reevaluation of whitewashed history and all that is untaught. Hence it is overdue and apropos that we visualize the blood, shackles, and whips adjacent to the perpetrators.
  
  The blood of past violence haunts our national currency, monuments, landmarks, and rituals. Why do we honor the perpetrators of this brutality upon our naming of cities, states, schools, and institutions? Enslavement and colonization's long legacy of dispossession, cruelty and harm must be reckoned with before healing can take place. To staunch the bleeding, we must tell the truth. 
  
  Controversially, I included Donald T**** in the throughline of presidential white supremacist slaveowners and imperialists. I argue that his documented custom of not paying his contractors, abusing his non-white and immigrant staff, and violently separating families [while potentially profiting from their warehousing through the private prison-industrial complex], he is in direct lineage with George Washington and all other slaveowning presidents. 
  
  These designs are a cathartic release of chronic rage from the previous five years of toxic, abusive, white supremacist leadership compounded by my own lifetime of enduring micro- and macro-aggressions, multiplied by unresolved intergenerational trauma. Like many others, I am only just now realizing the extent of my stress, sleeplessness, anxiety and anger triggered from that regime, complicated by the concurrent viral plague of COVID19. 
  
  The 400+ year old problem of structural white supremacy at the foundation of this country [and many other global systems] will not sweep away unless we commit boldly to a multi-generational, multi-decade approach to truth, justice, and reconciliation. 
  
  The presidents have set a precedent. Happy #PrecedentsDay. 
  
  Dragonfly
  February 14, 2021
  
  NOTE: The individual images of #PrecedentsDay are available for free circulation as memes on the project’s social media, http://www.instagram.com/abscondedproject 
  
  
  
  
  
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  https://abscondedproject.com
  
  http://dragonflyness.com