Jacques Morel Jr.
Almost a year ago I took the big step of my hometown Austin, Texas, to Brooklyn, New York. Now I got the east coast in motion almost 15 years earlier when I went to college in the mountains of Massachusetts at Williams College, but this step was very different. It was not a step to promote my academic skills, to do a job or to promote a romantic partnership. It was essentially just for me. And after I had spent most of my adulthood in Austin as a visible community voice and had discussions about justice and justice as a practitioner and strategy of racial justice, it was a difficult decision to formulate family members, friends and colleagues alike.
When someone asked me what the move was causing, I would be a dissertation about “Well, it will be great to expand our partnerships at Rosa Rebellion”, a production company that focuses on creative activism that I have founded, or “Most of my customers are on the east coast”. I hoped either one of these answers would meet your curiosity or maybe her judgment. It took me a long time, a few therapy appointments and many conversations with God to finally feel comfortable to just say: “Because I want.” In this movement, it was really about taking care of my whole black self – heart, mind and soul. To discover, deconstruct and deepen an invitation to discover my identity as a black woman from my work, my service and the white view of the capital Texas.
If you have never been to Austin, you may not understand the unique cultural positioning deep in the heart of Texas. Austin is a state that is known for football and grill for its oppressive political and conservative social ideologies, and has positioned itself in the middle as a creative center and self -proclaimed liberal bastion. But as a black girl born and grew up in the 1990s, I know first -hand that Austin has not always fulfilled the progressive hype and certainly not organically promoted a space of belonging to those who cross the street of the city with Melanin. This contradiction stood for most of my adult life at the center of my work and my own identity formation, which may unconsciously bumps parts of my self -expression and often restricts my blackness as an act of service as a self -defined identity.
When I put my life together in East Austin in the last spring, I began to design the process, a new expression of me, style and history in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. When designing my apartment, I again designed a personal practice of joy and liberation. In response to America's persistent persistence that many of us play the role of Mammy, Maultier or Martyrs, it was healed to design my walk-in walk-up on the fourth floor, and I dare to revolutionize.
The author and the modern theologian Cole Arthur Riley says as follows: “To create a home – to construct a small resistance at which you have the agency; where you breathe a little deeper, where you keep the key – is not a small liberation. The oppressor is not only interested in simply stealing the physical space of a people, but the dignity and the meaning that goes.” The act of claim, employment and construction of space as a black woman in this country is an act of defiance, and to do this in the privacy of this house, has left me another feeling for agency and autonomy.
Now an appreciation for the aesthetics was not new to me. I am known for serving Lewks in my life, and Instagram was also a platform to disturb the elimination of American oppression as in the magazine My Weekly Fits. I recently discovered the strength to give aesthetics a language. The interior designer and founder of Shane Charles, Shane Charles, masterfully offered the language of black millennials to define and record our aesthetic decisions, and interrupt the euro-centered terminology, which often leaves our experience and taste marginally. According to one of her Instagram roles, the story that I have to tell in my house is somewhere between “Harlem Deco” and “Afro-Caribbean Baroque”, which appears quite suitable in view of my Bajan roots and my appreciation for the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was born from a feeling of the revolution at the interface of art, literature, music and style and is again the Renaissance of Harlem on the political and cultural identity of the black blacks. Both sensitivity in style are grounded by color, texture and resistance to white colonial presence, and I tried to emulate the same feeling of freedom and autonomy.
Starting with the kitchen and the dining room, I opted for green, pink and yellow. My first purchase was a few Vintage Thonet Kelly Green chairs that I found on the Facebook marketplace (and hard-fought) that played steamed, green-painted walls of Sage Green. They centered the color history of the room and gave me the confidence, color and thus expressions of me to invite me into the room. Every time I rejected the urge to choose a neutral color or what I considered a more subtle choice, it felt like an exercise to resist the need to calm me down in order to be more tasty or acceptable (reminds of my work or voice in the part of the anti-dei mood).
Another invitation to tell a story about black beauty and brilliance was the curation of my bookshelf. From the brave prose by Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and the author of my favorite book for childhood, Aunt Fosies hats (and crab cake later)A book that has reoriented my world for black fashion and black history to the vintage parts of the story, which were found in the flawlessly curated archives of the Schwarzmarkt vintage (an edition from 1973) The black scholar Magazine with Angela Davis on the cover and the rare special edition that the plate danced and pray, commissioned by the New York Heritage Society), reminded me that I helped every day to help me shape my story as a black woman.
The decision to center the color was the choice of disturbing all the remains, placing the status quo, and the chance to regain my stem roots. This was expressed in my living room visceral at the visceral – to play with the color orange, which traditionally represents joy, vitality, imagination and pride. The focus of my living room is a large carpet with a checked rust and crème printing, which spreads across the entire room, which makes it impossible to ignore or silence its presence. My use of orange and rust tones was accentuated by lively art – the faces of the freed black women and scenes of black joy (many pieces that I had acquired from my grandmother's extensive collection in the paternal grandmother and others were collected by years of shopping on community markets in Austin and Brooklyn).
A few years ago I was interviewed for an article in which some of Austin's tasting were emphasized, and I was asked how I negotiated how I was as expressive in my choice of clothing as someone who worked in such a serious area (at the time when I worked as director of the center for the commitment of the community and the social judicial institute at the University of Texas in Austin). I think my answer at this time is a symbol for my current energy: “My chosen aesthetics is an expansion of my ethos – a resistance to the status quo and a memory that in the middle of our struggle for justice and justice can be an expression of joy.” In this next chapter, in which I curate in my small corner of Bed-Stuy, I think that Brooklyn gave me a new permit, my home, my story and thus my life in a way that honors my full self.
I am currently working on a new book/curatorial project called named threadResearch on how women with color, especially black women, offered us a blueprint for the foundation of our resistance. In essence, black women have set a precedent for the design of our wardrobes, our rooms and our experiences to articulate radical joy, disrupt political oppression and inspire a liberated future. While I am sitting in my living room that is illuminated by the light that looks through my French doors, surrounded by the plants that I bought from my vegetable plant sharpness in the neighborhood, I am overwhelmed with considerations of the trip last year, which at that moment led me to that moment:
Let the house be our break.
Leave the home a source of the postponement.
Let the house be an act of resistance.
Let the house be a portal of revelation.
Let the house be a safe space for our anger.
Let the house deepen the house. Let the house tell our story. Leave the house an invitation to dream. Let us introduce the house. Let the house offer us space to resist the horrors of this world. Let the house be a door to our collective liberation.