Jehan L. Roberson, a literatures in English doctoral student, recently published an essay that engages the art installation/ritual practice of Ogemdi Ude and Sydney King. The essay is entitled "Ever Present and In Process: Breathing and Grieving with Ogemdi Ude and Sydney King."
"Whether through embodiment, memory work, sculpture or photography, Living Relics propels us to question where grief houses itself in our bodies and how we might attend to its hand in shaping our everyday lives and rituals. Both Ogemdi and Sydney remind us of the particularities of our individual experiences of death and grief as a way of seeing how, like breath, they exceed the individual, and how, like breath, they merge to collectively sustain us from one moment to the next."
Read Roberson's full essay here.
Jehan L. Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s work explores text as a site of liberation, place making, and historical intervention for Black peoples in the Americas. Her art and research have informed her previous work in archives and cultural sites such as the National Civil Rights Museum and the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Kismet Productions in Chicago, and the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jehan is a PhD student in English Language and Literatures at Cornell University. She holds a MA from NYU’s John W. Draper School of Humanities and Social Thought and a BA in English Literature with a double minor in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Missouri.
This announcement originally appeared in the 3/22/21 Cornell University Graduate School highlights.
