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 (18601880),
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
communitiesmonumental 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 shoutscounterclockwise
dancing and chanting that created sacred spaceand 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 offeringa 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
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