![]() This Black tradition of communal care, the Black scholar Christina Sharpe calls “wake work.” In her extensively footnoted monograph, In the Wake, Sharpe traces how the aftershock of chattel slavery still animates daily representations of Black life. “Your grandmother was more concerned with what my life would contribute than the medium I would use to do it.” I took her question and returned to college understanding my art and myself differently,” my 78-year-old father says, speaking to me over video chat from The Gambia. ![]() “I learned from my mother that the only way to salve a personal pain was to heal the collective. My grandmother, who left school after fourth grade to sharecrop Georgia fields, is 46 and has already spent more than two thirds of her life cleaning white people’s homes. He’s on break from his first year of college at Ohio University, where he’ll be the second Black person in the school’s history to receive an MFA in painting. My father, Tyrone Geter, an Alabama-born artist, is 19. Against the weight of her question, my father’s cockiness spills across the floor. “Why you doing it if it ain’t helping nobody,” my grandmother Gussie Mae asks, staring at my father’s still life painting of bottles. ![]()
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