Public Preview: Body Been Liftin’
May 23, 6-9 pm
The Projects, 174 E Toole Ave

Please join artist Alanna Airitam for the preview of new work, Body Been Liftin’.

The series examines how Black women’s labor is made invisible, extracted, and rewritten within American history and its ongoing conditions. Grounded in inherited narratives and present realities, including the loss of over 319,000 jobs held by Black women following federal layoffs and the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the work situates events within a longer pattern of labor that is foundational yet consistently undervalued, obscured, or erased. The project evolves from a broader inquiry into erasure as a constructed condition, focusing on the bodies most persistently made to carry its weight.

Across a series of interactive photographs and installations, the work requires participation. Red and blue color filtration systems paired with plexiglass panels determine what can and cannot be seen. Archival images of Black women at work, sourced from public domain collections, are printed in red. When viewed through a blue plexiglass panel, the surrounding environment disappears while the figure remains. The laboring body persists without context, separated from the systems that relied upon it.

The blue plexiglass also creates an optical convergence between past and future. When positioned at the center, the images overlap, producing the illusion that these bodies are lifted, suspended, or held within the future. This effect shifts the reading of the image, transforming what once appeared fixed in labor into something recontextualized, where burden gives way to possibility, protection, and release.

The future images draw from the folklore The People Could Fly, in which enslaved Africans retained the memory of flight. In moments of extreme oppression, that memory could be activated, allowing them to rise and return home. Flight is not granted by a system but claimed through memory. It becomes an assertion of autonomy, self-possession, and refusal, where freedom exists outside the permissions of power.

These strategies position the viewer within the mechanics of erasure, where visibility is contingent and unstable. Body Been Liftin’ holds the tension between disappearance and persistence, insisting on a future where Black women are no longer defined by extraction, but are transformed, visible, and autonomous.