Backwater

II. Backwater Truths

noun, verb, adjective

1. an exhibition curated by Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones

Backwater Truths is an ensemble exhibition of eight artists whose work and livelihoods are rooted along the Mississippi River. The usage of "ensemble" as a curatorial tool is important to understand my practice. I practice ensemble-building in my curatorial methodology: allowing artists to gain deeper meaning about who their work is in conversation with, and how their communities are making sense of their work. 

Ensemble as metaphor is also important to make sense of Backwater Truths, as it is in conversation with exhibitions and artists who have showcased the stories, breath, history, and livelihoods about and along the Mississippi River. Some of these histories include: John Steuart Curry’s 1935 painting The Mississippi, in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum; Alison Saar’s 2016 exhibition Silt, Soot and Smut at the LA Louver Gallery in conversation with the 1927 Mississippi Flood; Karen Goulet (Ojibwe) and Monique Verdin (Houma)'s 2024 Aabijijiwan / Ukeyat yanalleh, It Flows Continuously at The Minnesota Marine Art Museum; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’s 2025 exhibition Make the River Present; Jasmine Amussen’s “Letter from Jackson: Southern Hospitality” (published in Burnaway in 2022) in which she discusses her own encounter with the exhibition opening of A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration at the Mississippi Museum of Art; and the 2025 exhibition History or Premonition produced by The Joan Mitchell Center. I also believe histories, such as those of Romi Crawford's 2022 exhibition Citing Black Geographies at Richard Gray Gallery, provide useful context for the usage of examining ecological cartographies within the context of the United States.

For Backwater Truths, my continued artistic aesthetic requires of me the practice of working with Black Indigenous queer technologies and histories; technologies that disrupt white dominant concepts of time, gender, borders, and extreme systems of punishment that have altered a natural order. In understanding the reimagination of the backwaters, the aesthetics that became relevant for the foundation of this work are Kevin Quashie’s use of Black aliveness, Katherine McKittrick’s context of Black cartographies, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s context of layering.

So what happens when I build an ensemble from these frameworks?
(The Blues by Nikki Giovanni)

III. Backwater

noun

1. water backed up in its course by an obstruction, an opposing current, or the tide
2. a body of water (such as an inlet or tributary) that is out of the main current of a larger body
3. an isolated or backward place or condition
4. an unpopular or unimportant field (as of study or business)

Backwater Truths evokes “backwater” as a term in conversation with the usage of reimagining and remembrance. It is not a term that those who live amongst the banks of the Mississippi River are looking to redefine, to my knowledge, as it is also a term identified as a slur for very necessary reasons. It is not a term I would use to identify a person. Backwater, for the purpose of this story, is discussed based on the definition that Richard M. Mizelle, Jr. shares in Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination, the central text that led to this exhibition: “in varying contexts the intellectual idea of backwater suggests an operation on the fringes of society, less than American and less than human.” The central reason I use the term "backwater" is to open a conversation, through a Black Indigenous queer feminist lense, about the limits of citizenship as a framework for understanding Black and Indigenous life. Therefore, when interacting with Mizelle’s definition, as a curator, my questions became: what if we gave up on citizenship?[1] What, then, does this definition become?[2] What if we understand this decolonial act[3] through embodied knowing of the intergenerational impacts of systemic dehumanization inflicted on Black diaspora and Indigenous bodies by settler colonialism?

I have come to answer these questions for myself by understanding that the history of Freedmen in the U.S. reflects a necessary fight toward the recognition of humanness as a pathway to citizenship. However, a decolonial approach to citizenship: one that rejects colonial constructions of nationhood, offers a pathway toward liberation. To give up on the colonial framework of citizenship makes it possible to engage with “operations on the fringes of society” as dynamic, layered, and alive, revealing Black and Indigenous cartographies in ways that more accurately reflect lived realities. My point is not that people of the margins should not be given citizenship; that would be against my whole personal ethos. What I am stating is that the fullness of citizenship within the U.S. was and is never afforded to those who are non-white men, and certainly not to Black and Indigenous people. Therefore, through the act of “giving up on” citizenship, only then could the term backwater be discussed and realized in layered ways, and what if we understood it through artists who have lived and worked along the river?

This became the central lens through which I wanted to tell the story of Backwater Truths; where the layering, aliveness, and cartographies of “overflow,” “flooding,” “ecological catastrophe,” mounds, dams, water, and words used to describe what is and was the Mississippi River, becomes known in conjunction with the lived realities of the communities who are impacted by her. This is why this exhibition will start with the remembrance of the 1927 flood, which Mizelle describes as the “most destructive flood in recorded history along the lower Mississippi River Valley…Ninety-four percent of more than 630,000 people affected by the flood lived in the states of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, most in the Mississippi Delta Region…some areas along the route of destruction saw the river escape its natural and man-made confines and spread 50 miles wide. Below Memphis, Tennessee, the width of the river was around 60 miles.” I understand the Mississippi River as a being within herself, and as many who have interacted with her do, “she” is referred to in the likes of personhood. Interacting with the aliveness of the river comes with people telling you “to be careful,” that “I am not going over there,” and for me, I believe there are stories the water holds that go up and down the river, knowing you never step into the same body of water twice. I felt deeply into Mizelle’s making of what happened in 1927: “the river wanted to spread over its natural floodplain and reclaim what was once its own, but too confined between mountains of artificial levees and dirt. Finding no other way, the Mississippi River ultimately had to make its own outlet, bursting and conquering humans’ feeble attempt at levee control throughout the Mississippi Valley basin.” The dehumanization that was inflicted on Black and Indigenous lives must continue to be discussed through the context of environmental racism, forced labor of Black people to work on the levees, being without food on strips of lands along the Mississippi for weeks, and sites that are a violent remembrance of slavery and colonization. What all the stories of the Mississippi River are in sum of is that, ecological man-made destruction causes human and non-human realities and livelihoods to drastically change.

Backwater Truths continues a conversation about how the river is discussed and engaged across different regions, from the Midwest to the Gulf South, an exhibition that evolves as it moves upriver and downriver along the Mississippi River. At each site, the showcasing of the exhibition’s research, programming, By responding to local histories, it allows St. Louis narratives to flow to New Orleans, New Orleans stories to return to St. Louis, and new meanings to emerge along the way.

Rather than presenting the region as something to be newly discovered or reinterpreted for an external audience, Backwater Truths adds to the discourses and practices already taking place within these regions. Through the framework of "giving up on citizenship," for a public audience encountering this work outside of academic frameworks, the exhibition makes visible the complications of place, history, and representation. It challenges viewers to reconsider how narratives of distance, progress, and authority shape their understanding of communities along the river’s banks.

IV. Black Cartographies

Katherine McKittrick is a brilliant theorist whose work, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, is another central text to this exhibition. To engage Backwater Truths is to engage a geography that refuses to be categorized as fixed, and actually I would argue, responds in catastrophic ways when forced to be fixed. I understand the reimagination of the backwaters through McKittrick’s whole book. However, her usage of deep space and the poetics of landscape is essential, “a serious engagement with the ways in which the production of space is connected to expression and difficult material conditions and the development of a spatial grammar that unhinges space from the limiting demands of colonialism, practices of domination, and human objectification.” I also adopt McKittrick’s analysis of Dionne Brand’s “to give up on” where “she [Brand] not only refuses a comfortable belonging to nation, or country, or a local street, she alters them by demonstrating that geography, the material world, is infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing:”

I use these two quotes to make sense of the ways artists in Backwater Truths are refusing the colonial geography of space. I specifically think of Lola Ayisha Ogbara’s sculptures that, as the artist describes, “explore material usage and composition to emphasize the nexus between non-Western epistemologies and bodily topographies, further progressing a future that narrates its own history.” Ogbara speaks to the forced migration of Black diaspora communities and the material remembrance of their existences. 

I also wish to invite in definitions of erosion, river, and sovereignty as language to understand ecological cartographies in conversation with Black and Indigenous realities, using the definitions from the digital collaborative research archive Indigenous Mississippi:

• Erosion: “a process of wearing, gnawing, and eating away, as well as a process of forming. It is a process of removal and displacement that can also be one of making…As a hydrological feature and a political one, erosion makes possible human industry and agriculture, even as it is also a consequence of human actions to transform the River Valley into a corridor for capital.”
• River: “Choctaw descendants might call a river a bok, and that syllable — bok — begins other words, often verbs. Bokafa is to burst. Bokanli is to bud. Bokko is to be a hill. Bokonoli is to rise up, as a seed presses up within the earth and cracks it open. One could also call a river chuli, which is also a verb and means to split, to make riven in two. Or one could call a river an okhina, a word which sounds almost like okhisa, or door. Thus in Choctaw the words for river all evoke ideas and sounds of active change, sometimes destructive and sometimes creative. Where there is a river, something breaks open, comes to new life, arises; something is split in two, emerges; something passes through.”
• Sovereignty: “In the context of Native American communities, sovereignty speaks not only to self-government and self-determination on the part of federally-recognized tribes, but also is an intellectual basis for movements that sustain food systems, artistic traditions, and Indigenous knowledge more broadly. Native Nations each have their own relationship to their ecosystems, with principles of respect being fundamental.”

When exhibiting Backwater Truths, as curator, what becomes in reflection is a real-time practiced awareness of on whose lands and in what communities this story will present in. This, again, is the practice of ensemble building.

V. Layering

Black Cartographies and Layering are in conversation with each other. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson defines layering 

1. “As an aesthetic through which makers weave multiple and coded meanings, and these can be literal, conceptual, metaphorical, and theoretical meanings layered into their artistic practice and the art they produce.” 

People who live along the backwaters are a part of communities where layering is understood as both operational and cultural livelihood. Within the context of Backwater Truths, layering is discussed as both an aesthetic and conceptual framework. As an aesthetic, layering can be seen as the physical act of combining materials, textures, and meanings. This approach reflects the nature of the backwaters: fluid, nonlinear, obscured by history, yet always alive, always moving. In the works presented in this exhibition, artists such as Kristina Kay Robinson, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Shabez Jamal, and Ashley Teamer, I theorize, are utilizing layering not simply as technique but a way to make sense of. Whether through performance, collage, photography, sculpture, or archival manipulation, each artist builds language from fragments: cut, reconfigured, flipped, or disrupted. Teamer speaks to this directly in her reflections on material practice: “Cutting and ripping are important... turning and flipping images into a new architecture.” The meaning of her collage practice positions material as memory, and memory as political.

Through Katherine McKittrick’s framing of Black women's cartographies, we understand geography and mapping as layered knowings that resist the fixed boundaries of settler colonialism. In this sense, layering disrupts the logic of citizenship, which depends on rigid borders, documentation, and state legibility. Instead, the artists in Backwater Truths offer an alternative archive: one that lives in the river’s currents, in oral memory, in digital print, and within the materials themselves. These experiences, these layered encounters, also became part of the research process itself.

During my curatorial residency at ACRE, this became viscerally understood when I unexpectedly encountered cotton flowing freely along the Mississippi River at the point where Wisconsin and Minnesota meet. I gathered some cotton for my own remembrance making. That moment reemerged for me later when Shabez Jamal and I spent time at the Harvard Art Museum, while standing before Edgar Degas’ painting Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, provoking a layered convergence of memory, image, and displacement. Layering offers a way to understand Black and Indigenous cartographies as alive, as present tense.

VI. Aliveness

The most human act a viewer can do when engaging with Backwater Truths is to imagine a Black and Indigenous world. In doing so, this is not imagination as escape, but imagination as insistence. Drawing from Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, the exhibition positions aliveness not as spectacle but as an interior, felt, and ordinary state of being. Quashie writes that Black aliveness is “in reverie and terribleness, in expectation and in ordinariness,” and it is this definition that serves as a curatorial refusal: to reject the dehumanizing implications of the term “backwater” and instead root the exhibition in the radical possibility of aliveness.

If backwater has historically signified stagnation, neglect, or lesser value, especially when applied to Black and Indigenous geographies, then Backwater Truths insists otherwise. This exhibition does not just ask us to view art, but to witness stories and the Mississippi River herself as a living entity. It is how artists like Jen Everett and Dail Chambers bring the concept of aliveness to form through image, ritual, and narrative. When we speak of aliveness, we speak also of water as medium, as memory, and as material. Poetics[4] becomes necessary to express this kind of knowing. As The Blues[5] has done for generations, blending beauty with grief, and structure with improvisation, the artworks in this exhibition offer a poetic language for the truths that the river carries.

And still, aliveness is not without danger. As Christina Sharpe at length invokes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Black aliveness exists within the proximity of death: always visible. And the colonial systemic disregard of Indigenous sovereignty and continued presence is within proximity of erasure: always at risk. The process of creating Backwater Truths, in this contemporary moment, forces the question to be asked: is this reimagination of the backwaters something to speak of or to keep silent? In Backwater Truths, the act of showcasing this exhibition in the near future implies visibility; however this question is not resolved, but it is held.

Notes

1. I am understanding “to give up on land” in the same ways as Dionne Brand does in her work, particularly in Land to Light On, and as Katherine McKittrick analyzes in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
2. The usage of “becoming” should be seen through the lens of Fred Moten’s, Black and Blur, Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World.
3. Decolonization and decolonial acts I use not as metaphor; I see it in the same ways as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their essay "Decolonization is not a metaphor." The usage of “decolonial act” as it pertains to settler colonialism requires “Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically."
4. Also implicating Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
5. Richard M. Mizelle, Jr., Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination.

Further reading

Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange, mississippiriver.school/about

Invisible Rivers, The Land Memory Bank in partnership with Mondo Bizarro Productions, landmemorybank.org/invisible-rivers

Indigenous Mississippi, indigenousmississippi.com