Azikiwe Mohammed

Interview by Stephanye Watts

Stephanie Mills’ Home album came out when I was three years old and by age seven, it was one of my favorites in my family’s collection. Besides being the swan song of The Wiz, Mills sings at the very end 'I can hear my friends telling me, STEPHANIE! PLEASE! sing my sooooooooooong'—and what kid doesn’t love hearing their name in a song? In the 30+ years since I’ve carried this song with me, it rang loudest as I explored the work of multidisciplinary artist Azikiwe Mohammed. Rooted in themes of Black placemaking, Mohammed has mastered varying art mediums producing work that exists as IYKYK coded language for Black folk. Using art to invoke community uplift is also key to his practice and lives now in his recently launched Black Painter’s Academy, offering free classes and mutual aid in lower Manhattan. In our conversation below, Azikiwe turned our Zoom room into a family room...the kind with the tv sitting on the floor, and we chatted like cousins that hadn’t seen each other since one went off to college.

Stephanye Watts (SW): How are you a year into this pandemic? It’s been a full calendar year! More specifically, how has working and living in isolation affected your process?

Azikiwe Mohammed (AM): Well, for starters, I'm not dead, unlike half a million people.

SW: I know, that's right.

AM: I was home approximately three months out of the year in 2019. Just moving, moving. Shows, shows, shows. Real tired. A homecoming of sorts was the Anna Zorina show. And then I've been doing SPRING/BREAK. And the idea was, after SPRING/BREAK, I was going to take three months off, stay in my house for a little while, call some friends, maybe bake some bread. Joking about the bread-baking. But it felt like what I had decided on ended up being decided for the rest of the world.

SW: So we're blaming you (laughs).

AM: It feels insane to say. It feels like a lot of things. But what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander, right? The three months of a break that I had asked for turned into a year plus of one for everybody. And definitely not a break, because there's been more to do as we've been imprisoned than I think anybody anticipated. So it's been a lot of painting, a lot of video and sound work. Trying to figure out how to keep making a living, make work that makes sense, and still say yes to Black folk while solely inhabiting a space that I haven't had to spend too much time in that has been historically populated primarily by white folk. Has been a lot of reframing my practice, how I think, how I approach. And it's tiring. I'm tired.

SW: You know what's so funny? My next pre-written question was, 'Are you tired'? I've been tired watching Black artists from the sidelines. Felt like in this time there's been an expectation on you all to produce a certain way. To produce on a whim at their request. To produce very specific types of work that has to be something political. And in some ways, not just this white art world, but also an obligation to Black Twitter, so they aren't knocking on your door either.

AM: It don't matter what you do, Black Twitter is going to come for you. So you can't think about that, because you’re always going to step wrong over there. And that's fine, you know. But hallelujah, Black Jesus, they haven't come for me yet. When the day comes, I'm sure we will all know.

From a personal standpoint, in terms of these expectations, I feel like a lot of people just found out we was Black. It took people, well I guess a year now, right? Let's just say six months. Let's be nice. It took people six months of living in a 2500 square foot loft with Netflix and wine delivery, Murray's cheese and... (I love Murray's. Don't get me wrong.) to be able to conceptualize what somebody living in a five by five foot cell for 20 years looks like. That's what the pots and pans were, right? "We see you! We know you!" All right. Well what happens when it gets warm again? What happens when you get bored? Ain't nothing new but the reason, so I'm tired of trying to remind folk. Like, yo, I know you just figured out that I'm Black, but you know I've been Black, right? I'm still Black. It's nice out. Still Black. The sun's up. Where'd that sign go? You had some signs. You had some pens. You had some buttons. I don't see them buttons no more. They don't match that summer romper? The work that I've been making has been looking at some of these issues or concerns for as long as I can remember. Because again, people tend to make work where they're from. Where I'm from is Blacknessville. So that's where...

SW: I'm from there too! Hey, cousin! When I'm talking to artists and I'm looking at their work, I think it's also important how they talk about their work. You said to Artnet, "Blackness is 400 years old, and the only ground we have is ground we were brought here to give to someone else, to till for someone else. So our culture is in our body, not in the ground. For us to try and touch the rest of the world is to grab a liquid ground that has been everywhere." It made me think a lot about a panel hosted by Weeksville Heritage Center where someone said that for Black people, the archive lives in our bodies. It's not always necessarily a tangible external thing.

AM: So, in a lot of different directions, we have a relationship to water. Black folk can't swim, middle passage, fire hydrants, slip and slides, the backbone of many of the beverages that come in powdered form. There's a lot of classical baked-in waters in our culture and our lives, some for reasons that we like, some for not necessarily fun ones. One of the more consistent truths for many of us is, we don't travel. I'm not talking about going on vacations. Cruise ships, going to go see your cousins down south, or go to Spain. Like that's different.

We, generationally, stay within a very small-miled radius. For a bunch of reasons. Family members, we've got to take care of our family. We don't traditionally put people in homes, so you've got to stay and make sure that the family's good. You always got some a little bit older, so you know, make sure the elders are wavy as possible. Jobs. Who knows if there's a job open there. There's a job here, so I'll stay here. You got somebody to sell you a house once. You know they ain't going to try to sell us no houses. You try to go somewhere else and try to get them to sell us a house somewhere that ain't the one we already got? Oh, we going to stay put!

So one of the few places that we can go that is everywhere is the beach. The longer you sit at the water there, the farther out the water has come from. So by sitting there at a free, usually reasonably accessible location, you can take a form of the vacation, you can reach some of the lands that you've thought about, that you saved up for. Who knows? You might even pop that old message in a bottle game up. You don't know. Being landlocked is difficult for anybody. But being landlocked with no land to be locked to is an impossibility that we are forced to try and navigate.

Approximate Weight Of My Hair From Birth To Age 35, 2020

Bronze and kitchen scale

11 1/2 x 7 x 4 1/2 in.

SW: One thing that I've noticed in your work is that land and place is a constant throughline. Let’s talk about your ongoing project New Davonhaime. Is it meant to be a kind of utopia? Is it a space where we just are? What does New Davonhaime represent to people as you say who are landlocked, but don't have land to be locked into?

AM: The cities that make up the New Davonhaime space are five of the most densely populated Black cities in America. New Orleans, Detroit, Jackson, Birmingham, and Savannah as determined by years of census data which, in and of itself, is a very faulty, nonobjective system. How many primarily Black towns are there in the country? Trick question. There's a lot, right? And what are the things that have us moving en masse, that have us trying to figure out some of these answers. Why do we stay put? Because there's no jobs. Where are there jobs? I don't know. Maybe over here. What are those jobs? Are those jobs good? I don't know. We've got to go see. I've found one. I call up everybody. Let's all go. Where did all the jobs go? I don't know. I heard over there. Why do the jobs leave? How do you answer the questions that keep showing up? You ask everybody that's been going to all the different places that all have similar, if not the same, concerns, to have that be one place, right? There was one occasion in the space where somebody picked up the postcard and they're like, ‘Oh, I think my cousin and them, they used to go over here.’

SW: I love when Black people do that. They see a picture and swear they know who it is. They be like, Yeah, I know them!’

AM: ‘That's a, wait, wait, that's Kim! I know Kim when I see…’ That's also something that happened. A woman came in, had all these photo albums. There's a few businesses in the New Davonhaime space. One of them is Jimmy's Thrift. So there's all these photo albums. Somebody came in, ‘Oh, look, there's Kim.’ He's like, ‘Eh, that ain't Kim.’ She's like, ‘He said people come in here and drop photos off all the time. That's Kim.’ I know for a fact that that was not Kim. That does not matter.

SW: If auntie said it's Kim, it's Kim!

AM: There's something enough within that physical, mental space that some Black folk came into and wanted to say yes to that room, to that circumstance, to insert themselves into that story, to make that belong to them, to take that with them when they leave. That's something that was lacking. That's something that was missing that they wanted to add to. They saw something that was good that they wanted to fold in. Here for it. Please. More of us in more places everywhere. Because you ain't taking nothing you don't want, right? So if you can think about a space where things don't suck as much, let me find out. This was me trying to see what the concerns were, what other physical objects that can hold, lead to, thinking around, addressing, and potentially carry some of the concerns for and with those of us that would like these things carried. It's something that I know that I need...I know a lot of black folk need. So I figured, why not try to provide a circumstance in which we could at least take a look at it and say no. We can say yes too. We can say yes. We don't have to say no. But it's hard to say yes, no, or maybe if you can't see it, so.

SW: Right. And I'm particularly drawn to New Davonhaime because I used to work in Weeksville and I'm also from Philly, a very Black city. And so I'm just very obsessed with sovereign Black communities, past and present. Right now we have Freedom, Georgia, that just popped up. Have you heard about it? Basically, a bunch of Black folk in Atlanta was like, ‘This ain't it, and we are going to create our own sovereign community.’ They bought up tons of acres of land building a whole ecosystem in the middle of Georgia.

AM: See, people think I'm out here tripping, making shit up. Look at this!

Places I’ve Been With Helicopters #4 / July 6th, 1970, Asbury Park, NJ, 2020

SW: In the '70s, we had Soul City in North Carolina and Nairobi in the Bay Area. With all these self-sustaining communities, I think it's also important for us to also think about the Detroits. These Black folks didn't intend to be all up on each other the way that we are, but we still found ways to build community, even through the circumstance of redlining. So just from the technical space, how did you go about this kind of world building to create the look of New Davonhaime?

AM: There’s two parts. First, the black visual language is very rich. Our culture lives in our bodies. Culture can live in the ground. Culture is how the ground relates to the bodies that walk around it. Clothes, food, dance, music, these are all mid spaces between bodies and ground. Since we don't have the ground to bounce it off of, it doubles up in here. Since as soon as we make something, somebody's going to steal it. We've got to make a new one, and then it triples up. So it's moving fast all the time. That doesn't mean that one gets erased when a new one gets made. It just means that a new tone gets added. But since the concerns are similar, and have been for however long, a lot of the new things that get made are still addressing older questions...which aren't older, they're unfortunately continuous questions.

You think about the velvet paintings you find in older Black homes, where a lot of it will be a powerful cat of some sort, right? A tiger of some sort. Why? Because that is the apex predator of its land, and if I am able to then tame, domesticate, and then display this creature, I have dominance over it. Therein, I have taken its power, and that belongs to me. I am now powerful. The power that I am denied at my job, when I leave my house, when I'm anywhere else, I have as soon as you enter my home. The colors we look good in. Purples, blues, pinks, gold, always gold. Gold comes from the earth. It has intrinsic value. It is guaranteed to last, even when our bodies aren't promised to. Purple was a color that was only deemed for the royal court, because it was expensive to make.

So these concerns of bringing power into our home, pulling the ground up onto us so we can take the ground with us. Us having dominance over some of these places. A call to home. So looking at this very long history, the themes and the colors pop up all over the place. So it's easy to pull from those things and then figure out a space in which you come in, it's like, 'Ooh. I know a Black person been in here.' You know immediately.

Freemans Beach, Wilmington, NC, 2021

Embroidered quilt

87 1/2 x 73 in.

SW: Your photography reminds me of going to somebody's grandma house and they whole wall is family members. Or the family Bible with everybody pictures in it. The quilts and blankets that you made, particularly thinking about the Max B blanket, family members that pass, you go get a little afghan made with their face. The Gucci Mane plates! I don't know about everybody else’s family, but my mom still has the closet with that china can't nobody use.

AM: I didn't even know we had that closet when I was younger. Recently I was like, ‘I'm going to look in that closet to see what's in there.” We had the blackest, almost finest china I have ever seen!

SW: And every Black family has one.

AM: Because when will you ever have enough money to buy another object like that again? Buy it once and you keep it forever. You put that plastic on that couch. You do not walk on that carpet.

The postcards are part two. And I asked people, "What is something you're not getting here you would like to get somewhere else?" And then people write in. They let me know in the form of a memory. So you get all the postcards, you start sorting them out and you start to see certain themes pop up. And then I try to make myself physically present whenever possible, so not if, but when I get it wrong, you can then tell me. From this accrued information can I attempt to offer some actual physical services to address the needs that you have said are extant to within whatever space this is? If that's a free photo studio... Most recently, it's pretty easy. Everybody hungry. Ain't nobody got no food. All right. Food bank. Cool. This New Davonhaime space exists to allow people to think around these ideas. But once some of the ideas are thought around, then it's also possible to take action on some of these and then try to address them via objects. Which I still count food as objects. A temporary object, but it's still a thing that you're holding. So whatever the case, trying to address the lack of the appropriate form and appropriate number of objects in the Black community.

SW: I'm always thinking intergenerationally, so as we talk New Davonhaime, Lorraine O'Grady and Art Is… came to mind. Framing Black people and the things we do as art. That's how I see the spaces that you created. And then it led me to think about the ways in which Black people are intrinsically art collectors. You go to any Black house, like you were talking about the velvet, the black and gold velvet cat, the figurines, which we love so much...

AM: I'm looking at four of them right now.

SW: I went to see my mom for the first time last week since March 2020, and you know the memes that say, ‘Tell me that you are X without saying X.’? I was like, ‘tell me my mom's Black without saying my mom's Black’ and took a picture of her figurines and this final supper painting she has with all people in Black history.

AM: If you want me to pull mine out, I can. It's in the other room.

SW: I would love to see it! (Azikiwe returns with an angel figurine and a prints.)

Blackest Night: A Survey in Blackness (Installation View), 2019

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

AM: Ellis Wilson’s Funeral Procession. You gotta have that! We don’t at all know each other, but we can have this kind of conversation. There's a familiarity, because we’re both from Blackville. There's this shared understanding that goes without having to be spoken, no matter where we are from. That's what makes the New Davonhaime concept so important.

SW: I went to a historically Black college and I say to anybody, that's the most diverse place you can ever go in your life. The kids from Philly and the kids from Chicago are so different, but there were certain things we share, like graduation. We all know when they say, ‘Hold your applause until we say all graduate’s the names,’ everybody’s mom is still going to yell when their child’s name is called.

AM: ‘They can talk about me, but that's my baby up there. They ain't pay all this money. Who paid this money? Who baby up there? I'm clapping. Go on now! Go ahead!’

SW: Exactly! There is something still so special about walking into a place you've never been but knowing it so well.

I want to wrap with another quote. You said to Cultured Magazine, ‘The spaces Black people inhabit are at once physical and material and carried through our bones through time and back out into the world through velvet, wood, lace, and plastic. How do you create a home to live in when the idea of home is an idea that lives in your bones? What do bones look like when wrapped in lace, and how do the spaces we are afforded affect our attempts at materializing the immaterial?’

AM: The question for me was, what are the other things that I can go talk to any other Black person about and then we just go ‘mmmhmm.’ Like how can we get there immediately? What are some of the older versions of that? What are some of the newer versions of that? Where do those intersect, and which of these can move into the future as far as they have already existed in the past. If we can look 200 years back and find it going in that direction, what'll this look like in 200 years forward.

Now with this current series of paintings I'm hoping I can answer, or address the noise...talk about it and ask about it. Rarely you get to an answer. You get to new questions. What does 200 forward look like? Is this language of lace, home, bones going to be the same? Are all of our bones going to be replaced by metal? How far is the space between the last question and the next one, and can they fit as much Blackness between those two tent poles as possible in hopes that, if one of those poles falls, due to misinformation on my part, not having looked enough, searched enough, found enough, that somebody will be there to catch it, to put it back up. And eight people on a tent pole, it's a lot easier to catch and put back up quickly than it is with two people. So you try to include as much information, as much people as possible. So maybe when you don't have, when you run out of lace, you can borrow somebody else's that's right next to you.

Stephanye Watts

Stephanye Watts is the founder of Be Reel Black Cinema Club, a group dedicated to amplifying independent, rare, and previously inaccessible Black films. A graduate of Clark Atlanta University, Stephanye is the Program Coordinator at Recess, an artist-led, youth-focused alternative to incarceration empowering court-involved young people to take charge of their own life story and imagine a positive future through art. She is also the woman behind the world's only R&B trivia night, #RhythmNBodyroll, and the music podcast, The Psyce.