Salena Braye-Bulls (’23), Editor-in-Chief
Author’s Note: Earlier this semester, I had the opportunity to sit down with DC-based artist Anike Robinson, a phenom whose exhibition Gris Gris Gurlz is currently on display in the Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. This piece could not have been completed without kindness from Anike Robinson, wisdom from Arturo Lindsay, support from the Stone Center staff, and inspiration from the Gris Gris Gurlz themselves.
Salena: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Anike: So, I always describe myself as a carnival or kind of a circus. I’ve done a lot of different things and I didn’t know until recently that a lot of those things would come full circle. I always loved art and I loved writing, but never considered myself an artist. I just considered myself creative and then I started doing other things like face painting, body painting, and henna. I would literally go to carnivals, and we’d set up paint like, you know, a thousand faces. At one point, I decided I’m a teacher by trade, so I went to graduate school to teach sixth through 12th grade. I’ve taught English and history for the better part of 30 years. It’s hard to believe. Everyone was getting laid off in 2010 and I decided to take one of those jobs where you teach people to paint while they’re drinking. Maybe it was a push to really see if I was able to paint what I could see. It was a practice. I wasn’t good at the painting part all the time, but the painting plus the joking? The entertainment? It turned out I was good at that. I learned a lot about people and how people learn in that process. So, I started working with students. I called the program Books to Brushes – we would take a lesson plan or book, talk about it for fifteen or twenty minutes and then do an art project based on that. A lot of the books were anchored in social justice and featured different artists that they might not have been introduced to. Everybody knew about Picasso but maybe not Basquiat. I would figure out how the kids learn best. Then I knew that if I did that, I would learn how to best teach them English or history. I did get nonprofit status, but then COVID happened, so I haven’t been able to do anything with that recently. When I was doing that, I would bring my “carnival van” and set my studio up and break it down at the schools. I’ve had a lot of hysterical jobs and serious jobs that are hysterical, like teaching middle and high schoolers. I am still teaching part time and I’m in grad school. I decided right before COVID hit like, let’s see if I get in art school and I got in. I only applied to one and I got in in Baltimore – The Maryland Institute College of Arts. I surprised myself and scared myself, and now I’m in my 4th year of grad school and it turns out that a lot of these little things that I’ve been doing here and there sort of all came together. I started to realize that I did actually have my own practice. I’ve always struggled, for better or worse, with my self-esteem. I was just like, “you know, I’m such a lazy person,” but I realized that it’s not that I’m lazy. I just wasn’t always doing the work I loved. The one thing that you might get about, you know, being a writer is those things from your life that enter your work. For better or worse. I always say that art is good medicine. I have stickers that I stick on almost everything that came here that say that. They say “Art is good medicine” to remind myself that that is the way to heal and to celebrate.
Salena: That makes sense. I heavily relate to what you said. The things that you want to write about or create are inextricably linked to your daily life and thoughts.
Anike: How can it not be? You know, dealing with race, culture, sexism, that creation was my way to sort of unpack these ordeals. Now I have ways of dealing with it in the moment. My favorite thing to say now is “what do you mean by that?” Then I wait.
Salena: Yeah, it’s like “Let’s unpack that.”
Anike: Exactly.
Salena: You mentioned thinking about art and your practice as ways to heal and celebrate. Do you think that’s true of your exhibition, Gris Gris Gurlz, that’s currently at the Stone Center?
Anike: The first thing I think is that I’m terrified. On Saturday, you might have seen me talking and whispering to the dolls and kissing the dolls. I know that it looks and seems really crazy as an adult, but it brings me back to being a child. My mother gave me all kinds of toys. They were never gender specific; she was very serious about that. We used to act out plays and ideas and all those other things with our friends. Somehow at least doing the dolls started out as practice – just trying something new. Then I really got into it because it led me back into creating stories and storytelling. One of my goals, when I was much younger in junior high, was that I was going to write my first book by 21. 21 is still super young. I mean really young. After I graduated college, I worked at the Washington Post for a little while and then I was like, “fuck this.” I thought that when I went to college, like, everybody would be cool and nicer than I thought. When I got to the job, I thought people would be different there. Every step of the way it was like people were just rank and petty. Working at the newspaper was a little aggressive and I didn’t like it very much.
Salena: Would you say that it was jarring?
Anike: Because of my background, a bit. My parents were both social justice activists. My dad and my mother created a nonprofit called Trans Africa. That work was like their first child, and then I came. The anti-apartheid movement was their first passion and because of that, I had a job as a child. My job was fighting apartheid, and I was like, five. Then at seven, it was licking envelopes or making copies and I always had something to do. I got to meet a lot of people and I got to be in a lot of places and hear a lot of things. With this exhibition, when I got back to some of the storytelling, a lot of it had to do with what I saw growing up and the amazing people I met. Like, I met Nelson Mandela. I thought I just knew he would never get out of prison, and when he did, I was just so in awe. A lot of the dolls carry some of those stories, a lot of those memories, a lot of those ideas. My mother did her thesis for one of her degrees on early South African history. So, a lot of these stories I would hear at seven and at nine and at ten years old were about 16th century South Africa. Without my knowing it and sometimes with my knowing it, all that stuff gets woven into what a doll might look like and each of their stories. I think…there might be a book. I don’t know what kind of book. I have no idea, but they definitely have a story and there’s a larger story to tell. In some ways, I see that it manifested because I had some people that I really cared about who told me that my work wasn’t compelling. And I was like, yeah, I mean, they’re just these little weird dolls. Then I changed my mind. I was like, “It doesn’t matter whether you think they’re compelling because they bring me joy and they bring other people joy.” They creep them out, too. It’s an absolute dream to have my art come up in a real place. Once I had it in a café and I was like, that’s the end of the dream. I just kept going though ’cause, you know, you’re compelled to do whatever that thing is that you love. And even though I was bad at it, each year, each month, each decade, I would learn a new skill set. I learned in art school that you can just say you’re an artist if you want to. The rest is learning different skill sets. That’s taken a lot of fear out of saying that I’m an artist. It’s taken me a long time to say.
Salena: I will say that I have an aversion to dolls. I think most people do. But through holding them and working with them and positioning them – as corny as it may sound – there was a transfer of creative energy that helped me overcome my aversion. It was like “yeah, I’m a little creeped out, but I feel the stories here.”
Anike: Oh, yeah. I go to get the dolls we need, and I’ve spoken about this before – I go to thrift stores. I don’t buy new dolls. That’s silly. We have so much stuff in this country, it’s ridiculous. I can go find them and they look raggedy and rough. Sometimes it gets creepy with the porcelain clown dolls. I enjoy just taking them apart. I leave the brown and black dolls for the children because there’s only a few. I also sometimes go to places and release certain dolls. There’s a couple of places where I go up and down the East Coast, primarily in Virginia, and they have antiques and almost always somewhere in there they’ve got a mammy doll and a sambo doll.
Salena: It’s so interesting because I’m from Alabama and there are similarities between Alabama and Virginia that I think people like to ignore. Thinking about it though, I’ve seen way more lawn jockeys and sambo figurines at those stores than I’ve ever seen Black and Brown dolls to play with, and that feels wrong.
Anike: It is wrong. It’s totally wrong. The overarching idea is how can we have all these dolls that are supposed to represent black people, but they are not at all for our enjoyment? They’re not at all for our education or soothing or magical goodness or anything. They are to subjugate and oppress us and remind us.
The dolls themselves that I’ve been working on, the Gris Gris Gurlz, are running from their imprisonment – which some people call plantations. They’re running from death camps to maroon societies to find autonomy, and so the exhibition does have some historical significance from my learning about some of these maroon societies. Each one is imbued with a different kind of power or ability. They’re going to have the ability to time travel starting in the year 1783, their job is to save the future. It’s very based in Afrofuturism. I do love sci-fi and, and so I am trying to construct these smaller stories for the dolls. I’ve been working with Mo Manning, who’s a former student of mine, but he’s in his 30s now, so he’s a former student many years ago. He does my sound work, so we do a lot of recording together. I love working with people in general and doing creative stuff. Arturo wrote the curator’s statement, and I was actually shook when I read it. At the end of it, he wrote – and I’m paraphrasing – “don’t be surprised if you see this on Netflix or Disney.” I half wanted to cry because I was terrified. Also, it would never be Disney. There’s more. There’s more to the story, and somehow these dolls are igniting these stories to come out. I’m afraid and excited because I know how much work it’s going to be but I love it.
Image by and courtesy of Anike Robinson
Salena: I have so many thoughts. I think when you mentioned the time travel aspect of the dolls’ stories, I immediately thought of Afrofuturism. I also think that it’s more fundamental than that. These are futurist pieces that are reflective of your own journey, new beginning, and creative continuation.
Anike: Because I’m a history teacher, I’m always trying to get the kids to think about history as not that far away. It’s like, when my grandma died, she was ninety nine and a half years old. She was very clear she didn’t want to be a hundred years old. She was born in 1919, the year women got the right to vote. That moment is only like two people away when you start to think about it. There’s this place that my family and I have gone to for years. It’s a very small beach in Virginia. It’s very much in the country because when everybody comes around, folks are like “Are we going to be okay down here?” And I’m like, “it’s fine.” I learned from a neighbor, one of the people that’s been down there for generations, that it was the land that was part of the forty acres. It’s all swampy and really shitty land, but the people cleared it and farmed on it. I started going there when I was around 5 years old, and my mom started going when she was about ten. Now white folks are trying to buy a bunch of it back. It is beautiful now, but I know what they had to clear because I remember what it looked like before. There’s a very small cemetery there and the neighbor told me that his great great aunt was born into slavery, and this was the land where she lived and died. She’s buried there and I’ve written a bunch about that, and I feel a lot about that every time I go down there. Sometimes, I take dolls. We go in the water, and I pray in it. I put my paintings in the water, and I pray. My parents were not at all religious when I was growing up, but still something compelled me to pray to something or someone. All of this with the dolls has heightened my own spirituality and my own willingness and desire to learn more and trust myself more. It isn’t easy in a society where people say, “You’re a woman, you’re Black, you don’t look a certain way or weigh a certain thing,” to say, “I’m going to trust myself,” and be okay with some of these decisions. I’m also going to work hard to be okay with what people don’t like. The first thing I focused on when I went to the gallery on Saturday was what was turned around – not which works were facing out. I wanted to know what was nixed, but I tried to focus on not blocking my blessings and being grateful for everything. Then, I said to myself that I want to remember this moment where I’m feeling all these things, feeling afraid and everything else. I said I’m even grateful for the rock bottom, because if it wasn’t for the rock bottom, I would not be strong enough to overcome it. That’s some magical shit right there. You realize that it may take longer and be harder, but you can fight your way back out of a place you never imagined yourself being in. It does make it harder, though, when you’re living with capitalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia…but we’ve left something good and powerful here. It is unbelievable what’s happening in our country. I imagine my parents thought the same thing in the ‘60s and ‘70s with the murders of Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr. And Medgar Evers.
Salena: On the note of reclamation, what does it mean to you to reclaim space and what does it mean to reclaim a sense of joy in the face of unprecedented, abysmal times?
Anike: I remember this one guy in my graduate program who was doing a lot of work around all the protests and, you know, toppling capitalism and the white patriarchy. But he wasn’t participating in the art school program. He wanted one of the spaces where we were going to have the first show I would ever install, which was this summer. I wanted that space, but he wasn’t there, and I thought about how he hadn’t been there for weeks. I didn’t know if he was coming and I didn’t want to start trouble, so I just said I’ll take this [space] over here. Later, my professor said, “you better take up some space,” whether he was there or not. He told me “You need to make some noise and don’t get smaller. That doesn’t serve anybody, and it really doesn’t serve the people around you. There’s no point in disappearing.”
Salena: You’re right. Some people – including me and some of my peers – struggle with this impulse to shrink ourselves in conversations, the work that we do, or even in certain social settings. What would you say to people who are constantly trying to fight this urge? I think the dolls and the portraits could be read as a demand to be seen – to push back against that impulse.
Anike: Physically and biologically, we are made up of all the elements of the universe. So, I think one thing that I hope is true is that the universe is in us, and we are in it. And it’s pretty big. We are made up of all the elements of the universe. That’s what we’re made of. That doesn’t answer the shrinking question but take a breath. Lift your shoulders. Look at what it is in your life that you know you are good at and will be good at. One of my friends is a musician, and he said you need to put a reminder on your phone that says, “I’m a bad motherfucker.” Twice a day. Another one was “You got it. It is your time.” I had to change the messages, because they don’t fit right now but they did when I was doing the work. Those are some little things to remind us that shrinking is not what we’re here for. I am positive that our ancestors were not here for that either. When some jumped off the boat or tried to kill themselves, they didn’t do it because they wanted us to be small. They did it because they wanted to be whole, and they did not want to be reduced to something smaller or subjugated. More importantly, those who endured, those who stayed on the boat, those who lived, those who had children, those who fought it all – I’m positive that they would want you to be everything you could be and absolutely more. I do believe that they are around us, with us. We are not on their shoulders. We are shoulder to shoulder. I’m bringing all of them with me. I want to bring all my ancestors, all my people, whether they are in physical form or someplace else in the country. They’re rooting for me and cheering for me. I know that our ancestors did not put us here to be small. They did not die for us to be small. They did not clear the land for us to be small. You know, Nat Turner didn’t have the greatest plan – if you ever go to the site, you’ll see there’s no way to get out. But Nat didn’t do all of that for us to be small. So why should we be? We shouldn’t. Not at all.
Salena: Anike Robinson, thank you for your time and your magic.
Anike: Thank you.
— You can keep up with Anike and her art on by following her on Instagram (@beinganike). Gris Gris Gurlz is on display at the Stone Center until December 10th.
