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When people experience panic attacks, therapists often suggest focusing on the small details around them: light radiating through bedroom curtains, the ripples of waves across a pond, our beloved’s face when they first wake up in the morning. As a society facing multiple, overlapping crises, it can often feel as though we’re experiencing some kind of collective panic attack — and are thus turning toward what the activist adrienne maree brown calls “the miraculous mundane.” Rather than lofty goals, brown seeks to direct our focus to daily life as a site of possibility and collective transformation. This is the soil from which the artist Golden’s work grows.
Born and raised in Hampton, Virginia with roots in Pocomoke City, Maryland, their work combines photography, performance art, and poetry to explore queer imagination and Black love in the United States. Using their family's archives as a guide — whether overflowing wedding albums or images made by their Pop Pop Edison, who is also a photographer — Golden weaves together and resurrects long suppressed histories.
When we speak on the second day of 2024, Golden tells me that their creative practice is guided by the scholar Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work,” which they describe as the desire to create something new “amidst the sea of anti-Blackness that makes America and the world possible.” In this way, the mundane — documenting the intimacies of Black family life — becomes sacred ground upon which to gather the memories and dreams that white supremacy has stolen.
This year, as a recent recipient of the Queer|Art Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, Golden completed their debut solo exhibition, I’m Never Alone, on view at the Brookline Arts Center until January 13, 2024. They are also working on their second book of poetry, REPRISE, which will follow 2022's A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE, and will be published with Haymarket Books in 2025. Below, we discuss the familial relationships that make their work possible, the revelatory power of self-portraiture, and ongoing solidarity between Black and Palestinian communities.
In your work, you often describe the importance of the mundane in the context of Black familial lineages. How does that emerge in your practice?
For the exhibition I’m Never Alone, I spent a lot of time researching my family's archives in regards to wedding albums. My parent’s wedding has been a big touchstone for me because they got married near their hometown in Pocomoke City, Maryland. It was this huge wedding, and I remember my mom was wearing this decadent, long, and gaudy wedding dress. I'm always asking her where she got that dress. No one knows where it is now, but I feel like it's something that I always resonate with. I grew up going through my family's photographs, and so it's something that I always go back to. Sometimes you'll even see these family photos pop up as sub-portraits within my work.
How did finding that family archive influence your decision to become a photographer?
Many of my family members are always carrying a camera, so photography came very natural to me. My dad's father is also a photographer. His name is Edison. I also do a lot of photos with my twin, and that just comes with us having a close relationship. I feel like my practice first and foremost is about relationships. It's about relationships with self, to family, to friends, but I feel like because all my work is inspired by where I grew up, that’s naturally a huge part of it.
Can you tell me a little bit about one of your favorite images from the exhibition?
One of my favorites is this photo I took with my twin. It's called I remembered Champion meant give it to the sky, and it's a photograph we took in the garage. This is my childhood home, and I can remember all of the stuff that me and my twin went through. Growing up, it was not a home that was really accepting of queer people, but we made this life where we could have our own joy. We also played tennis together at one point when we were in high school. It just feels like such a full circle photo. There's a sense of freedom that I have with my family, and like I said, this series is about my relationship to people, relationship to life, relationship to living. It is more than just myself, and I feel like this photo really exudes that.
There's something so beautiful about having the chance to stay home to be yourself, which I don’t feel like is always afforded to queer people.
Absolutely. I think that this project is also a search for home. It's a theme that will always be a part of my work because home is the space where I create and feel like myself.
I’d love to know a little bit more about How We Live. Can you tell me a little bit about how this piece came to be and what it represents to you?
This is a visual ode and amalgamation of how my family came to be. First, my father and my mother, Tilden and Stephanie, on their wedding day in Salisbury, Maryland. This wedding album has been in my family since 1992. There’s [Golden’s sibling] Cam’s kindergarten graduation photo, pulled from his childhood room in my parent’s home in Hampton, Virginia. I also included me and Morgan’s baby book, featuring our first photos after being born; we were preemies and had to be kept in the NICU to get stronger.
My book, A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE, is swinging on the door with our first family photo together as “The Goldens” on the cover. It's the presence of gold, the materiality of country frill, southern-belle decadence, and the archive of Black southern aliveness that brings these images and heirlooms together.
You’re also a poet. How do your photography and poetic images relate to each other?
It makes me think about Christina Sharpe's In the Wake. She talks about “wake work,” and the idea that no matter what you do, there's this sea of anti-Blackness that makes America and makes the world possible. She also talks about another form of “wake work,” where we're trying to create something new, whether it's artwork or resistance. I think that what I'm trying to do with a photograph is to visually show you what that process is like. This living is a byproduct of surviving anti-Blackness and surviving the transatlantic slave trade, but also surviving the day-to-day. I'm trying to show that all those things are happening together at once in a visual way and also to write about it. I feel like that's where the poems and the photography come together. They are both attempts to do that.
I know you're also an organizer. What do you think about your artistic practice in relation to movements for social justice and collective liberation?
It's my core. It's the thing that keeps me going. We have to talk about Palestine, about Sudan, about the Congo, LGBTQIA people and trans individuals being targeted by the state, women being targeted by Roe v. Wade being overturned, all these things are interlocked. That's really what the work is about. That's what I'm writing about and writing towards. Even in the editing process, it can't be the same book, it can't be the same ending now that this war has been ongoing.
I'm currently writing [REPRISE] about the uprisings of 2020, and it extends back to Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, all these different Black people who've been killed by the police. Now (I’m) thinking about this ongoing war against Palestinians. I continue to ask myself: What is my responsibility? What is our responsibility?
Black and Palestinian solidarity has always been palpable. I'm thinking about Assata Shakur, about June Jordan, about Nikki Giovani; there are so many people who have already been doing this work. I just removed a poem that was supposed to be published in Poetry magazine as part of the Palestinian-led boycott of the Poetry Foundation. That poem was literally written during one of the protests I went to in 2020. One of the first lines is: I will die so let this be without the language of glory. Nation, I heard them swallow first, bones buried in my back—yard, so I won't be swinging for peace, or a southern sunflower song, or a scripture focused on heaven.
I think about Nina Simone, who says an artist’s job is to reflect the times. Even today, thinking about we're doing this interview, and over the last couple hours, Harvard's (first) Black president just resigned. It just reminds you that no matter where you are, no matter what your job is, Black people, people of color, and LGBTQIA people aren't free until we're all free.
Golden's debut exhibition, I'm Never Alone, is on view at the Brookline Arts Center from October 28, 2023 through January 13, 2024.
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