Robyn Gibson, Fused, 2020. Ceramic vessel with black terra sigillata, 12.5" x 14" x 9". Image courtesy of the artist and Untitled Space.
don’t tell me you’ve just learned how to
shallow yourself, cause we been knew
by Funto Omojola
i'm tryna
find someone to braid my hair out here, i tell her.
i don't say
what i am craving is the inside of my mother's thighs.
in Bembe, her hands are too big for the part of her hips she decides to rest them on. she is deep brown malt.
i am the color of bitter leaves.
in the background, Kanye be like Jesus is King. oh baby boy, the Lord reigns in this place. she tells me to stop smacking my weave. i don't know how to love conditioned apathy or suckle on the thought of honest song. i smile agony. she bellows deep. what is the color of bodies bound? of wiping yourself off of the floor?
lips against just below collar bone, i tell her i’m scared of getting melanoma.
you know, the kind Slick has. the real bad kind,
i say.
the kind that killed Bob Marley.
Published January 2nd, 2022
Funto Omojola is a Nigerian-American writer and artist based in New York. She is the founding editor of ẹwà journal, an online literary journal that publishes work exclusively by immigrant writers, and is an MFA candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Robyn Gibson is an emerging visual artist, curator, and poet living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Louisville in 2014, earning a BFA in Painting and a BSBA in Marketing. Since receiving her MFA in 2018 from the New York Academy of Art, Gibson has been developing her multidimensional art practice. In 2020 she completed a seven month residency at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. After she started boxing in 2016, Gibson began incorporating it into her art practice. Larger-than-life-sized bold, gestural charcoal figures on canvas, a lyrical writing style meant to pack a punch, and voluptuous vessels inspired by her own curves all convey the movement and force important to her work and inspired by her boxing practice. The act of taking up space and claiming ownership of it is important to her work. As a Black artist focused on self-portraiture and the exploration of her trauma, Gibson grapples with Black identity, the depiction, perception and value of Black bodies, and what it means to be authentic. Parallels and Peripheries: Practice and Presence, her first curatorial project was born from the question, “How do we, as people of color, take ownership of our space?” She and curator Larry Ossei-Mensah worked with the New York Academy of Art to put together an exhibition featuring BIPOC members of the Academy community to address this question at the beginning of 2021.