BRILLIANT DARKNESS 

ABOUT

Brilliant Darkness was a public forum with artists and activists about mental health issues in their lives and across the country. Inspired by the psychological trauma inflicted on migrant families at America’s southern border, heightened feelings of depression, anger, and instability reported among communities across the United States, and the tragic, high-profile deaths of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

The stigma that surrounds our mental and emotional health is astonishing when you consider how many of us are grappling with heightened bouts of anxiety, depression, mania, and fear. Those conditions can spring from an array of factors, including our genetic wiring, which may contain data from historic traumas; the blunt impact of present-day racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, greed, and other forms of inhumanity; and the kinds of sudden, devastating losses that can arrive for anyone at any time.

Then there is the psychological harm that is done for the sake of spectacle. The tearing apart of immigrant families, the criminalization of asylum seekers, the relentless policing of black and brown people, the unsubtle endorsements of White Nationalism. Also the travel bans and mass deportations, the calls to erase Trans identity, the threats of nuclear war. All meant to rattle the nerves of marginalized communities and people of conscience.

“Artists have a unique ability to challenge society and advance the culture, but those who acknowledge darkness alongside joy can find themselves at risk.”

These issues impact artists in a particular way. Artists have a unique ability to challenge society and advance the culture, but those who acknowledge darkness alongside joy can find themselves at risk: in an age of aggression, vulnerability is easily mistaken for weakness. 

But some artists are empowering us to consider our mental and emotional health as parts of our whole selves, and to accept any gloom that may exist there as inseparable from the qualities that also make us luminous and powerful. What new potential comes revealed with that embrace?

– Brian Tate, 2019 

FEATURING

Loubna Mrie, writer/photojournalist; Caits Meissner, poet/artist/cultural worker; Sydney Magruder Washington, ballerina/mental health advocate/singer; and Dior Vargas, Latina feminist mental health activist (moderator)