Shani Peters

Designed in collaboration with the NYC Birth Equity Initiative , the Birth Justice Defenders (BJD) and community engagement artist Shani Peters, Collective Care for Birth Justice (2019-20) multi-part project created space for listening and wellness to the women of the BJD initiative, with the wider goal of sharing those same benefits with the communities those women support.

During Collective Care sessions attendees practiced yoga, meditated, ate, talked, listen and created art together. Some of this art was completed day-of, some went on to take the shape of a series of public posters that will be displayed in lobbies and waiting rooms throughout the NYC health department’s network of hospitals and community health spaces.

Attendants took home a set of personal wellness Care Packages (yoga mat, block, and herbal care packages from Moon Mother Apothecary). The project was designed and facilitated by Shani Peters, with the collaborative support of licensed Yoga Instructor Nia Calloway , and Photographer Chanel Matsunami Govreau

17,195 Sunrises (2019) references the number of days the sun has risen between Civil Rights Activist’s Stokely Carmichael’s (Kwame Ture) first public utterance of “Black Power” and Alicia Garza first public use of the term “Black Lives Matter.” In the summer of 1966, Carmichael famously pronounced the phrase “Black Power” at the “March Against Fear” rally in Mississippi. Carmichael, These words announced a turn in the activist’s ideology surrounding Black liberation. They were a recognition that the Civil Rights movement’s non-violent tactics and accommodation of white American empire were no longer yielding effective progress for Black Americans. In the summer of 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who murdered Treyvon Martin, Garza wrote a Facebook post that ended “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Her words were an acknowledgement that Black people are still not safe from state-sanctioned violence in America, that the value of those lives somehow needed reiterating.

In Shani Peters’ ICA commission, these historic Instances of Black Political might are fused with metaphors of sunsets and sunrises. Layered throughout Peters vibrantly colored wallpaper are images from Detroit and Newark during the ‘long hot summer’ of 1967 during which 159 race riots erupted across the United States. Peters digitally manipulates images from those events and collides them with incidents from our present. The latter include images from the #DontmuteDC events in Washington D.C. which followed noise complaints from a MetroPCS retailer whose decades-long practice of playing Go-Go music was met with anger from the newly gentrified neighborhood.

In this work, Peters compares the cycles of the sun to the cycles of history, which an ongoing struggle for liberation has always been and will remain , necessary. The text layered atop the wallpaper on acrylic panels and adjacent imagery address the ways in which Black and liberation will always need to be adjusted according the the shifts and forces of persistent white supremacy. Shani Peter’s ICA commission extends her practice of tracking cycles of Black resistance through American history, taking the form of floor-to-ceiling vinyl wallpaper and text on lavender acrylic panels.

Amber J. Esseiva

Assistant Curator

Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University

2018- For the New Museum’s Social Justice Residency The Black School designed this immersive participatory exhibition. This work considered the history, contemporary needs, and limitations of Black learning spaces. Architecture and the potential for transformation of traditional U.S. schools was our primary inspiration for the installation and programing that happened in the space. Screen prints of my design reimagined familiar motivational classroom posters with Black students as an intended audience. Suspended fabric structures designed by Joseph Cuillier functioned modularly as a sculptural element that converted into an enclosed tent. The tent approximated privacy as a symbol of autonomy during the various performances, meetings, and workshops that took place in the space.

Through a series of workshops focusing on key principles of Black radicalism, Black feminism, and decolonial thought TBS worked with teens from NYC’s summer youth employment program to create artworks of diverse mediums, including collage, printmaking, photography, drawing. Throughout the lifespan of the exhibition the student work wall was populated with source material and artwork as the students were creating it, resulting in a living installation. Students also took the skills they learned in private closed door sessions and taught those skills to the public in open door student-led workshops, completing their learning cycle, transitioning from student to teacher.

2016-17 Installation drawn from a series of collage prints overlapping historical and contemporary photographs of Black American protest and resistance strategies. The install elements create physical and contemplative space to recompose and revive the spirit in the midst of ongoing trauma of racial injustice. The images in the collages are treated with a pallet that simultaneously references the colors of flames and of sunrises/sets, as well as lavender incense oil, and finally light via LED backing. A series of laser cut wood panels (a design process executed via a scorching flame), etched with text passages that reflect historical cycles of protest and resistance. The text combines references to the natural phenomenon’s of sunrises, sunsets, fire, ash, and passages of the work of James Baldwin.

The installation has been mounted first at Bennett College (one of two all women's HBCU's in the nation), in Greensboro, NC, and most recently at Columbia Universities Wallach Gallery in New York City.

2016- "Coronations are grand ceremonies that indicate a single transferring of power. In The Crown Futures, artist Shani Peters has worked with our Museum to partner with young people in disseminating the empowering message of self-determination.

The anchor of this exhibition is Shani’s piece entitled The Crown Installation. This work was initially produced in 2014 for inclusion in If You Build It, an exhibition curated by No Longer Empty to christen Broadway Housing Communities’ seventh affordable housing effort. In 2014, Shani’s canopy of crowns captured the extraordinary light affiliated with the history of this neighborhood and featured paper interpretations of crowns from African, Indigenous American, and European monarchies; honoring the layers of her heritage.

Shani’s exhibition in the Museum is the first to be produced under the guise of the Artist-Children’s Collaborative, a hands-on art making program, led by an artist through which children play a lead role in the development and creation of a new art work or installation. In preparing for this exhibition Peters focused on the core concept of her 2014 installation--self-determination. To lead children through her artistic practice, which is rooted in social justice principles, the artist facilitated a 5 week art making program that included discussions of power, class, and stressed the importance of loving one’s self by prompting children to design crowns with materials inspired by their individual heritage. The laser cut paper sculptures on view are Shani’s abstractions of collages that children have fashioned from locally sourced materials. The crowns in this installation are indicative of each child’s family members, and future aspirations."

-Lauren Kelley, Curator

2016- The African’s experience in the America’s has been grounded in brutality and trauma. Through eras of forced enslavement, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, both clearly stated and veiled every-day racism, and now the most commonly perceived egregious police injustice and abuse of power, Black people have exercised unimaginable degrees of determination to simply survive and persevere.  The work in this exhibition is the most recent exploration in the theme of imagining crowns as symbols for Self-Determination and the complexity of the experience of the African people following the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade that my series The Crown has reflected on for the past few years.  These new works begin to explore what Self-Determination means specifically for Black Americans situating both historical and contemporary images of Black Americans engaged in focused political protest within the visual narrative of The Crown project.  

James Baldwin is famously stated, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for, all we have to do is wear it.”  These works illustrate the price that was and continues to be paid.

2015- The Crown’s Round 43 iteration the project targeted it’s focus more precisely on economic self-determination.  In partnership with two small, women owned bookstore businesses in my home communities of Harlem, NY (Blacknuss: books & other relics, Sharifa Rhodes Pitts) and Detroit, MI (DittoDitto Books, Maia Asshaq), this iteration of

The Crown featured the sale of merchandise from both stores and hand-printed tote bags designed especially for the round with it’s conceptual intersection of economy and self-empowerment in mind.  In the midst of installation designed to generate and inspire thoughts of collective value and determination, visitors were be able to purchase knowledge based goods from POC business owners representing communities similar to their own.  Participation in Round 43 also included screen-printing workshops with area youth and adults. 

2015- "Shani Peters' The Crown: Contemporary Construction of Self in America seeks an understanding of what she refers to as the "possibilities and perils that lie within" the process of self-determination.  The tandem installations in GalleryDAAS and the Institute of the Humanities Gallery are the most recent iteration of The Crown, which was first installed in 2014 at a new affordable housing development in Harlem, NY, and later that year, in an art space in Harare, Zimbabwe.  In each of these installations the crown, specifically the wearing of the crown, is used as a metaphor for self-determination and a celebration of blackness, of what it means to be Black.  Each installation has been different, the result of Peters' strategically deploying this powerful metaphor for the particular audience encountered at the venue.  Here at the University of Michigan, her primary audience is our Black students, though her message has relevance for all who will experience her installations."

Raymond Silverman, Director's Statement

2014- This Crown project iteration brought The Crown to Harare Zimbabwe and featured it's first public portrait session.  Sitters were given a copy of their portraits.

The project invited viewers and participants to consider their personal autonomy in establishing their own sense of self, their own understanding of western society, and the ways in which they position themselves within it.  This exhibition also created the significant opportunity for inter-Diasporan dialougue around shared, though disconnected, ancestry and contemporary opportunities for self-determination.

2008- A floor collage of a repeated print of a family photo of Sean Bell (murdered by NYPD officers on the day of his wedding) with his now widow and their first child.  The work's elements (silk, lace, candles and intentional floral reference) attempt to convey the tension between the celebration of weddings and the grief of funerals.