Mojuba: an expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum.
- M. Jacqui Alexander
How do we build a radical visual archive of the African Diaspora that grapples with the recalcitrant and the disaffected, the unruly and the dispossessed? Through what modalities of perception, encounter, and engagement do we constitute it?
- Tina M. Campt
Ole Dandy, the Tribute, is an introspective into the lives of Jean Loren Feliz & Angelo Lwazi Owenzayo. Feliz & Owenzayo are male impersonators who live inbetween NYC & New Orleans during the late 19th century. Feliz & Owenzayo were peers of male impersonators like Florence Hines & Gladys Bentley. modeled after male impersonator/entertainer Florence Hines.
Florence Hines was an African-American drag king and singer who performed from the 1890s to the 1920s all over the United States. Hines is an inspiration because of their importance to African-American theatre and comedy. Their portrayal of the Black dandy character is one that not only elevated the representation of the Black man in the post Civil War era, but she also blurred the lines between what race, class and gender could look like. Hines is not known by many because there is not much archival imagery of her performance career. White male impersonators such as Ella Wesner performed during the same time as Hines, yet there are many surviving images of her throughout her career.
Ole Dandy, the Tribute re-imagines the life of the gender expansive performer during the early 20th century. A celebration of the radical queer communities existing pre-Stonewall while also giving a specific focus to how that looks in and out of the archive. This work is a remix of past in order to envision an inclusive future.
