How does one define an intervention? Through critical reflection and response or through rupture and renewal? In the words of scholars Jacqueline Francis, Jeanne Gerrity, and their contributors, an intervention should have all these qualities and more. Copublished by Sternberg Press and the California College of the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth annual edition of A Series of Open Questions. The publication weaves twenty-nine entries, including previously published book excerpts, commissioned media, art, and experimental projects, into a profound meditation on Black feminist ideologies, critical making, and institutional critique.

Editors Francis and Gerrity adopt the practice of late conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady (1934–2024) as a model and metaphor for constructs of difference, censorship, and defiance. O’Grady, known for performance work and scholarship that explicitly challenged the hierarchies imposed by Western-centered arts discourse, is featured as an author (“From Me to Them to Me Again: Text in Three Parts to Accompany a Diptych Portfolio”), a primary source (“ ‘In Our Lives:’ Lorraine O’Grady and Johnny Mathis at a Record Release Party”), and an object lesson (“Porous Records”). In various capacities, O’Grady, and her Jamaican heritage, serve as a grounding force for Black female subjectivity, which in turn is used to problematize the historic and present-day vulnerabilities associated with visual media, music, literature, and the historical archive. The publication exercises various lenses—social, cultural, and political—to ask essential questions of our current moment and to stimulate generative interruptions (9). Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? presents visual and textual essays that blur past, present, and future; that are unapologetic in their challenge to censorship; that question the nature of language and its signifiers; and that, above all, invite others to help carry the proverbial torch of liberation.

The book’s cover art forms the first of its many confrontations. For Edmonia (2020) by yétúndé ọlágbajú is a collaged tribute to Black and Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907). Created by manipulated images of neoclassical sculpture layered and cut to form a silhouette bust of Lewis, the print acknowledges the way that the nineteenth-century artist’s legacy has participated in discussions of race, multiculturalism, and individual agency. By breaking Lewis’s form into discrete parts, including fragments of one of her most celebrated works The Death of Cleopatra (1876), ọlágbajú belies the fragmentation inherent in Western systems of classification. Beyond serving as a platform for the featured work, the structure of the book’s dust jacket calls larger attention to Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage’s underlying theme of deconstruction. Notably, the jacket must be removed in order for the reader to access the table of contents—a purposeful stripping of the surface that symbolizes larger concerns regarding loss and representation.

Several of the publication’s entries examine the impact of loss on personal and communal memory. Stills from Alisha B. Wormsley’s video series Remnants, Portals, and Power: The Space I Am In (2022) question erasure through the “conjured” imagery of Black women in nature (63). Through text and visuals, Wormsley explores interstitial environments to demonstrate a creative process that is fluid and unbound. In the commissioned essay “Porous Records,” interdisciplinary scholar and artist Bec Imrich considers Sarah Charlesworth’s Still series (2014) as well as work by O’Grady, Leslie Hewitt, and Buck Ellison as a visual exercise. Through an examination of Imrich’s own family photo albums, she interrogates ways of seeing, interpreting, and reconfiguring visual histories. Trina Michelle Robinson’s Ghost Prints of Loss (2022) features five copies of a page in the African American newspaper The Chicago Defender. The prints were made with raw pigments the artist gathered in West Africa and serve as a reconstruction of Robinson’s own photo of the original 1932 issue. Projects like Selam Bekele’s empty, whole, and on the way (2022) and Jeanne Finley and John Muse’s #BookReport (2022) adopt the experimental, hands-on methodologies of critical making to challenge racial and spatial boundaries and to critique misogyny in social and political media.

Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? suggests that if sources such as photographs, newspapers, and television can be manipulated, then history can be rewritten as well. As Francis and Gerrity argue, “the past isn’t merely a script for the present nor is it a prospectus for the future” (9). Responsively, many of the publication’s authors address revisionist themes of difference in the histories of art and music. Judith Wilson’s “Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art” critiques the historic binaries that polarize Black and white racial categories, while David Scott’s “Between that Event and This Memory: Tradition” interrogates the African diaspora’s relationship to Africa, slavery, and colonialism. In the excerpt “Laure of Olympia: A Revision of Precedent” Denise Murrell utilizes close reading of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) to suggest the Black body as a site of “disruptive modernity” (79), while Martin Bernal’s excerpt from Black Athena Writes Back interrogates language and modern constructions of classical Greece through the lens of racialized models of the ancient world. Building on the subjectivity of language, an entry by Hsu Peng and Allison Yasukawa (“Drive My Car”) and an excerpt by Sawako Nakayasu (Say Translation is An Art) negotiate the social and political motivations of interpretation.

With entries ranging from recently commissioned projects to works published as early as 1987, contributors address the biases and assumptions that affect knowledge systems across time, though notably in nonchronological order. Although the essays/projects are numbered (from one to twenty-nine), the entries feature recurring themes that do not always align with their sequential order. Additionally, the publication features fourteen previously published essay excerpts, variously positioned between and around newly commissioned works. On one hand, this transhistorical approach supports the book’s interrogation of the present, but on the other hand, it results in some entries that are a clear product of their time. For example, in “Rock, Racism, and Retailing 101,” Darrell M. McNeill examines the history of rhythm and blues (R&B) music, its challenge to white normativity/values in the Jim Crow era, and the appropriation of the genre by white artists throughout the twentieth century. The text was originally written in 2004, and although McNeill convincingly argues that the segregationist practices of the radio music industry persist today, his observations—made near the dawn of Web 2.0—feel incomplete. How does the history of R&B reflect current trends in digital file sharing, user-generated content, and AI-based algorithms? In what way has the distribution of Black music changed or remained the same? Do listeners have more control or are we all now complicit in furthering systemic obfuscation? In this instance, a postscript from either the editors, a fellow contributor, or the author himself, would have enhanced the book’s emphasis on conversations responsive to the current moment.

Another occasional challenge is the quality of certain image-based entries. The previously mentioned Ghost Prints of Loss by Robinson is a compelling work addressing the disappearance of the artist’s distant relative, but the photos’ dark reproductions, on off-white newsprint paper, make close visual analysis difficult. Although the poor image quality could be symbolic given this work’s intent, other projects such as Camille Chedda’s Under Construction (2017) are similarly challenged. Chedda’s charcoal drawing is meant to showcase the popularity of Jamaica’s dancehall culture, but parts of the composition are unreadable. Largely, however, photo entries like Erica Deeman’s inner eye and Charles Lee’s Destiny Manifested I, II, III, IV are effective in communicating themes of the body and Black subjectivity with sufficient visual clarity.

The book’s contributors effectively critique the exclusions of museum and gallery systems. Carrie Mae Weems’s ongoing Museum Series (2006–present) captures a lone, specter-like figure at the entrances of major global museums including the Guggenheim Bilbao, the British Museum, the Louvre, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, and others. Questions regarding Black representation in art spaces are furthered by Rujeko Hockley’s interview with filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, founder of the pioneering Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery (1974–86) in New York City. Each of these entries considers the impact of representation within and outside of communities of color.

Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage’s refusal to “play nice” is reinforced by O’Grady’s model of feminist resistance and solidarity (3). In “ ‘In Our Lives:’ Lorraine O’Grady and Johnny Mathis at a Record Release Party,” Francis pens a close visual and symbolic reading of a snapshot of O’Grady and R&B singer Johnny Mathis to question the “open secret” of Black queer identity and its associations with shame and nonconformity. As Francis argues, “[O’Grady] took risks, and ultimately exhorted others to do so as well . . . ” (179). This risk-taking influence is apparent in the entries that defiantly and explicitly call for change. Édouard Glissant’s “For Opacity” champions the protective qualities of opacity as a means of disrupting hierarchies; an untitled Facebook post by E. Jane (Deluxe Dreams while hiding away I still think of the world while trying to love myself) calls out the role of colorism in limiting the presence of dark-skinned women on television; and Gabrielle Civil (Swallow the Fish: A Memoir in Performance Art) questions how race determines the allowances for deviant or risk-taking behavior in performance art, asking simply if a Black body can do what a white body does (85). The role and responsibility of Black feminism today are perhaps best exemplified by the contribution of Legacy Russell. In “Glitch Refuses,” an excerpt from the influential publication Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), she contextualizes feminism in the digital age. Recognizing the body as a “social and cultural tool” (59), Russell’s essay challenges the exclusions inherent in mainstream feminism by championing deviations and disruptions. These “glitches” complicate the restrictions imposed by physical and digital realities, creating meaningful, alternative opportunities for sustained transformation.  

So . . . is now the time for joyous rage? Although the oxymoronic title may suggest inherent contradictions, Francis, Gerrity, and O’Grady demonstrate that the answer to that question is, and remains, a resounding “yes, and” rather than an exclusionary “either/or” (95). In a moment when museums, libraries, universities, and cultural institutions across the United States are forced to navigate politically imposed censorship, polemical rhetoric, and wide-spread uncertainty, models of resistance and radical care have the potential to transform the field in ways fundamental to sustainability. Lorraine O’Grady’s practice “bridges divides but never compromises” (2). Likewise, Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? demonstrates that the collective work of those willing to challenge the past, reconfigure the present, and reclaim the future are needed now more than ever.