HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? is a multidisciplinary collective of 45 African diasporic artists who have lived and worked together, in various iterations, for the past twenty years. The collective identifies as a primarily Black, mostly queer group that consists of visual artists, writers, poets, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers from around the world who collaborate across disciplines and cities. Projects conceived and created by the collective ultimately function as laboratories for investigation, production and discourse around race, embodiment, restorative justice, institutional apartheid, and global creative culture.
The online exhibition Archiving HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?: Process Over Product will be on view October 12–November 25, 2020, presented by the New Media Artspace at Baruch College and generously sponsored by the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center.
The collective’s name, which spells out “How Do You Say Yam In African?”, playfully acknowledges that there is no such language as “African”— and signifies the yam as a common root in African diasporic cuisines and cosmologies. Collective members embrace the multifaceted moniker because of its irony and symbolism.
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? gained critical recognition as a formal artist collective with their film debut of Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Their work has been presented in solo exhibitions including “Pot Liquor Medicine Women” (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago), “No Humans Involved,” (Witte de With in Rotterdam, The Netherlands), and “Post-Speculation 1 & 2” (P! Gallery in New York and Jacob Lawrence Gallery and The New Foundation in Seattle); and numerous in group exhibitions, performances, and screenings at institutions including ICA Boston, UMMA (Ann Arbor), ICP (New York), Roulette (Brooklyn), Town Hall Seattle, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, The New School, and the “Black Portraitures II” conference (Florence, Italy).