“What I Have Shaped into a Kind of Life”: On Making Beauty Monumental

by Dr Rikki Byrd

I.

I have arrived at the place that it used to be.

The remaining material bears no mention of the now removed statue. There are no footnotes telling me what used to be here, why it is now gone, some promise for a future recuperative monument, what TK Smith has considered “an often-distasteful American response” that “fill[s]” in “absences” without proper redress.¹

The statue of Christopher Columbus was removed from Tower Grove Park in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri in 2020, amidst an ongoing Black political movement catalyzed by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. When I look at this empty plinth, void of narrative, as much as it is void of its monument, I think of loss. Not of the figure no longer here, but of the loss caused by the many figures like him who have been memorialized through the erection of public dedications of such size. The pillaging, destruction, and death that had to happen for these figures to have a chance to cast their shadows against hot gravel; the true scale, the true magnitude, is really the loss. How do we contend with this?

In an essay titled “Writing Black Beauty,” Jennifer C. Nash considers beautiful writing as one possible response. She argues that beautiful writing is a new form in Black feminist thinking and scholarship that not only expands “our collective conception of where black beauty is found, staged, performed, and articulated,” but also illustrates the “expansive political potential of black beauty beyond critiquing the long-standing exclusion of black women from discourses of the beautiful.”² Attending to an archive of contemporary writing by theorists such as Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman—the former describes beauty “ as a method ,” and the latter positions beauty as “ a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure ”—Nash follows up this line of thinking in her recently published book How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, where she insists that we treat loss “as an aesthetic question.”³ Instead of ascribing it to frivolity, Nash brings to our attention the ways beauty is substantive, malleable, and a critical material useful for not only responding to despair, but also envisioning and gesturing toward other possibilities.

In addition to beautiful Black feminist writing, I turn to contemporary artists Lauren Halsey and Tiff Massey to think of what other forms this critical beauty might take. Both artists cast Black beauty in an array of materials at monumental scales, understanding the art history in hair weaves and barrettes as much as they do the work of Donald Judd and ancient Egyptian architecture. They make it clear that Black beauty, itself, is a monument worthy of scale and rigor.

II.

Two days after the summer equinox in 2023, I arrived on the rooftop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a dear friend. We were greeted by two sphinxes made of hand-carved gypsum on wood. Set behind them were two towering pillars with pharoah figures atop them and a massive shrine of the same material, all in dedication to South Central Los Angeles. Titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), Halsey's sculpture was commissioned by the museum for its Roof Garden. Welcoming museum visitors to walk and linger around and inside of the sculpture, the work was as devotional as it was invitational.

Installation view of The Roof Garden Commission: Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), (2022) © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Hyla Skopitz
On one side of Halsey's sculpture, a collage of the backs and sides of heads were etched into the panels and adorned with a variety of hairstyles: Bantu knots; Caesar haircuts with designs of an Ankh, the Eye of Horus, and the word “swag.” On another side were more figures with hairstyles including a high-top fade with “Lil Bit” scrupulously scrawled into it, and on yet another side, greetings and affirmations in an array of fonts that read “Waz Up!”, “Kenfolks,” and:

“Be Ye Who Ye Is.
Because if you ain't who you
Is
You ain't who you think
You Is.”

The text existed as a sort of poem for the people, which reminded me of the canonical sonnet by Lucille Clifton, “won't you celebrate with me,” that inspires this essay's title. In the opening lines of her poem, Clifton queries: “what did i see to be except myself?”⁴ Walking around, through, and near Halsey's sculpture, and reflecting on it again in the here and now, I consider the ways the artist makes Black beauty matter and politic, through which the shaping of “a kind of life”—as Clifton describes in her reflection on self-making—can be enacted.

One characteristic that I've long observed of monuments is the way that they cast penumbrae, how you can find yourself in them depending on where you stand. The towering form of the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) consumes you. Yet, it's significant that Halsey's monument, erected on the top of The MET and looming over Fifth Avenue, is unable to cast a shadow onto the beaconed street of profuse capital. Instead, she casts shadows in which we are not proclaiming power over another, but ones in which we see each other.

Despite the massive scale of the work, I found myself in relation to two B-girls carved into the material who greeted me just below my 5´ 1″ stature. Their backs are pressed against each other, wearing oversized bottoms, boots, and their ears adorned with hoop earrings. I looked up and spotted a FUBU logo hovering atop a spaceship and was reminded of the time my mother dressed me in an oversized FUBU jersey and Timberland boots when I was in elementary school. I thought I was the flyest girl that day, the size of the jersey swallowing me, while simultaneously swaddling me in something made for us, by us. Halsey's sculpture made me feel the same, covered and seen in each other's likeness.

In 2020, I followed along on the artist's Instagram page (@summaeverything) as she turned a warehouse next to her studio into a center that sought to provide holistic support for her community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scores of food filled the warehouse and were distributed readily. Halsey's orientation toward her practice as a mode of civic duty that exceeds her sculptural offerings is, too, a monumental ode to beauty, an expression that should also be about the action, about seeing the people as beautiful and worthy enough of care.

Likewise, across the expanse of her interdisciplinary practice, Tiff Massey draws attention to the accouterments of Black beauty. On the almost-eve of the summer equinox in 2024, I walked the labyrinth-like halls of the Detroit Institute of Arts searching for Massey's exhibition in the museum's galleries. 7 Mile + Livernois, the title Massey chose for the exhibition, is a dedication to a Black business and fashion district in Detroit.

Then, I saw them:
stainless steel,
linked,
geometric cubes protruding from a wall.
And, I knew not only the reference,
but the provocation, as well.

I smirked looking up at Whatupdoe (part I). It reminded of the chain-link necklaces that sat atop the collarbones of the many Black folk cast throughout my childhood. Inside of the exhibition, more geometric cubes, titled Whatupdoe, spilled from a wall onto the floor in one gallery. On the wall of another room was I Remember Way Back When (2023), for which Massey used red-stained wood to create 11 scaled-up hair barrettes, the kind typically made of plastic that snap together.

Tiff Massey, Whatupdoe (part I), 2024, stainless steel. Image courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts.

Tiff Massey, Whatupdoe 2024, stainless steel. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts.
Across from I Remember Way Back When (2023) was another wall with a sculpture titled Baby Bling (2023) made of large metal cylinders colored in a candy-apple red that are connected by black woven rope and cinched with brass to create 11 more barrettes (the kind that wrap around little girls' ponytails). At this work, I recalled a childhood photo taken of me. With a wide toothless smile spread across my face, I pose for the camera with my hands on my make-believe hips modeling a hairstyle done by my mother: two ponytails made up of several synthetic braids, and each wrapped in large, white hair barrettes. One other work, I've Got Bundles and I Got Flewed Out (Green) (2023), reminded me explicitly of the impact of Black beauty, and what happens when it is disregarded. On a stretch of black canvas made of several panels, Massey created an array of Black hairstyles made of gradients of green Kanekalon hair. Similar to Halsey's panels of Bantu knots and haircuts, I recognized several of the styles: the fishtail, the cornrows with beads, the French roll. And I recalled an incident which I am still finding language for.

Baby photo: Photograph of the author on the front porch of her childhood home in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tiff Massey, Tiff Massey, Baby Bling, 2023, Metal beads, woven rope, brass. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts.

Tiff Massey, I've Got Bundles and I Got Flewed Out (Green), 2023, Canvas, Kanekelon, beads. Collection of the artists. Image courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts.
What I am willing to share at the moment is this: When I was a child, my hair was once undone by someone who did not see it as beautiful, and this was my first lesson in learning how to make myself small. Before this moment, in my world, to be beautiful was to glimmer and shine, to have a tempo. This came through, for me, in the single gold tooth that gleamed from the mouths of family members, the acrylic nails that typed on computers, high heels across vinyl floors, the holding-sprayed hair that crunched once taken down. Despite this lesson (and many more as I got older) in being diminutive, I maintained a keen awareness that to be beautiful in my world was to be big, to be boisterous, to be boundless, to laugh with a full belly, to write our names on our nails, belts, and T-shirts, as much as we did on paper. And when I could decide for myself, I chose (and continue to choose, everyday) to be big, practicing these gestures in beauty (like carrying forth my maternal lineage's skills in design through my commitment to the history of Black fashion and letting memories of watching my mother and godmother braid hair filter through my hands as I gather the courage to braid my little sister's into box braids) as an archive and ritual.

Halsey and Massey give these gestures form by sculpturally cementing them into canon. Although their works are not public like most monuments, both artists make monuments of their publics, so that someone like me can find myself in it. I look up and they confirm that I am indeed worthy of it all. These are not monuments of replacement, and not necessarily of repair, but they are of recognition, an inflection of the majesty of the Black quotidian.

III.

In an editor's letter for the Fall/Winter 2020 issue of Art Papers titled Monumental Interventions, Sarah Higgins writes of the Latin etymology of the word “monument,” which means “something that reminds.” Returning my attention to the way monuments cast shadows, I am thinking of the ways such shadows remind us of the stretch of a figure's impact and legacy, the warped history for which they were once a beacon toppled now in an act of defiance. Where might we locate the beauty in such a fall, this alteration of the shadow?

Halsey and Massey have found it in the personal, turning to the cities and neighborhoods that shaped them, for which they are now giving shape through their practice. Through their works, I am reminded of the singed hair and laughter at the beauty shop. My mother's makeshift hair salon in the corner of our two-bedroom apartment was one such monument and my late godmother's hair braiding salon, another; both were as much sites of labor as they were momentous occasions for the Black girls and women who came on the weekends for their dose of beautification and gossip, the black hair gel that kept edges smoothed wafting through the air, a smell that I can recall, one that reminds. These are the shadows in which I stand proudly. One prophecy, then, is to have no qualms about seeking beauty in a world that otherwise would prefer your destruction, prefer your memories be insignificant and small.

So, I have decided on these beautiful reminders as my monuments. We cannot undo history, and the remaking of a new one is filled with success and failure, but what if we begin by recollecting the small things that make us who we are, that, taken together, make us big?

For who else are we to be except ourselves?

TK Smith, “Monumental Futures,” Art Papers, 44, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020): 26-31, 27. ↩

Jennifer Nash, “Writing Black Beauty,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, 1 (2019): 101‐122. ↩

Jennifer Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 5. ↩

Lucille Clifton, “won't you celebrate with me,” in Book of Light, ed. (Copper Canyon Press, 1993) ↩

Photo by Lawrence Agyei.

Dr. Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator, and curator. She is the founder of Black Fashion Archive and the co-founder of the Fashion and Race Syllabus, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Art and Art History. Across her writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, she draws connections between Black aesthetic practices, including 20th and 21st century art, fashion studies, and performance. Dr. Byrd received her Ph.D. and Master of Arts in Black Studies from Northwestern University, a Master of Arts in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design, and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri.

Amandine Nana