Listening to Images — An interview with Legacy Russell 10.11.2025

American writer and Executive Director & Chief Curator at The Kitchen, one of New York City’s oldest non-profit multi-disciplinary, avant-garde performance and experimental art institutions, Russell is committed to a rigorous survey of image construction, deconstruction and reconstruction in the digital age and the historical framework that informs these materials.

In her new book, BLACK MEME, Russell explores the construct, culture, and material of the meme as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor: One of my favorite sites of remembrance was the Zora Neale Hurston Arts and Humanities Festival in Eatonville, Florida that my mother took me to every year. It cemented this inextricable relationship between art and Blackness for me. I know you grew up in East Village with a photographer father and a mother who was a gerontologist and active member of the community. What was your relationship to Black art and artists as a child?

Legacy Russell: My father was born and raised in Harlem and moved downtown to take up the life of an artist in the east village. That was how my mother and father met. There was a spirit of Black art and creativity in my home. I reflect on my mother, now that both of my parents have passed away. In many ways her work as a community gerontologist, in terms of community organizing and advocacy for families and elders was something that was part of an artful remit. I think that my mother was someone who was incredibly experimental and ahead of her time and in her thinking about the specific care in relationship to the Black psyche. I grew up in a very diverse and amazing community. The East Village in the period of time that I was being raised in was very different than it is now. And I think my parents arrived there because it was an affordable place to live and allowed for a kind of cross pollination across many different types of people. The area I lived in was on St. Mark’s Place is the kind of vibrating string for a wide range of movements of poetry and dance and punk rock, music and sound experimental media.

Specific to Black art, there was a period of time with my father where he had to make some decisions around what the creative life of an artist would look like. The work that he did in thinking through how his legacy would continue, in terms of his practice, was one that was largely unsung across the course of his life but he continued to do that work in a very special community of artists. Many of whom were Black people. To be in dialogue with folks of a different generation has been really meaningful in a way that I’ve kept current in my conversations with my father even though he’s passed on. I look forward to continuing to carry on my father’s archives specifically because this has also been critical as part of my life’s work. It is a great moment to continue to consider how that work and archive can have additional lives and think about where those materials can be placed and how they can have a different visibility. This was also a moment in New York where institutional practices were still navigating many of the tiers of segregation in terms of race and class across the city. For me, now being at The Kitchen and then formally at the Studio Museum in Harlem, these are two institutions that I went to with my parents when I was growing up. The ways I was directed towards Black art and creative community were in many ways shaped via those visions.

JLET: Picking up from the archives, in scholar Christina Sharpe’s book Ordinary Notes (2023) which is a collection of 248 notes about black life in the United States in “Note 72” she writes “some notes arrive from the grave.” Your work deals directly with Black visual archives, and I was struck by your writing on the black and white film Lime Kiln Field Day (1913). Do you do any kind of internal repositioning to be in contact with archival material? My current doctoral research is on grieving, mourning and death rituals within the African diaspora. How grief lives and functions in the physical body, in diasporic memory and in society. The research is on how this collective grief can function as a witness to history. My work takes me to many different archives and when I’m working in the archives, it requires a shift in my disposition as a researcher. I have to tune out some of the academic training I’ve been given and tune into a different frequency to be able to sort through what is ‘useful.’ What kind of radical witnessing must we conduct in order to receive these notes from the grave?

LR: From the perspective of “notes from the grave”, my name is Legacy. So, in many ways my entire embodiment is holding all the ancestors that came before me. Legacy has been at the forefront of defining many parts of how I think about the world and exist in my work.

With Lime Kiln Field Day, my work began with looking at (filmmaker) Garrett Bradley and her phenomenal work which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem. Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum) and I worked on this project together to present Garrett’s film. This resurrected Lime Kiln Field Day—which was a really important document of Black intimacies and Black conviviality that came out of a period of time when many folks thought the only images of Blackness that were being circulated were of Black violence. The idea that this imagination could be platformed and expanded really challenges the core assumptions around archives and also helps us better position different models of power that situate themselves within archival practice. The things that we end up seeing aren’t often a choice. Those are things that do not happen by accident. It’s because someone has chosen to put them there. That’s something that is really important when we think about Black somatics and this informs BLACK MEME overall. This idea of, as you said, what is carried with us in a physical form. The text of BLACK MEME is something that explores that in many ways through and beyond our screens and digitality. But the way in which the Black meme is defined at its originating point is thinking about the data material—and Black people as data—and what that has meant. Taking the arc from the Middle Passage and thinking about the transfer of intellectual frameworks, cultural properties, ideas and imaginations that were inside the movement of people by force from one place to another. That in itself is a moving archive. And what we think about the way in which those things have been fractured and distributed over time. That becomes something that has to be contended with when we ask questions about models, power and systems of visibility and erasure within archival practice.

Within Christina’s [Sharpe] point, of “notes from the grave”, I have felt very much so. As the child of a Black artist, who was raised in a Black radical tradition, it is something that I take very personally. Thinking about what it means to shape an archive and to remember Black life. Because I lived and experienced firsthand what it means to be inside of an artistic life, a life of struggle. In many ways my father, being deeply politically engaged and also creatively invested, struggled a lot. That was something I witnessed as a child growing up but also have felt motivated by. A great hope with some of the work that I do is allow(ing) for a different idea of how Black folks can be remembered creatively throughout the course of their lives, by thinking differently about citation and asking questions around the framework of the archive in relationship to the footnotes and how these different materials can allow for memory conversation, discourse and dialogue to be brought in.

This is immensely motivating in the first book that I wrote, Glitch Feminism (Verso Books, 2020), thinking about Black and queer life and asking questions like ‘what does it mean to get your flowers?’ in a time where we are still walking on this earth. There is a tradition, and I’m calling it a tradition because I think it is something that has been shaped and assumed over time, of Black folks, queer folks, historically dispossessed peoples being remembered after they are no longer on this earth.

The scholarship and ways in which their importance is registered in a cultural and social remit then become something that in hindsight, I would hope, for a different way of art history to function. That comes with us taking a different approach to visual culture by asking ‘why is it that we choose to make certain parts of history accelerate and not others?’ Time is significant. I know this is something you’ve been thinking about as well. A Black memory within a contemporary discourse is disfigured as we think about points of recognition. We see so many different examples of Black artists who had to rush through those points of recognition in the final parts of their lives.

So, I don’t say it’s a vendetta on behalf of my father, but I think it is something that I take very personally. I would hope for a way in which some of that history can be written and also changed and transformed over time. And then that becomes its own exercise art historically.

JLET: The book, BLACK MEME, looks at American visual culture relating to Blackness from the 1900s until now. I’ve been researching how Western linear timelines are confronted by African cyclical time structures. In terms of my research on death, Western linear timelines propose that there is a past, present and future whereas in cyclical time structures, life and death move in an everlasting circle or cycle that is connected. I’m fascinated by poet-scholar Leda Maria Martins’ spiral time, writer Sheila Smith McKoy´s limbo time as well as Black time, genealogical time, ontological time, to name a few. How does memetic time operate? And what other timelines is it in conversation with?

LR: Black genealogical time is a complicated clock. There’s so much that we don’t know within the arc of hyphenated Black histories and diasporic histories. Black genealogical diasporic time operates at a fracture, accelerates and then slows down. There are so many things that have been lost or redacted because, as you said, so many had to be carried on by the individual. And then, if the individual is no longer walking this earth, if that memory has not been recounted or documented in that way, it causes gaps in the record, if you will. The framework of the meme assumes a certain level of speed, in terms of a hyper-acceleration and a hyper-production of images. Part of the interest in asking what a Black meme is—and how we can look at representations of Blackness as it moves from 1900 to present day—is to imagine a pre-history before computers as we now know and define them and to acknowledge that much of what we use to read images has been predicated on Black life and Black death. This is something that is meaningful because what that looks like in terms of memetic time is that Blackness itself is its own ontological force that in fact actually intervenes into memetic time and expands or contracts it based on moments that we are existing in in history. That, for me, is a unique possibility—because what it means is that Blackness can be both an expansive force but also a disruptive one. It can help us both think differently around the way that we absorb images and also our responsibility to them.

JLET: Thinking about the ways in which we absorb images and our responsibility to them leads me to the section on Emmit Till in the book. The way you position Mamie Till’s decision to show her son’s image in conversation with author Tina Campt’s seminal book Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017) is such an important note because it highlights how images can propel movements.

LR: This is such an urgent text. Tina’s work has been influential in so many different ways to so many folks because it speaks to this idea that not everything exists within the readership of a frame. It is instructive in helping us understand that ‘listening to images’ is also a uniquely Black exercise. There are parts of this that are embedded in a Black diaspora because of the fact that there is information that has been left behind, lost, or did not travel into our current future. Within this, I think it’s meaningful to think about ‘what does it mean to listen to an image and have that be part of an archival practice?’ Part of that is about a speculative imagination.

JLET: In your presentation at Atlanta Contemporary in 2020, the discussion around zombism was fascinating. Particularly the Haitian model of zombism taking two forms: the individual stripped of their autonomy and having a body with no soul, and the empowered individual who has a soul and perhaps loses their body. It reminds me of scholar LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant’s theories on the Bodiless Soul/Soulless Body dichotomy in her book Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Duke University Press, 2014). She writes about how for African Americans in the US, at the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade, learning Christianity was a punishable offense. The idea was that if the enslaved learned the Bible and its tenets, they would identify themselves as God’s children and thus have a soul. The atrocities that were inflicted upon them would therefore be morally reprehensible. So, the resulting theory was that the enslaved were devoid of souls, like animals, and could be treated as such. The idea of the soulless body. Then after emancipation, one of the big tactics of assimilation was learning Christianity. The idea of being saved, of being brought into civilized life. Missionaries and religious leaders believed that newly emancipated Black people did have souls, and they needed to be saved. But their mortal position should stay the same. It didn’t matter what happened to their bodies, as long as their souls were saved. The most important life was ‘the after life’.

The idea of the bodiless soul. How does the complicated duality of a bodiless soul/soulless body figure into Black memetic vernacular? What are the contemporary transfigurations of Black zombified figures?

LR: Within the text of zombieism there is an analysis of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983). This felt significant because the intersection of this idea of the Black body and questions of the soul in relationship to the histories, traditions and discourse around the ‘cyborg’ has been significant. The dispossession of humanity has been its own tactic and strategy within supremacy. The way in which we have complicated discussions within techno futures, talking about this idea of being post-human as maybe an emancipatory frame, as possibility, is something that I think has always been an uneasy topic when we think about Black people because of the reasons that you outlined. Even being perceived as human or not. The struggle has been to be recognized within the taxonomy of humanity in its first place. There is a frame around Black laboring and Black intellectual property which leads to really interesting questions. The very idea that it could be set apart from the physical self and then resurrected to a new form to perform indefinitely. A big part of Black memetic form is also thinking about where one [the Black body] is set apart from the physical body. And/or one is merged with. The zombie becomes a great representation within that.

Within the text of BLACK MEME, I’m really interested in the ways in which the framework of the zombie becomes a symbol and the ways in which there is a sort of rebellion against certain ideals of what Black hyper-performance needs to look like. But also certain assumptions of the archetype of the Black superhuman which is a version of the human that may be beyond feeling. At the same time the Black zombie becomes something that can also be possessed. It becomes its own political frame, specific to BLACK MEME, because the readership of that is looking at the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic. What does it mean to have a moment where one of the most viral forms of visual Blackness in the case of Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video set into the context where the language of zombieism was being used to pathologize a wide population of Black people who were critically ill? And the failures of the state to work a protection around that.

Seeing where these two things are in conflict with each other in terms of thinking about the readership of Listening to Images, the visual culture of Blackness and how of course Blackness is circulated becomes important as a motivating force within much of this work. What does it even mean to be a Black cyborg? Is it possible to have a liberated Black cyborg in this period now? Is the cyborg—which has been uplifted and upheld in many ways a political, social and cultural imagination and also within the histories of cyber feminism, which is significant—what would it look like to think about a cyborgian frame that has a different type of consciousness?

JLET: Thinking about levels of discomfort. In your poem, AAAVEnues, you write:

can’t we leave these cute lil colombus-wannabes

alone!!!!!

all they wanna do is blast quavo in their digital

blackface // a proliferation of

memes screaming YAS

those forefathers weren’t my daddy

you steal from us every day //

don’t think that I missed you pocketing that Vine™

affect,

i’m dead i’m not dumb

Does writing poetry have any curative effects for you and your practice?

LR: When I was kid, I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. Many folks who have read my work are often drawn to parts of the presence of poetry within it. Whether it’s international or not, I start with some poetry in every part of my writing. I spend a lot of time thinking about the poetic form and how language can be broken and remade. I’ve been recognized more in the frame of art history and visual culture, though. I’ve kept poetry kinda to myself. It’s something that I return to for inspiration, and I have continued to write for years. I’m an avid reader and writer of poetry. I find theory-based work to be quite restrictive. Within the imagination of writing and the rules of the academy, poetry has been the place that you go to see, that in fact, everything we are schooled in, within the rules of the academy and academic writing, in fact does not have to be. It is totally constructed. When you look at the work of [poets] Morgan Parker or Danez Smith, these are folks who have shown us that, in whatever form, that there is an economy of language that can command and expand and reframe entirely how the world works. I see much of—in terms of a Black feminist tradition—when we think about the language of Black feminism, that it has drawn so much from Black poets, and I also think that in itself is really electrifying. It shows us that through many frames of Black feminism there has been such a generation after generation struggle to even be recognized within certain frames of academy and to have one’s own language built and to be acknowledged as being within authority. The framework of Black language, its dialect, how it changes over time is also something that can be emancipated and sticky and tactile and really exciting and dynamic within poetry that can be flattened within a theoretical frame. You see [author, theorist] bell hooks, for example, who really fight for a different type of vision there. Or [poet] Gwendolyn Brooks. [Writer] Toni Morrison. These are folks who advocate for a proliferation of a different type of archetype and having that be something that can kind of carry forward and move in spirals throughout the world. That’s something that I love about returning to poetry and also thinking about through a frame of fiction and experimental fiction. Is there a way in which the ongoing work in writing—through books, essays, writing about artists—can exist in a different type of language? And how can that be expressed or articulated in a way that can ground us outside of the academy? Bring art back into life, and have that be something that feels like we truly own it and also that we can belong inside of it. That’s the reason that poetry has always been at the center. And maybe like a secret superpower or like a home that I go to when I enjoy breaking away from the linearity of certain models and thoughts and practices.

JLET: Right here on my desk I have these two books (holds up a copy of the Penguin Modern Poets series Your Family, Your Body: Malika Booker, Sharon Olds, Warsan Shire [2017] and a copy of Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding The Ghosts [1997]). Studying poetic language and construction has been a really useful tool.

LR: It’s a really interesting challenge when we think about language overall. I felt so stuck in my graduate studies. I felt like we were doing so much to hyper-perform some version of excellence and that the expectations around that didn’t always speak to how it felt to be inside the study of the work. Also how it felt to be in real conversation with artists. I’m sure all folks can remember the moment when they experienced a work or saw a performance or interacted creatively in physical or digital space and were transformed by those things. Inside of an academic frame, there’s something that is hyper-desaturated and keeps us from being able to fully resurrect that experience. Sometimes it’s not actually possible to describe it in full sentences. Sometimes it’s about the synapses of your brain just moving between different points, the compilation of those different flashes of light that help to illuminate the full picture. That’s what poetry does for me. Growing up in the East Village, there are so many amazing folks that were working inside of poetry that were important. The HOWL! Festival as well as the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival were some within the same site of [the drag festival] Wigstock. These are major festival moments where poets, musicians, queer performers would convene inside of Tompkins Square Park and be able to meet one another. It was a very different type of reality than some of what we are often schooled in that these were movements that existed separately. They did not correspond or speak to one another when in reality what’s really incredible in looking at history and questions of peership and of cohorts—folks were talking to each other. The musicians were listening to the poets and poets were answering to movement-research and thinking about different models of performance and that as a circuit is something that has a really rich lineage. In this moment now, it’s also something that is really important to remember. Especially now politically when we are constantly being told what the value systems are of these disciplines and if they should or should not exist.

JLET: There are so many nerdy avenues that I could go down right now!

LR: Thank you for your questions. I’m so excited about your work. It’s a really big task to take up talking about mourning in archives. ‘Witness’ was a word that you used, which is really important because so much of what is meaningful about writing about Black art and Black life is being exactly that, a witness—and acknowledging that someone even existed in the first place. There is something about that which is really emotional and meaningful because there are so many folks that leave this earth or go far too long without ever really knowing the value of their practice, feeling as if they are the only ones who know that value. Recently I went to see the Jack Whitten (b. 1939–d. 2018) exhibition “Messenger” at MoMA here in New York. I mention Whitten because Whitten is also in another exhibition that I just opened, called “Code Switch” which looks at histories of African-American diaspora and technology. The exhibition was massive. It was the most thorough and comprehensive exhibition and the only thing that I kept thinking, was if only this had occurred just five or six years ago. To be in the moment when an artist just misses their exhibition on that scale and recognition. Perhaps these things happen exactly as they should, but I also appreciate that Whitten along with so many artists was hiding in plain sight, working fiercely and ferociously alongside so many incredible peers, and this is the first time that many folks have even heard of him. This is why I think that witness is so important because art history is all about witnessing, and when we ask about Eurocentric art history—what has it taught us—who have been the masters or the folks who have prioritized within this narrative; all of this has been an agenda. It has been a series of conscious decisions about who will and will not be recognized. I feel very determined and recognize your determination as well in making plain the agenda. I don’t think that’s something to disguise. Art history exists and has the narrative because of a very specific agenda and in order for it to change and in order for visual culture to love us differently we have to have a similar agenda that is kind of willing to go up against a long history of failed witness.