Discussions
Slavery in Motion
Join us for a presentation and conversation with members of Remains // An Archive Jessica Newby, Samantha Stephens, and Kevin Ah-Sen as they discuss the inspiration for the multimedia art collection Slavery in Motion with featured artists: Romaine McNeil, Tatiana Esh, Sha-Shonna Rogers, and Julia Mallory. Remains // An Archive of the Mellon-funded Diaspora Solidarities Lab (2022-2024) explores grief through various media in the arts, digital storytelling/mapping, and curation.
Accessible seating and assistive listening devices are available for this program. A reception will immediately follow the panel discussion from 8pm-9pm.
About the Collection
Slavery in Motion is currently on view through January 8, 2025 at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, SC. It was inspired by the life of Molia, a young African woman who was sold and lived as a captive in mid-18th century Westmoreland, Jamaica. Molia and other enslaved women and girls in Jamaica are the focus of Remains lab member Jessica Newby’s dissertation research.
The four original artworks in the exhibition are by Black women artists from across the diaspora, Romaine McNeil (Kingston, Jamaica), Tatiana Esh (Brooklyn, NY), Sha-Shonna Rogers (Baltimore, MD), and Julia Mallory (Harrisburg, PA), and each convey an aspect of Molia’s life through a variety of visual, poetic, and sonic mediums.
In keeping with the core philosophy and principles of Remains and the Diapora Solidarities Lab, the collection enacts a Black feminist ethic of care that accentuates and memorializes Molia’s story of captivity, motherhood, loss and frequent fugitivity. It seeks to transcend the obscurity, silence, erasure, and other limitations of colonial archives in relaying the complexity of enslaved women’s lives.
Tickets
This event is free and open to the public.
Please have your ticket printed or readily available on your phone for check-in.
Schedule
6 p.m. – Auditorium doors open
6:30 p.m. – Auditorium program begins
Opening remarks by Kevin Ah-Sen & Samantha Stephens
Introduction by Jessica Newby
Panel discussion with Remains members Jessica Newby, Samantha Stephens, and Kevin Ah-Sen, alongside artists Tatiana Esh, Julia Mallory, Romaine McNeil, and Sha-Shonna Rogers
Closing remarks by Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson
8–9 p.m. – Reception in Fox Court
9 p.m. – Program ends
Participants
Jessica Newby
Jessica Newby is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at The Johns Hopkins University and co-lead of Remains // an Archive. She researches enslaved women, family and kinship, sexuality, violence, and mourning throughout the Black Atlantic during the 18th century. She is a 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow in recognition of her dissertation, Kinship in Motion: Women and Slavery in Eighteenth Century Jamaica. Kinship in Motion examines a community of enslaved women in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish who depended upon their own ingenuity, determination and empathy to create and maintain a community of both blood and chosen kin to help keep themselves and their loved ones alive.
Samantha Stephens
Samantha Stephens is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia and a Solidarity Fellow in the Remains // an Archive microlab. Her research focuses on the intersection of enslavement and technology in the Black Atlantic. Thinking with Black feminist technologies and Caribbean digital archival methods, she blends literary and artistic practices to reimagine Black Caribbean pasts and futures. In her critical-creative praxis, she (re)makes spaces to consider what remains of Black enslaved women who lived in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, mobilizing the glitch as a productive feminist tool of resistance and rebellion that powers alternative Black archival spaces. For more information on Samantha’s ongoing project, Secret Histories of Coomba: A (re)collection of heads, please visit https://coomba.wordpress.com.
Kevin Ah-Sen
Kevin Ah-Sen is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at McGill University and co-lead of the Remains // an Archive. His research explores theories and forms of racial and queer subjectivities, death, grief, and their pedagogical im/possibilities, through Black studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis. Kevin is the curator for REGARDS (2024) at the Maison de la culture de Côte-des-Neiges (Montreal, QC), and Coastal Relations: Enacting Diaspora (2024-2025) at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (Charleston, SC). Kevin is also the co-founder of the black symposium noir, an independent bilingual Black Studies collective in Montreal, QC. His recent publication Against Capture: Notes on recording and the problem of extraction in education research can be found in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson
Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at The Johns Hopkins University, and the Faculty Director of Remains // an Archive. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). Her work explores histories of slavery, African diaspora, and Black life in the Americas.
Tatiana Esh
Tatiana Esh is a sculptor of sound, color, cinema, and story. Her favorite mediums include ink, watercolor, song, and poetry.
Julia Mallory
Julia Mallory is committed to being a good steward of, and vessel for, her ancestors’ stories. As a storyteller, her foundational creative love language is poetry, and she moves between genres with a range of mediums from text to textiles. Julia’s work can be found in A Gathering Together, Barrelhouse, the Black Speculative Arts Movement’s Curating the End of the World: RED SPRING IV – Wildseeds & Black Futures, The Offing, Raising Mothers, Sugarcane Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, 68 to 05, petrichor, SISTORIES, Emergent Literary, and elsewhere. Julia received the 2022 CUSP Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Mayday Micro-Chapbook Poetry Prize. In addition, she is a Poetry Editor for The Loveliest Review. Julia is also an emerging filmmaker whose work has screened from Toronto to Iceland. Her latest loves include creating stop-motion animated collages and building TEN OH! SIX, a multi-generational community space for collective learning, connection, and creativity. Julia is the mother of three children and is from the Southside of Harrisburg, which she affectionately refers to as “the lil chocolate city that tries.”
Romaine McNeil
Romaine McNeil, is a Jamaican-based artist who uses brushstrokes, palette knives and enigmatic concepts to transcend ordinary thinking and emotions into powerful and provocative images on canvas. Originally from the parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica, she spent most of her free time as an energetic free-spirited child drawing and sketching on walls, paper and whatever other surfaces she found that would offer her the opportunity to make a mark. Her younger days saw her composing landscapes and seascapes in oil and watercolor paints that sharpened her technical ability that aided in exploring elaborate concepts. After high school she enrolled in the Edna Manley School of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, where she studied sculpture, painting, and music. Even though she has never truly explored a career in sculpture, her paintings do carry a more 3-dimensional feel to them. But her love for painting gave her the means to create powerful visual narratives that were often times a blend of joy and sorrow. Her need to explore the depths of the human psyche transcended traditional styles as she matured and this allowed her the freedom to explore without boundaries, true self-expression. Her work often blurs the lines between reality and fantasy allowing emotions and memories to collide in a poetic flow reflecting her personal journey through the world.
Since debuting her work in the early 2000s, she has garnered attention in the art community for her unique and provocative compositions and concepts. Her work is layered with symbolism that explores transformation, identity, the struggles of our own being, and the unseen forces that continue to shape our experiences in life.
Art and the process of creating has long been a part of her everyday life. She invites viewers to journey through the flow of emotions and ideas that stem from the subconscious; which challenges us to explore the poetic and sometimes raw nature of human existence. Her artwork embodies the intricacies of human connection, stripping away the distortion of everyday life to reveal the untainted truth of what lies beneath.
She has exhibited at the Pegasus Gallery, Olympia Gallery, and The Sky Gallery in Jamaica, as well as overseas, where her very first solo exhibition was held in St. Maarten. She has also exhibited in Florida and Atlanta, and recently added the Coastal Relations: Enacting Diaspora exhibition at The Avery Research Center in South Carolina, to her growing list of spaces.
Sha-Shonna Rogers
Sha-Shonna Rogers (b.2001) is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on cinematography and still photography from West Baltimore, Maryland and a current senior at Morgan State University. She has been into the arts since she was child and has continued to grow in her passions over the years. Drawing inspiration from her everyday surroundings and the pulse of her community, her creative style is shaped by her environment, resulting in narratives that pulse with life and truth.
This event is being co-sponsored by The Diaspora Solidarities Lab, LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, The Johns Hopkins University Center for Africana Studies; The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality; The Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts (Inheritance Baltimore); and The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies; with additional support from Eindevr | Data Science for the Digital Humanities.