ALISHA B. WORMSLEY
Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work is about collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of color. Wormsley’s work has been honored and supported with a number of awards and grants to support programs: The People Are The Light, afronaut(a) film and performance series, Homewood Artist Residency (recently received the mayor’s public art award), the Children of NAN video art series, There Are Black People in the Future body of work. Recently awarded a fellowship with the Monument Lab. These projects and works have exhibited widely. Namely, the Andy Warhol Museum, Octavia Butler conference at Spelman University, Carnegie Museum of Art, Johannesburg SA, HTMLES in Montreal, Project Row House, the Houston Art League, Rush Art gallery in NY, and the Charles Wright museum in Detroit. Currently, Wormsley is working on a number of public art projects and exhibitions, namely, The People Are the Light Publication, August Wilson Park, ArtUp South Africa at the Mattress Factory, and Pittsburgh’s Market Square. Wormsley is now working on Sibyls Shrine, a residency for black mothers and the Children of Nan Survival Guide and instructional video for black women. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and is a Presidential Post Doctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.
IG: @alishabwormsley @sibylsshrine
Before this text was a billboard it was an archival project. In Homewood, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, this work began as a mantra, a ritual of collecting objects, printing them with the text, There Are Black People In The Future, and encased them in resin.
Writer Tameka Cage Conley writes about TABPITF in 2017, she says, “When we say the “future,” it could mean anything: grown children, life on another planet, retirement, safe drinking water for everyone on earth. We might recall iconic films or books that dare us to dream a world so unlike ours, it can only be called “fiction,” even as we pant for that world and place ourselves in it. In the future, our faces, limbs, and desires dance on water. Or, they are mounted in concrete.”
Now inspired by Westmoreland county, I see a community protecting their legacy, holding on to their own image. I want to pay homage to the past. Giving thanks to the dreams of our ancestors that ensured the text long before it was written by me.
Special thanks to Joanna T. Moyar and Anita Zanke at the Westmoreland Historical Society.
MAKE OUR DIFFERENCES OUR STRENGTHS 