TAKING FLIGHT/FLIGHT SCHOOL

 

FLIGHT SCHOOL

My current body of work, Flight School, uses abstraction to capture and make visible the vitality of Black people. For five years, I have built this framework through research ranging from anthropology to poetry. The Reconstruction era (1860–1880), described by W.E.B. Du Bois as transformative, embodied the ingenuity and forward energy I wanted to express. In just two decades, formerly enslaved people constructed schools, hospitals, businesses, and communities—monumental achievements that required extraordinary tenacity and vision. They carried an energy of grace, confidence, and guardianship for the future. I began to ask if the vitality of Reconstruction could serve as both inspiration and instruction for us today. Reading narratives of enslaved Africans who transcended the fields to accomplish the seemingly impossible, I sensed a spiritual consciousness that enabled healing, planning, and creation.

Psychologist Wade Nobles writes that for our ancestors, “Reality was always conceived as the synthesis of the visible and invisible, material and immaterial, the cognitive and emotive, the inner and the outer” I reflected on ring shouts—counterclockwise dancing and chanting that created sacred space—and on the symbols carried across oceans: the Kongo cross, adinkra symbols, and abstracted forms from nature. Together they form codes, a visual language. I abstracted the beautiful forms created by starlings into whirling triangles creating a murmuration. Though I did not know the term murmuration initially, I learned they were starling formations without a single leader, achieving altitudes impossible alone. Together they repelled predators. Keen directives for my people.

Everything connects and improvises in my practice. Flight School is both lesson and offering—a study in energy, resilience, and transformation. It is where my ancestors, nature, and spirit have sent me to learn, and my art is how I return the lesson, completing the circle.

Claudia “Aziza” Gibson-Hunter