“One of Them” is all about you. More community than column, this space is where we’ll be speaking to friends and idols, history-makers of the past and present, and those who inspire us, challenge us, and dare us to ask for more from this world. It is where we can be together. Read more here.
When people experience panic attacks, therapists often suggest focusing on the small details around them: light radiating through bedroom curtains, the ripples of waves across a pond, our beloved’s face when they first wake up in the morning. As a society facing multiple, overlapping crises, it can often feel as though we’re experiencing some kind of collective panic attack — and are thus turning toward what the activist adrienne maree brown calls “the miraculous mundane.” Rather than lofty goals, brown seeks to direct our focus to daily life as a site of possibility and collective transformation. This is the soil from which the artist Golden’s work grows.
Born and raised in Hampton, Virginia with roots in Pocomoke City, Maryland, their work combines photography, performance art, and poetry to explore queer imagination and Black love in the United States. Using their family’s archives as a guide — whether overflowing wedding albums or images made by their uncle Edison, who is also a photographer — Golden weaves together and resurrects long suppressed histories.
When we speak on the second day of 2024, Golden tells me that their creative practice is guided by the scholar Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work,” which they describe as the desire to create something new “amidst the sea of anti-Blackness that makes America and the world possible.” In this way, the mundane — documenting the intimacies of Black family life — becomes sacred ground upon which to gather the memories and dreams that white supremacy has stolen.
This year, as a recent recipient of the Queer|Art Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, Golden will complete the installation for their debut solo exhibition, I’m Never Alone. They are also working on their second book of poetry, REPRISE, which will be published with Haymarket Books in 2024. Below, we discuss the familial relationships that make their work possible, the revelatory power of self-portraiture, and ongoing solidarity between Black and Palestinian communities.
