My interview with the artists Benji Hart and Anna Martine Whitehead revealed how a commitment to the principles of abolition strengthens their creative processes, keeps them honest, and brings them into relationships that shape the outcomes of their artistic practice. As performance artists and educators, they hold a keen awareness of abolition as a verb and a horizon (rather than a fixed identifier)—something that they can move toward, with others, even in moments of ambiguity and difficulty. The scope of our original conversation was expansive—we talked about the arduous and fulfilling labors of iterative art making, consent in collaboration, living wages, generative tensions in the creative processes, and the stickiness of naming Black art forms. We discussed these ideas in the context of producing their performance pieces: Hart’s World After This One and Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts.

Read the full interview here on Public Books.

Image : Benji Hart & Anna Martine Whitehead