ECHOES Episode 4

Nzinga Simmons + Mia Imani Harrison in Conversation

ECHOES is a monthly series where we spotlight our community of contributors—writers and artists who’ve been central to Art Papers creative and rigorous coverage over the years. New episodes release the last Saturday of each month and are available on Youtube and Spotify.

This month, we have a dialogue between Mia Imani Harrison and Nzinga Simmons. Both wrote reviews of Simone Leigh’s work—Simmons on the Hugo Boss Prize exhibition, Loophole of Retreat in 2019, and Imani Harrison on Sovereignty, Leigh’s groundbreaking installation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams.

In this conversation from 2022, Simmons and Imani Harrison key in on how profoundly important experiencing Leigh’s work in person was for each of them, as well as approaches from Leigh’s practice people can bring into their daily lives.

The texts they’re discussing are linked in the description, as well as a link to buy the physical issues in which they appear.

Nzinga Simmons’ textStrategies of Response : Fall 2019
Mia Imani Harrison’s textNew Commons : Summer 2022

Nzinga Simmons is an art history scholar, writer, and curator. Simmons is a Ph.D candidate at Duke University. She received a BA in art history from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on works of art from Africa and the African Diaspora. Through her writing and curatorial practice, she aims to highlight the significant contributions of often marginalized artists to the canon of American art.

 

Mia Imani Harrison is an international interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer. Harrison explores how disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in between art and science. This “third-way” mixes unconventional methods (dreams, rituals) and science (ethnography, geography, psychoanalysis) to dream new potential ways of being. This path is followed through experimental interviews, reportage, continued conversations, and the like. She strives to create generative pieces that allow the artist’s works to have a second breath outside an exhibition’s confinements.