What's A Booklet Proof Vest?
sighting my sources...
(photo by Hanna Leka)
Every time I leave the stage, people have questions about what I am wearing and why (sometimes even asking if they can buy it off of me). I believe every performance is a shared ritual, and every ritual should have regalia. The Booklet Proof Vest is my way of showing up ready for the ritual of performance. Weighing about 30 pounds, it’s as heavy as our histories. I see it as a literal workout as I get these words out.
As a conceptual art piece, The Booklet Proof Vest acts as armor and a visual way of sighting sources. The design was synthesized in response to the question, “How do I embody the words that have made me possible?”
I was inspired by seeing the work of Jamal Cyrus’ Africanimus_12469 (2006). I first viewed Cyrus’ the Africanimus_12469 at the ICA Los Angeles as a part of The End of My Beginning survey exhibition, which included more than 40 works made over 20 years. I left drenched in inspiration.
Chad Dawkins writes via Art Papers: “His (Cyrus’) works always indicate some internal conflict or reveal the contradictions inherent to our understanding of American culture. In Africanismus_12469 (2006), a baseball catcher’s chest pad is covered in paperbacks of Black Power literature. The books serve as an added layer of protection. Africanismus_12469 is paired with BPPGG (2016), a black leather jacket, labeled as having pouches of “unspecified contents,” hung behind a thin light-blue curtain. Both objects reference protection and coded adornment.”
I loved his piece so much, it haunted me, it felt like an alley oop I felt called to build on. What if we got more specific and modular? I went home and started dancing with the what if’s of 16 books the way a verse holds 16 bars.
In 2022, I designed The Booklet Proof Vest with the help of sewer and fabricator Ella Trimarchi. I needed a uniform as I set out to spread a more radical message (I almost called it the Wearable Word, but that felt too biblical). I wanted to wear something that spoke volumes before I opened my mouth. I set out to find a way to have a uniform that was signature yet versatile. I was inspired by the powerful series of 47 jumpsuits Andre 3000 wore back in 2014 during the Outkast 20th anniversary tour.
Why not walk through the world armored up with the writings that shape the concepts and ideas that are housed in the music? Each of the writers that I wear have given me the words to better understand who I am, what I am up against, and the lineage I am a part of. The Booklet Proof Vest functions as both homage and protective assemblage.
We are all living libraries. It’s important to make the Truth visible. In the midst of the surge in the banning of books and the erasure of archives, memory work is imperative to show our work. I mean the vest to be as confrontational as it is beautiful. It is also a statement piece about gun violence in the classroom. I might need to wear a vest teaching what I teach. I choose to arm myself with visible critical thought. As a professor and educator, I need protection in and out of the classroom as anti-intellectual sentiment continues to grow across our timelines & planet.
The Booklet Proof Vest is how I choose to mobilize language, drawing importance back to the written word and its power to shape us. The piece needed to be modular and ever-changing as each book we engage with changes us.
The books I chose to wear at my last performance were:
Tupac Shakur’s A Rose That Grew From Concrete,
Said The Shot Gun To The Head & Dead Emcee Scrolls by Saul Williams,
bell hooks’ The Will To Change & All About Love,
Kiese Laymon’s Heavy,
Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Toni Morrison’s Beloved,
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet,
Amiri Baraka’s Blues People,
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask,
Fariha Rosín’s How To Cure A Ghost,
Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ Heads of Colored People,
Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams,
aja monet’s My Mom Was A Freedom Fighter, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.
-d