S3 Ep023 BIPOC Reproductive Justice & Intergenerational Healing: with artist Lehna Huie, Pt2
Lehna Huie, a Baltimore and New York City based multimedia artist, and recipient of the Artist Changemaker Award from the Global Fund for Women, returns to explain:
How her collage processes also function as investigative processes;
How she deepens her understanding of family connections across time and space;
Her personal experience, as a pregnant person, with medical apartheid;
Her work towards reproductive justice for pregnant people and babies who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Bio:
Lehna Huie is a multidisciplinary artist, mother and cultural worker of Jamaican heritage from New York City. Huie works in painting, installation and video on diaspora, memory and fragmentation - creating atmospheric portraits that document her lineage. Concentrated on the soul, non-linear time and ritual, her works are composed of fabric, paper, projections, textile scraps and everyday objects.
In 2022 Lehna was named Artist Changemaker with Global Fund for Women and was an Inaugural resident of Stoneleaf Retreat Art Mamas Residency. That same year, she represented the USA in The Hague Contemporary Art Fair at Quartair Gallery in the Netherlands. Lehna has received multiple awards including the Space for Creative Black Imagination Makers & Research Fellowship and Artist Changemaker Award with Global Fund for Women. Trained through the Joan Mitchell Foundation, her practice includes work as a Legacy Specialist, preserving intergenerational artists archives and oral histories.
“I just really understood the importance of doula care for our communities, and how much was lacking. And it was really alarming to learn just how much misinformation was out there, for birthing people in general, but particularly for low income families of Color and Black families.”
-Lehna Huie
Transcript
Season 3, Episode 23 (Part 2 of 3) : BIPOC Reproductive Justice and Intergenerational Healing: with artist Lehna Huie
Lehna Huie:
I just really understood the importance of doula care for our communities, and how much was lacking. And it was really alarming to learn just how much misinformation was out there, for birthing people in general, but particularly for low income families of Color and Black families.
[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan Castle, Host:
Welcome to Towards a Kinder Public, a podcast dedicated to designing kinder public space that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.
We are so fortunate to be able to share this conversation with Baltimore and New York based multimedia artist Lehna Martine Huie. Lehna’s work has been shown and commissioned across the United States and internationally. She is a constant contributor to grassroots community work and humanitarian causes, including the African American Policy Forum’s #sayhername campaign, Doctors Without Borders, and Ancient Song Doula Services Decolonize Birth conferences, among many other initiatives and organizations. Lehna received the Artist Changemaker Award from the Global Fund for Women. She is currently participating in the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts and Asian American Arts Alliance 2023 Bandung Residency, to foster and uplift allyship between Asian American Pacific Islander and Black communities.
In this episode, we will discuss one of Lehna’s most interesting art and investigative methods, how she deepens her understanding of family geographies, her experience as a pregnant person with medical apartheid, and her work towards reproductive justice for pregnant people who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
This is the second of three episodes from my conversation with Lehna. In addition to being a thought provoking discussion about her art practice, the information Lehna shares is so critically important in building awareness about equity, safety, and wellbeing for all in our communities. Thank you so much for joining us.
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan, opening interview:
I wanted to also talk about your work, I Have Never Felt Sorrow Without Reason. I want to bring that up now because you just talked about the things that aren't seen. And in that piece, one of the things that seems to be a very big part of your process in making the work, which I'll let you describe, but, is removing information to reveal the things that are unseen in the pictures, the relationships between people, and you're kind of eliminating all this spatial information and some of the information about the figures in the photo to actually reveal them more.
So I was wondering if you could talk about how the process of removing information reveals more about the relationships between people. And again, I think it goes back to the stories and the information that you collect and archive, and so forth.
Lehna Martine Huie:
Yeah, I'm really intrigued by just rummaging through photos. I have- I am really grateful- to have a lot of material to work with, that has just been preserved through family over time. Just our albums are really kind of where I draw the majority of my work, even though they all, each body of work manifests in a very different way. Each of them look very different from the next, right?
But in this work, I really, yeah, I just found myself looking at these photos and then I would see someone in the background that was faded out that, you know, I would wonder about, or maybe I didn't know as much about who they were and I wanted to know more about them. Or I would notice a certain expression that someone would have, just in their gesture, even just in the hands, the way they were holding their hands, or the way that they're, you know, embracing someone else, or distancing themselves from someone else, or the way that they're just kind of enjoying their leisure time.
And so I think just all of those moments, I always wanted to know more like, well, “What's going on there? Who's that?” Just itching to know. And then throughout that, I kind of began weaving a better understanding, through piecing the images together, more things would come out in the silence than if I were to ask someone about it.
And so, yeah, I started noticing patterns of, and this was very heightened for me because this was in, I began the process at the start of the pandemic as well, which is when we were not able to touch each other, not able to see each other, and share space. And so I think that kind of drove me to digging into that even more because of the absence of touch and absence of connection that was felt.
And so, yeah, and then I just started thinking about all of the painful things that have come up in interpersonal relationships within myself, my own self, as well as other family members, and you know how, like at least for me, so often I would idealize certain family members, or ideas about who they were, because they were all so brilliant to me, and so beautiful and amazing. And being a young kid and looking up to them and just being like, wow, these people are amazing. They could do no wrong. They couldn't be a perfect… a more perfect person.
And so then, I just started noticing that they too have pain. They too were parents or moms who had to deal with a lot of the things that I do. And so when I started realizing that more and more through the work, then it just became a really important healing tool for me to be able to like unpack some of that and the silences around that. And I think, some of the pain around the silence.
Because so often, at least in our Caribbean culture, in Jamaican culture, it's like you're just told that you can't talk about certain things. Are there certain things that you just have to push to the side or you don't bring those things up. We don't talk about money. We don't talk about the struggles that we have. And so things like the painful aspects of life that we don't want to discuss are the things that became more interesting to me. And I was able to get to know those aspects of relatives much more, and that helped me to see them more in their fullness, and humanness…. humanity, just to understand that there is this range or a spectrum of emotion.
And also, space for that spectrum to exist, instead of it all just kind of being covered up and just covered up by this smoke-mirror of happiness, just all of that.
Cevan:
Yeah.
Lehna Huie:
So yeah, I think that that's where the series is really tapping into that and tapping into intimacy that we don't often see within Black families. And there's often this hypersexualization of everything. And so this exploration is really tapping into what it means to feel good in your skin and to just enjoy life, but also asks, you know, “Well, yeah, how are we spending our days?” From the mundane to just getting to work every day or not, or when someone's ill, what's happening in that moment? When someone's dealing with an addiction, what's happening in that moment? When things come up around boundaries, like people crossing boundaries and that happening where you can see something like that in a gesture and in just one moment it's like, wow, that's very telling.
I think just considering, also, people who are no longer alive, who've passed away, and just understanding how much communication is coming through that image and through cropping, because I do a lot of cropping, it's honing in on these moments that are where I'm really looking at the softness or the fullness of things. And also thinking about transparency, and reflection, and how things come up. And so I play a lot with scale, and I use projection and video as well. So, like, this series is collage based, but it's collage in every sense of the word, bringing together all these different mediums.
And so, yeah, that is another form of research for me. And it's also thinking about our connections to space because we're, you know, we’re from Jamaica, but my family, through learning stories from interviewing family members, I'm learning about how our family is really concentrated in these three areas. So it's mainly, well, although we're all over the world, really, a lot of my ancestors, like my great-grandmother's siblings, they all went to… some of them stayed in Jamaica, the others went to either Panama or Cuba to live.
And so, like, when I hear stories from my mom about traveling to those places, and they went there to either build the canals, the Panama Canals or work in the sugar plantations in Cuba. And so when I think about that and, like, that fragmentation of the family and understanding that we still have all of these similarities, and I've seen pictures of them and we all look alike. <laughing> So it's just understanding how all of these lives are manifesting in all these different places. And then a lot of our family came and settled in New York, or in London, and other parts of the world, really, in Ethiopia, just everywhere.
But just learning and understanding why they made those choices, why my great-grandmother chose to stay while her siblings went to, you know, these other places. And it's just really putting the pieces together helps me to understand more about the larger history as a whole and our relationship to the land, our relationship to those songs and how we're processing pain. And so any healing methods that we might use to get through things, or a song to get through things, dance to get through things, and how that's kind of carried across generations.
I also am really interested in addressing mental health because it's something that's kept very hidden, or if you bring up any type of anxiety or just any mental health issue, and it's often seen as a taboo or not… it's like an American problem, it’s not how we deal with our problems. And so, like, “Just take this fruit and you'll be fine,” or “take this and you'll be fine. Don't worry about it.” And so just really unpacking that and understanding that, again, that spectrum of emotion and those lived experiences are very real, and the mental health piece is major… so being able to break the silence around those things through the series is important to me. But I think that unless you know, unless you've read about the work, you might not know about it.
And so in some ways, there's this concealing and revealing thing that's happening within the work that is also a big aspect of it. So, like, unpacking shame around guilt, around managing pain, pain management, having a high tolerance for pain and understanding why that is, and why that's a pattern that comes across so many generations.
And so I also think about my practice in the form of quilting and creating a cosmology with these little patches or little vignettes of moments that are happening that all create one whole. And so yeah, that's kind of echoing through the personal, the familial, and the larger historical.
Cevan:
In listening to you speak about this work, I am thinking about how in one of the interviews or the talks that you shared with me, you talk about your life, your life's work being rooted in the space of collaborative care, which you also touched on just now as you were speaking. And you have a lens of trauma informed practice. Can you talk about how you bring the trauma informed lens into community, and into your relationships?
Lehna Martine Huie:
Definitely. Yeah. So I really grew up with my mom and aunt who were twins, and they have, their lives really were really centered around ministry and helping others grow to be their best selves and helping others through their darkest hours. And myself and my cousin, who's like my sister, we're the same age, we grew up constantly surrounded by that and just constantly surrounded by being in spaces where, you know, you were caring for others, and providing service that is of need. And we also spent a lot of time as children caring for our grandfather when he was aging and he was experiencing a lot of health issues. And so I think that was my introduction into that, just, you know, caring for him in those ways and, like, understanding the work of a caregiver and that the work of a caregiver kind of having its own… like, there's not one way to do it, <laughing> right?
Cevan: <laughing> Yeah.
Lehna Huie:
So I've always had the awareness of that and also a desire for that to be at the forefront of shared space as, like, ensuring that others are cared for.
And then they were also abolitionists and were activists. And so we always were learning about things that were going on around the world and locally in our cities, and injustices that people were facing in terms of racial injustice, around sexual orientation, around housing discrimination. And we went through our own issues around housing, being displaced, and all of those things. And so just learning from those experiences, and then also organizing a lot as a teen around racial justice really was the root of that.
And then when I became a mom, well before that actually, I was in arts education, and so I was working in arts education and learning about how we can utilize the arts as a healing tool. And I also was doing community murals. That was one of my first community practices as a visual artist, was being a muralist. And so would collaborate with all these different groups, and would create these murals that were very much a collective… So, an example of this was working at a women's recovery clinic in the Bronx, and it was with all of these women who were, like, my elders. And just to be able to go through this transformative experience together where at first they were all so afraid to even touch any art materials whatsoever, any brush…
Cevan:
Wow.
Lehna Huie:
…pen, anything, and afraid of their own voices at that, while in recovery to then seeing this transformation of them being able to celebrate their voices and their stories and their hardships. And these are women who've gone through so much and they were able to share this experience together. And it was so moving to see and to be a part of that.
And so that is kind of where I was introduced into that kind of transformative… like, how powerful it can be. So I just started doing a lot more work with groups. I was working with Sadie Nash for a long time, and just working with young women all over the city of New York, who might have either been… who were survivors of domestic violence or navigating some really or youth who were navigating a lot of really rough circumstances.
And the society for the most part, didn't believe in them, and so they kind of discarded them, but in these art spaces, in these spaces, it could be medicine and we could go through this healing together through our, you know, creativity. And everyone has that. Everyone has that, right? And to be able to facilitate those… that tapping in, to that creative source was really, really incredible. And so just all the groups that I've worked with since then have been amazing.
And then <laughing> in 2015, I became a mom. And so, like, throughout my pregnancy, I learned the harsh realities of medical apartheid that I only really read about before. Like, I had experienced it to some degree growing up as a little Black girl in America and New York, but I didn't know just... I didn't know just how deep it went. These are things that I read about, that I protested about. But until I went through it myself, I really didn't understand the impact, and the magnitude, and the importance of why this is something to stand up against, or yeah… it was really wild to experience being an eight month pregnant person and having the midwife say all kinds of horrific things to you that are really just so inappropriate and just out of line and just saying horrible things.
And I had a really intense moment where I thought I would lose my life, and I wasn't sure if Simone, my daughter, was going to make it during my pregnancy, because I have a heart condition. And so yeah, I had a high risk pregnancy and I was working with a medical team that really didn't understand me or my cultural background, and it was really obvious that, you know, it was not a safe place. And had I not had the language to be able to navigate that and advocate for myself, I wouldn't have been able to move through that at all. And I think just understanding that that's the reality for most people regardless of race, it really is a reality for most. And of course, it's impacting Black women, and like- not just women, but birthing people- Black, Indigenous, People of Color. There's such a high, alarming postpartum mortality rate between children and those birthing people.
So yeah, I think when I was expecting my daughter towards the end of my pregnancy, I actually went to an art exhibition with my mom. And this was like a random thing, and we didn't really do this for a long time, but we went to this art exhibition and it was called God, Funk, Jazz, and Medicine. And it was led by Creative Time, and it was held in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. And at this space, they had a series of outdoor and indoor activations across Bed-Stuy where they invited the community to interact with these art installations.
And so one of them was in the medicine house, there was the space called Stuyvesant Mansion, and it was a historical space where one of the first practices- Black practices- of midwives took place. And so in that house, they were signing people up, like during this installation, they were inviting folks from the community to do community wellness programs, and they had this space where you could sign up for health insurance. And at the time, I had just lost my health insurance, so it was really important for me to have access to all the information they were providing.
And this was a project by Simone Leigh. And so that was also something to note because her work is so pivotal in so many ways, right.
And they also had a place where you could go for a pap smear and a breast exam. And so I was like, I guess I should do that, with my mom. And so we went up and I learned how to give myself a breast exam, and I was eight months pregnant. And what happened to be in that space was Ancient Song Doula services where I met my doula, who taught me how to give myself a breast exam. After she taught me how to do the breast exam, she was asking me about my pregnancy and how everything was, and I was being honest with her about how everything was without knowing what she did there.
And then I asked her, like, “Do you know of any doulas?” Because I was looking for one. And she said, “Well, yes, I do.” So I got into this whole conversation and she changed my life completely. I mean, we became like family, and it was instant, an instant bond.
And then through her, I learned, I was trained as a doula myself. And she, of course, helped me to bring Simone earth-side. She was there with me every step of the way. Who would've thought that she would be… that this person that I met randomly at this installation be with me and my family while giving birth. And she really, really did teach me how to advocate for myself in a different way than I ever had before.
And I just really understood the importance of doula care for our communities and how much was lacking. And it was really alarming to learn just how much information, how much misinformation, was out there for birthing people in general, but particularly for low income families of Color and Black families. And so that was really intensive.
But then, like, throughout the trainings, and throughout our relationship over the years that has grown, I've met so many wonderful folks and been able to build with so many incredible leaders, and those who are coming in at all different stages. So, some of them are really experts and have been doing this for a long time, and for generations and generations, while others are just learning. But the space was so inviting for all that learning exchange to happen, and it was really amongst Black and Indigenous women, People of Color. And so that also was a bonding that I was longing for.
And I think I was experiencing, with the healing arts process and wellness processes that I was telling you about earlier, but this was a different angle. This was through, like, our physical bodies, and through wellness, and through herbalism, and learning about how plants, like certain plants, can really assist us with healing. And that goes back to, that kind of brought me back to my family, which is where I first really learned about herbalism and working with plants and nature. And so that was great too.
[Audio recording of “Tuning Forks on Resonators” demonstration of the interaction of sound waves with physical objects (from the Physical Science Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History) begins to play in background]
Cevan:
Be sure to check out our website, kinderpublic.com, for more information about our guest and the topic, as well as a full transcript of the conversation, which can be found on the podcast page. A captioned episode is available on our Youtube channel, where we are @kinderpublic.
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I’m Cevan Castle, my guest has been contemporary artist Lehna Huie. Join us next time for more of the conversation. Have a very good week!
[“Tuning Forks on Resonators” fades out]
Mentioned in this episode:
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
African American Policy Forum #sayhername Campaign
Ancient Song Decolonizing Birth Conferences
Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn
Sounds/Visuals in this episode:
“Tuning Forks on Resonators“ demonstration video of the interaction of sound waves with physical objects, care of the Physical Science Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History