MOVING IMAGES
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motherwit: family museum
motherwit: family museum is a gallery exhibit and performance activation that invites community to archive personal histories as a practice of documentation and speculation. The project is primarily a 2-D art show and performance/activation, which can be scaled to the venue.
Rooted in documentary poetics and altar work, my creative process invokes both ritual and research, transforming speculative genealogies into poetic and visual experiences.
My practice engages the absence of personal imagery as a generative force, turning to literary “aunties” such as August Wilson’s Aunt Esther, Toni Cade Bambara’s Minnie Ransom, and Toni Morrison’s Pilate Dead for ancestral wisdom and affirmation of Black American queer existence. Through these references, I construct a speculative family tree—one that remaps legacy through the lens of reverence, recovery, and reimagination.
Photo Credit: WMS the Sultan
PROJECTS
DIGITAL COLLAGE
DIGITAL COLLAGE
PROJECTS
My work testifies to the existence of two under-acknowledged peoples: Black American New Englanders and Black queer femmes. It’s about insisting on our right to self define our past and present, beyond the erasure and elitism of dominant culture and the institutions that reproduce its deluded beliefs. It’s about situating my experience growing up dislocated in the suburbs as a micro-migration in a long history of departure, diaspora, and flight that connects me to a myriad of lineages and communities.
I resist the gaze that tries to classify me among respectable talented tenth Black folk, coded as straight, educated, and ascending. I claim every inch of my queer, wayward, working class townie identity. Drawing from a rich archive of 1000+ vernacular photographs from the 1930s-1970s and domestic ephemera—hand mirrors, cigarette cases, vintage phones—I create diptychs, digital collages, performances, and animations that center Black interiority and femininity.
Materials: Found photographs, print advertisements, and objects from artist's collection. Dimensions variable.
STATEMENT
Full interactive portfolio available by request
BOOKS
"John’s method in this notable debut is incantational. She mixes court transcripts and dashboard recordings with prose poems and personal narratives to create poetic testament. The book is a memorial to Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland, to black transwomen and more lives taken early. In Testify, there is not much time. John’s book offers poetry as solace, knowing it is only a temporary salve for the pain. 'Eventually you’ll develop / an inner compass to navigate / this path,' one narrator says to her son. 'I am laying the groundwork / to keep you alive long enough to get there.'"
- Nick Ripatrazone, TESTIFY Review in The Millions' Must-Read Poetry: August 2017
"The poems [in Collateral] range from personal histories of male entitlement to the speaker’s body, to a simple list of names of dead black women, to the words spoken between two people during an arrest. Simone John, like Claudia Rankine and Charles Reznikoff before her, has a gift for locating her historical moment’s most troubling details and presenting them plainly, using linebreaks with astonishing deftness. ...“Black rage cannot be reworded. // A poem cannot be paraphrased,” writes John in “Ars Poetica,” a claim to poetic distillation which she honors throughout the book, each poem making a single argument with its own stark ending, culminating in the final poem, “The Poet’s Eulogy,” which casts the author herself in the role of dead black woman. Collateral is a profoundly moving book, and gives us much to look forward to with the release of her full-length collection, Testify, from Octopus in 2017."
- Mary Austin Speaker, Collateral Review in Rain Taxi Fall 2016 Print Edition
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