A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP (The Colored Girls Museum): 2016 Fringe review 12

photo credit:  Jessica Jackson Tingling and Oliver Tingling of Boogie Down Spring Productions.
photo credit:
Jessica Jackson Tingling and Oliver Tingling of Boogie Down Spring Productions.

As you make your way through Germantown to the three-story home on Newhall St transformed into tribute to cultural memory that is The Colored Girls Museum, ask yourself, “Did you get a good night’s sleep?” Meditate on what keeps you from it and what leads you to it while standing in the garden walkway waiting line. A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP answers with the experience of the colored girl through painting, photography, comics, video, ceramics and sculpture, fiber arts and quilting paired with gentle scents that calm and live lullabies that would lift you to a dreaming place.

 A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP is about the reclamation of the colored girl’s experience, finding the strength and beauty in it, acknowledging barriers to healing and developing tools for survival and liberation. The curated home addresses heavy histories and present conflicts— centering rest as a tool for self-preservation, a daily return to recharge. A video of a woman bathing and scrubbing down her likeness.  A room honoring the sacrifices of grandmothers who supported their families as washing women, tools of the trade adorning the space. In another, a colored girl’s reimagining of the American flag as stripes of hair weave and cotton stars, called “Justice” for short, which she holds close. “The Dream Space” where you can picture the colored girl as she sleeps and imagines herself a new future. The story of the colored girl’s night stretches on so long one is called to ask what it truly means to dream. 

[The Colored Girls Museum, 4613 Newhall Street] September 9–18, 2016; fringearts.com/colored-girls-museum-presents-good-nights-sleep.

 

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