In 2015, New York Times Review writer and podcast co-host Still in process Jenna Wortham sent a direct message on Twitter to the author, curator, then unknown, Kimberly Drew. “I must say that I love your instagram and you are a DREAM QUEEN,” Wortham wrote. From there, the two women exchanged praise, and began collaborating on a black art zine. Six years later, this project materialized in their co-published book, Black Futures, an amazing anthology of art, writing, photography, recipes, tweets and Facebook posts. Although these women never interacted before messaging each other on Twitter, they seemed doomed to collaborate: The two women’s experience collecting and curating black art and culture on Tumblr and Twitter uniquely prepared them to create a book that captured the vastness and nuance of modern art. Black life, placing screenshots of Black Twitter exchanges alongside nighttime hair routines and family coconut bread recipes. In Black Futuresthe writers have created an anthology that not only chronicles the 21st century black experience with grace and care, but also preserves decades of black history and culture for generations to come.

—Marie Reta

Marea Rand your : Do you both have the same vision of Black Futures before deciding to collaborate?

JEnna Oortham: We really didn’t know what it would become. We just had a shared desire and sense of urgency around a common mission. We were invigorated after the first meeting and we were both really convinced that a book project seemed like the way to go. Then it was just a matter of letting it unfold from there.

Kimbecile Drew: It was really working together that helped us find the middle ground. But there is also something divine in the construction of Black Futures, and all the many hands that have been placed upon this book in prayer, concentration, and conception. The book definitely remained very fluid throughout and remains fluid even though it is in its physical form now.

SIR: What were the meetings like when you were composing the book?

KD: Each meeting began with a heart-to-heart check. Even this morning when we checked in, we started with, “How are you? Do you watch the snow too? then we went from there. I think Jenna gets a thrill every time I transition into work mode.

JW: Everytime.

SIR: What did that look like?

KD: “Oh, it’s so funny you mention that because it reminds me of that email we have to respond to…”

JW: We still get there though.

SIR: What was it like working on this project for four and a half years? The answer to the question you all posed in your introduction – “What does it mean to be black and alive right now?” – has it changed at all during this period?

JW: Throughout the process, we tapped into a historical urgency and a current desire to imagine the worlds we want. It’s something that our Tourmaline friend and contributor always talk. When we think of evoking the dream of freedom, we know what we don’t want, but what do we want? The book has always oscillated between these two benchmarks in terms of commemoration, commemoration and memory, but also the search for space to imagine and the search for space to dream.

SIR: Did you organize the book during the Black Lives Matter uprisings, and did that have an impact on the elements that ended up in the book?

JW: We worked on the book until June of last year, and we added changes until the very last minute. Our editors finally only had to say “pencils down”. There was that moment during the uprisings where we said, “Do we need to add anything? Should we mention it? and then there was another moment of recognition that it’s already in the book. These struggles around black liberation are not limited to this summer. The book begins with Alicia Garza’s 2013 Facebook post, which started the movement that eventually became Black Lives Matter.

SIR: Did this idea of ​​nonlinear time, or blackness and black culture existing outside of time, often come up when you were putting the book together and trying to envision a black future?

JW: It definitely comes through in our contribution from Rasheedah Phillips, part of this Philadelphia-based collective called Dark quantum futurism. Rasheedah’s work was really fascinating, because she was trying to get this idea of ​​breaking away from linear time. Our narrative in this county, those who are the descendants of enslaved black people, is really organized in this epistemology that begins with the Middle Passage, and there is a lot of interest in abandoning that or reorganizing it. Our story doesn’t begin the moment we arrive in this country, and what does it mean to recognize that and reflect on how black people have always existed outside of all infrastructure and institutions since the jump? What does it mean to embrace this as a way to re-liberate ourselves?

KD: With contributors like Rasheedah or Nikole Hannah-Jones, we really wanted to give people the space to create something that might not be exactly what they’re known for. In this concept of linear time, we raise children, we go inside ourselves, we raise families, we take baths – we do all these things that are so mundane and so spectacular in their own ways, and I think that’s where the book really succeeds in its timelessness. We were really trying to create something relevant, and I know it was a big anxiety for both of us that the time was right. I think that success was grounded in those times when we didn’t give in to what everyone is known for. We really tried to make these pieces exist on their own in this unique space, which is not always offered to black creatives.

SIR: You include a lot of screenshots from the internet in the book. What was your process for capturing and preserving black spaces online like Black Twitter?

JW: One of the things that we felt was really crucial when we were organizing around this project was the question: what does it mean to do some kind of memory work around the dialogic exchanges that we see happening on social media? We recognized that there are so many amazing interactions that are not being preserved, and we wanted to make sure we kept those records for ourselves.

It was imperative to chronicle and remind people that we have the agency to save, and what it can look like. These moments of preservation were therefore about recognizing that these online interactions are truly meaningful, and that they often happen in very spontaneous and fleeting ways that deserve to be preserved.

SIR: The book contains so much fine art, which can often be inaccessible to black people in America. How did you include so much artwork while keeping the book readable and accessible to a wide audience?

KD: Historically, museums and art spaces were not designed to be exclusive. They were really designed to serve an audience – and of course in those days, that audience didn’t mean us. For those of us inheriting that legacy, it’s important to make sure that we really go the extra mile to really redefine what audience and community mean. From the perspective of marginalized people, it’s really important for us to question how these architectures have been constructed to exclude us, either explicitly or implicitly. In building the book, we wanted, of course, to give contributors an opportunity to shine, but also to give everyone who encounters the book an opportunity to feel like an equal.

SIR: What kind of hearing did you do Black Futures for? Do you think all audiences will get the same from the book?

JW: Each person will get something different from the book. Every time I open the book I get something different. As for the people it was designed for, I think in a way it hasn’t been realized yet. We were both obsessed with preservation and providing a resource for building tools to preserve an archive. For us, the book is really an exploration of these ideas. We also wanted to create a book that works in the same canon and tradition as books like The black book, Fire!!, and other seminal texts that were not only a model, but also an element of education on the life of black people in their time. We definitely made the book for Toni Morrison, and we definitely made the book exist in both commercial and domestic spaces. We made the book not just for the intellectual exercise of doing so, but really for future generations.

SIR: The book has been out for about two months now. What was the reaction?

JW: All in all, it was very moving, very joyful and very enlightening. Many people have said that they have historically felt really left out of art institutions, and how exciting and relieving it was to come across a book that had a lot of art but didn’t feel like a hierarchical approach. That was one of our goals from the start, to make this book truly feel like a book for everyone, from babies to grandmas. We wanted anyone to pick it up and find something for themselves. I remember seeing it once at the start of an Instagram story at a beauty salon and I was like, “Correct.” I want this book on a table with the Question from Rihanna of Gasoline, with images of Lorna Simpson, right next to it. This is exactly my take on the book.

SIR: What is the most important thing you learned during the creative process Black Futures?

KD: When I first sat across from Jenna in a restaurant all those years ago, I didn’t think I could write a book — and now we’re authors together. So what I learned is that there are more possibilities than you might imagine.