As bell hooks wrote in All About Love, “We do not have to love. We choose to love.” In light of Valentine's day, here are a couple of artists within the Artists’ Books Collection that not only choose to love, but bring that love into their artwork.
First up, Contact High by D'Angelo Lovell Williams.
This is a stunning book of photography – primarily made up of self-portraiture, though Williams is rarely alone within the frame, instead pictured among lovers, queer family, and kin. In an accompanying text titled “The Dystopic Cinematic,” Tiona Nekkia McClodden describes Williams’ work as “Black mundane surrealism” (87). The mundanity looks like Williams sitting in a rocking chair in a nondescript kitchen having their facial hair shaved by a lover; the surreal looks like multiple limbs intertwined creating a kind of sculptural work of Black figures caught in a dance-like gesture. Then there is Williams bending over to show white underwear stained red, “familiar to many of us, at the edge of a shared shame that is expected following rough sex” (88); and Williams with their head in a lap – seemingly of a family member – the two attached mouth-to-mouth by a red string. The photos are intimate, an intimacy unique to “imagery rendered by Black artists who also are queer and non-binary.” As McClodden explains, “Within this intersubjective and experiential position there is a space that can only be rendered by their hands” (87). Even as this work portrays the everyday-ness of queer Black people sharing love, sex, and intimacy, it is this very ordinariness that makes the work remarkable – it exists in opposition to what McClodden calls “hyper fantastical modes of representation and figuration” (87).
Be your own valentine and sit down with a copy of Contact High – a book of beauty, of kinship, and of the “in-between space[s] that no one sees, that no one knows how to talk about” (91).
Title: Contact High
Author: D'Angelo Lovell Williams
Call Number: W55634 C66
Publisher: MACK
Publication Date: 2022
Next up, Heart of a Shapeshifter by Coyote Park.
A collection of poems, essays, and prose – this book features stories of trans love, polyamory, and queer community alongside conversations about cultural loss and reclamation. Park writes about hook-ups: “I want my body to be toyed with but not my heart” (78), the self-reflexivity of queer love: “I fell deeper into the idea of loving her. / Because maybe, it brought me closer to myself” (43), the power of transitioning: “I am going to construct a body that I made by myself (53),” and also of reclaiming spirituality from the ashes of an all-girls religious school upbringing, saying “My prayers now are to the people in my life, those that came before me and figures I want to hold in great respect” (57). Park gives language to the tension of long-term partnerships: “There is virtue in entanglement but rebuilding / independence through love is the love I want to foster” (36), but also to the tension created by societal expectations of transness, asserting: “NOT ALL TRANSITIONS ARE LINEAR” (69). They talk beautifully about their own partnership, recounting multiple dreams spent in the company of their wife, feeling fully seen and loved: “Healing has been allowing my wife to call me her girlfriend, because I feel known beyond language” (26). And alongside this, they speak about the richness they experience within non-monogamy: “Multi-love is an act of exploration not extraction” (89).
This is a book about love in its many forms – love for oneself, for one's community, for friends and lovers and ancestors alike. Read it aloud to a lover, read it tenderly to yourself; however you do it, just be sure to read Heart of a Shapeshifter.
Title: Heart of a Shapeshifter
Author: Coyote Park
Call Number: P275 H43
Publisher: GenderFail
Publication Date: 2022
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