About the Publication:

Unveiling is a conceptual monograph comprised of past and recent artworks connected to Alanna Fields’s projects, As We Were, Audacity, Mirages of Dreams Past, and Constellations: Our Love Was Deeply Purple. These series are center on Fields’s ongoing research on Black Queer Archives and the power of representation and speculation through vernacular imagery. As both a book and an object, Unveiling symbolizes the complexities and limitations of visibility and invisibility, while breaking open veils that reveal audacious queering. Meditating on Black Queer memory, vulnerability, and desire, this monograph brings to focus everyday representations of Black Queer life in the U.S. between the 1920s and 1990s. The design of the publication, developed in collaboration with Alanna Fields, Brian Paul Lamotte, and Pablo Lerma of Meteoro Editions, is closely connected to the tactility and visual properties of Fields’s original artworks, where painting, layering, repetition, fragmentation, opacity, and transparency become intermediaries to unveil the identities of the figures pictured. Throughout the immersive imagery in Unveiling, there lies whispers of poems and reflections on queer introspection by Sumia Juxun that thread and weave each section of the book together in a beautiful cadence.

Excerpt of Curatorial Essay by Curator and Artist, Luther Konadu, on Alanna Fields’ Queer Archival Practice:

“Alanna Fields’s work is the result of a persistent search that attends an unwavering longing. Over the better part of a decade, the U.S. artist has dedicated tireless time and resources on a journey to discover and recover traces of Black queer life from the past. Her interest reaches backward to a time before she was born – long before our contemporary moment, in which queer identities and iconography are increasingly detached from their origins, commodified and casually tried on at will. Rather, Fields concentrates her search on a bygone time whose interpretation is often skewed by historical accounts. Her attention is attuned to a realm beyond the more ubiquitous historical vestiges, marked by fear, vitriol, tragedy, political strife, or battles for equal rights and their attendant violence. Counter to common perceptions and prevalent histories, Black queer life has existed outside of sensational headlines, and in spite of social marginalization; this fact drives Fields in her pursuit to foreground such examples. This quest has taken her as far back as the mid-to-late 19th and 20th centuries, the days of tintypes and cabinet cards, with her sights set on photographic glimpses of the quotidian, quiet, and intimate domestic interstices. Through archival findings, she directs our attention to seemingly innocuous details – mannerisms, gestures, postures - the way the subjects present themselves in relation to the camera. Their sartorial choices, makeup, jewelry, or the garlanded interiors in which they are photographed are all cues for Fields. The are surfaces to project onto, a means by which Fields bears witness to and finds affinity with the distant lives behind these archival residues.”

-Luther Konadu, for CONTACT Photo.

Full essay available here.