GODBODY: Creating Without Shame Artist Panel

Hosted by Kamaria Weemz, This interdisciplinary artist panel will feature artists Ifé Franklin and Bashexo in conversation with Diovanna Obafunmilayo to explore, across mediums, the process and embodiment of creating queer Black art. Audiences will be invited to take part in a community-art making activity that will be on display as part of the Exhibition.

GODBODY asks the central question, "What does it mean to birth a body free of shame?"

With this as its foundation, the series engages the body as a site of emotional processing and vessel for the divinity of self. The rich symbolism and philosophy of the AfroCuban religion, La Regla de Ocha Lukumí, become the spiritual technology with which Diovanna Obafunmilayo engages herself.

Existing joyously, and in the process, conjuring a new sense of personhood, is the imperative. The series was made in the development process of the evening-length performance, GODBODY, a ritual opera, with the support of the Center for Performance Research and The Theater Offensive.

There are two key components to Godbody. There are performances November 13th & 14th and there is an accopanying exhibition of work that is on display daily at the Multicultural Arts Center. This ticketing page is for the artist panel November 9th only.

To attend the performance, please secure tickets through the event collection.

As part of this exhibition event, Diovanna Obafunmilayo invites audiences to be part of the ritual of GODBODY by engaging in the practice of live-art making. Through leaving impressions of their own body in oil pastel, strangers and friends alike create a group signature that they were here, a guestbook that becomes part of the larger body of work itself.

Additional Activity Days:

• Thursday, October 22nd | Public Opening
• Friday, November 13 | Godbody Performance
• Saturday, November 14 | Godbody Performance & Talk-Back

Kamaria Weemz is a Black, queer and nonbinary community cultivator, skilled facilitator, somatic practitioner and artist, who has lived and worked in the Boston area since birth. Their life’s work wades into the depths of Blackness, reveling in liberatory practices that heal across generations–backwards, contemporarily, and into the future. Kamaria’s tools for creating include training in somatics + trauma healing, embodied movement and a myriad of lineages and practices. Through Cultivate (a queer healing lab) and UnBoundBodies (a multimedia experimental community-based art collective) Kamaria works collaboratively to amplify QTBIPOC wellbeing and extend collective ecosystems of imagination.

Prior to Ujima, Kamaria was a Program Officer at the New England Foundation for the Arts supporting artists and the field at the intersection of Public Art and spatial justice.

Ifé Franklin's practice involves several genres of art-making inspired by slave narratives, dreams, dance, song, and visions. Over the last decade she has been developing The Indigo Project which honors the lives and history of formerly enslaved Africans/African-Americans who labored to produce materials that generated the wealth of nations. At the center are Franklin's Ancestor Slave Cabins which often incorporate Adire fabric, an indigo-dyed cotton cloth decorated using a resist technique from the Yoruba culture. These assemblages are built in collaboration with the community and cultivate connections that promote understanding and healing from the hard history of enslavement. In 2018 Franklin published, The Slave Narrative of Willie Mae, a fictional account of Willie Mae Lenox’s escape from slavery to freedom. The work was adapted into a short film in 2021.

Franklin's work has been exhibited at The Slave Dwellings Project in South Carolina, the North Charleston Arts Festival, and throughout the Boston area including, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Medicine Wheel Productions, Villa Victoria, The Eliot School of Applied Arts, Franklin Park, and the Royall House and Slave Quarters. Franklin’s work is in the permanent collection of The Fitchburg Museum of Art, Fitchburg, MA, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. Originally from Washington, D.C., Franklin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lives and works in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

bashexo was born and raised in south philly, pa. and currently lives in providence, ri. ze is a black trans non-binary transdisciplinary installation|movement performance creative who blends race & queer theory w/African diasporic spiritual traditions & aesthetics. zir’s creative practice is a care conjuring practice, inspired by the poetics of blackness and black queer aliveness. bashexo creates objects, immersive spaces, performances, and workshops that center the exploration of blackness| black queerness within ritualized liberatory care frameworks. zir’s socio-creative framework is rooted in ancestral reverence, feminism, queer theory, research, collectivity, love, experimentation, desire and other healing technologies. bashexo intentionally embraces multinodal and super-temporal relationships among ancestral wisdom, nature, black futurity, somatics, and liberation in order to create worlds (albeit temporaneously) where blackness and black queer folx can be, heal, and thrive.

In addition to ze's personal creative practice, bashexo is the co-founding member of unboundbodies art collective, a core member of the hotbits collective, member of playchurch co-op, and co-founder of variable (n).

Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier is a multimedia performance artist, Grammy-nominated songwriter, award-winning filmmaker, and poet, from Virginia Beach. Her major choreographic debut came in music video for Kehlani's "Altar." Her songwriting debut began with the gold-certified "After Hours." Her debut experimental dance poetry film, "When We Arrive As Flowers," has been screened at over 25 film festivals since its debut in 2022.

Based in New York, she continues to produce work that fuses all of these creative practices under an umbrella of spirituality, liberation, inspiration, and women's empowerment.

Info: Walk the gallery and experience the GODBODY exhibition. This exhibition is the companion piece to the GODBODY: a ritual opera, opening November 13th. Please secure tickets to the performance via the Eventbrite collection.

Info: Hosted by Kamaria Weemz, This interdisciplinary artist panel will
feature artists Ifé Franklin and Bashexo in conversation with Diovanna
Obafunmilayo to explore, across mediums, the process and embodiment of
creating queer Black art. Audiences will be invited to take part in a community-art
making activity that will be on display as part of the Exhibition. We will begin with a gallery walk of the work at 6:30pm and the panel will begin promptly at 7:30pm. This panel is open to the public. Please secure tickets separately via the Eventbrite collection.

Event venue & nearby stays

Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second Street, Cambridge, United States

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