HOTFOOT by Angela Davis Johnson:
In Honor of The Children of Folks Who Migrate
by Trelani Michelle
If you’re signed up for our newsletters, you might recall that the Black Art in America Foundation sponsored the New Freedom Project’s two-week artist residency with a $2,500 grant to support visual artist and activist, Angela Davis Johnson. Well, this Sunday, April 3rd, Angela is showcasing the work she created during the residency (and her magic-making process) at the Mint Gallery in Atlanta.
Also located in Atlanta, the New Freedom Project has been around since 2010. Established by the artist-activist, Charmaine Minniefield, the New Freedom Project preserves Black narratives as an act of resistance against erasure. By reflecting on the wisdom of those who have come before, the organization is igniting a new freedom movement. One avenue to making that happen is its brand new residency program of which Angela was the first.
Photographer Credit: AD Kaya Clark
“Angela is the bomb diggity,” Charmaine boasted. “She’s an artist activist, like I am. Her art reflects history and ancestral memory. This whole residency is part of her nomadic, creative process. That whole concept is called ‘HOTFOOT.'”
Charmaine insisted that I speak with Angela directly to get a better understanding of the HOTFOOT concept. I reached out and her words challenged me to reach in, into my own nomadic ways and deeper in search of my mother’s and foremother’s respective (and collective) gardens. HOTFOOT, she explained, “is a working definition of what it means to be the children of folks who migrate.”
“Murmuration Prayer” | Angela Davis Johnson | 2017 | Courtesy of the Artist
“I’m from a lot of spaces, because my father was in the military, but I claim East Arkansas because that’s where my family is from. It’s the last place my grandmother lived. And I had the good fortune of living back in Arkansas when I was 14, to be able to revitalize my grandmother’s garden. I say that, too, because it’s so important to understand me as an artist. My work is rooted in ancestral veneration and carrying on family stories. So I’m always listening for ways of understanding how family life and Black folks’ traditions impact our walk through life.”
Angela’s voice is light as a feather yet passionate like burning sage. Not even halfway through the conversation, I started craving a blanket around my shoulders and a mug of hot tea to properly cradle myself into her stories of joy, trauma, past and present movement, and creation.
“One of the things that I noticed about myself is that I can’t sit still. I’m always on the move. And I wanted to understand where that came from. My great grandmother was constantly on the move. She had a hot foot. While living in Arkansas, a white man told her that we have oil on our land. She inadvertently signed away our family’s land, and she and all her children were put out.
Angela’s grandmother (left), great-grandmother (middle), and uncle (right)
“She left from there to Mississippi to Florida to Chicago, and back to Mississippi. She was in a constant loop of migratory movements, and it’s made me reflect on how I’m in a constant loop of migratory movement,” Angela explained. “I’m here in Atlanta, claim Arkansas, but I’m always in New Orleans, and right now I’m building in Philadelphia with my partner. So it’s like this movement that I’m on and wanting to recognize and understand the power of that, also to be able to understand how it may be informed by trauma as well as pleasure. So it’s like a tension that I’m trying to uncover through this body of work.”
HOTFOOT brought to mind something Tina Hicks said during her quilting workshop at the Beach Institute in Savannah. Gathered around a table of five women, she shared that her father would tell her, “You so free ’til you fool. When you gon’ quit carrying ya clothes on ya back?” So I wanted to know more about Angela’s implications behind HOTFOOT and if she set out to redefine it. She agreed that it had a negative connotation when she was growing up.
“Can’t Pour from an Empty Cup” | Angela Davis Johnson | 2020 | Courtesy of the Artist
“Because it’s like someone who can’t sit still,” she explained. “But you can reframe it as a point of, yes, it could be that and I think it is that. And I think also there’s an aspect of curiosity, dream-making, world-building, and the strength of movement. I think about mental-emotional movement, how we crawl over terrains of growth in things that we have to navigate as Black folks living on this land and how we’re able to do that. We do it through our music. I feel like that’s a migration. It feels like a hot footed behavior to be able to dance our way through something. I’m always interested in trauma release exercises. Whether we’re in church catching the spirit or we’re in secular spaces twerking, these have been practices and ways of moving through the mundanity and the present nature that this space can be, and so I’m tying that to hotfootedness.”
“Canebrake Ceremonies” | Angela Davis Johnson | 2019 | Courtesy of the Artist
“We’re from people from the Great Migration,” Angela added, “and I’m trying to parse through what it can look like and what it can mean because symbolism is important to my work. And HOTFOOT doesn’t stand alone. This is a part of a work that I’m doing with my collaborator and partner muthi reed, a poet and media maker from Philadelphia, whose parents and grandparents were a part of the Great Migration as well. We’re doing this piece called ‘Hold On Devotion to HOTFOOT Living,’ which is moving up and down the eastern seaboard, where we’re connecting with family and friends in community and listening in and carving out a Black Queer methodology to understand how we’ve been able to not only survive but ways that we’re building worlds within the practices that have been passed down to us. So that’s what HOTFOOT is a part of. It’s in communication and conversation with ancestors, with ourselves, and our beings in the ways that we’re moving now.”
The more she talked, the more Zora Neale Hurston, who also joined the Great Migration, came to mind. I rarely speak on what the dead would have wanted, but Zora would have absolutely loved this body of work. Angela was born in Orlando, mere minutes from Zora’s hometown of Eatonville. Like Angela, some of Zora’s movements were out of necessity but most were pleasure-based. Zora wasn’t afraid to travel alone—literally, yeah, considering her move to DC and Harlem and her trips to New Orleans, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands, but also creatively seeing as how so many of her peers criticized her intent on writing about Black people being Black people sans the white gaze. Zora was an OG hot footed nomad who boldly claimed ownership of her freed self.
As if I’d passed her a baton of my thoughts, Angela picked that thang up and took off, leaving dust tracks on a road. “I call Zora Neale Hurston the patron saint of HOTFOOT, because of the way that she was able to be in multiple spaces, not only physically but mentally. Like, the clarity to understand that there was so much power in our story, our folktales, our vernacular. Oh my gosh! I love her. Last year I went to Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce, and I was so honored just to see and walk where she walked. She would travel through Florida with a Black woman, or alone. But that takes a certain fearlessness and bravery and clarity of your soul to be able to do that and go and gather stories. It feels like that’s my kindred spirit; that’s my kinfolk.
“I have a piece I worked on through this residency, where I’m reading her short story called Spunk. I have written just an excerpt of that story then I’m overlaying it with abstracted imagery. And it feels like such a mark-making prayer invocation to release myself from the bodies, because I’m primarily a figurative painter but stepping into abstraction. So it’s like I’m closer to that thing, you know, that release from needing to be respectable or representing aspects of us that can’t be contained, which is one glimpse. Being able to do that, during this time, has really left an impression. I felt nervous doing it because I’m known for my bodies, and I was able to create from that space as well. But there was something about these little works that I’ve been creating that just feels like a light coming on or a switch, because it helps me to lean into the prayers that I need through the work.”
While she talked, I scrolled through her older artwork online again. According to ArtPil, the self-taught artist “incorporates body movement and sound alongside her vibrant narrative paintings which consist of portraits created with paint, scrap paper, found objects, and fabric.” Mesmerized by her paintings of Black women—elder and young, some in head wraps and others in locs, fros, and pigtails. None are smiling and only a few make eye contact with me. Each has facial features or body limbs that seem to be in movement themselves, enough so that I don’t see an intended person but rather my own people. In their faces and postures, I see my friends, Nichelle, Lily and Glenda. I see my Aunt Bessie and journalist slash author Sarah M. Broom. A few brothers too. Then there’s “Strange Dark Garden,” which the Mint Gallery shared along with the announcement of Angela’s upcoming open studio. In the best way possible, “Strange Dark Garden” is not at all like its predecessors, yet it still somehow is.
“Strange Dark Garden” | Angela Davis Johnson | 2022
“‘Strange Dark Garden,’ Angela said, “makes me think about the work of planting seeds and being patient enough to watch them grow, and tending and not rushing but always in a movement. That’s what I’m trying to understand more about HOTFOOT because it is that active space. It is movement. But then there’s also this question of how does one remain rooted while in motion? And so with that question before me it feels like it’s in the garden. It is in the practice of being able to tend to one’s spiritual soul garden while in movement, while traveling and being in multiple spaces. So that’s what the piece is that I shared with Mint. The open studio feels more like a share of a work in progress and an invitation to be in conversation with these works.”
Whenever you make room for the spirits to speak and you honor what you’re told, resources will align for you to make it happen and take it to the next level. I wrote that in “Re-Membering Women’s History: Laura Gadson and Shimoda Donna Emanuel’s Story” because it’s one of my core beliefs and even a mantra at times. Just as it stood true for me and for Laura and Shimoda, it stands just as tall for Angela who says she’ll always have one foot in Atlanta. “I knew coming that I wanted to merge my life practice—the ways of cooking, living, and being with a more of a container to be able to practice making things in another way. So I needed a studio. I reached out to Charmaine and said, ‘I want to do a mini residency. Who do I reach out to?’ She was like, ‘Girl, I got you. We’re gonna do it through New Freedom Project.’
“To be able to conceptualize this and be able to see it come to life with our requests feels like the practice of knowing and movement, and then also planting and growing. This manifested from a beautiful space of making one’s request, and then watching the work come to life. Najee and Black Art in America, with the support and the ability to just show up, is so indicative to me of a Black wave. We know how to move in community. We know how to think in a collective way. And the more we do that, the more we decolonize and shed things that aren’t for our greatness and for our goodness. To me, this residency speaks to that. Even with Mint Gallery, for Danielle Deadwyler to open her space for me to be there in studio, it just kept growing.”
Angela shared a quote that she meditates on that the spiritualist and People’s Oracle, Dayna Nuckolls said during the pandemic: “‘The burden of survival is shared. It’s a shared responsibility. And in order to move life and to reshape our world, we have to do it collectively. It’s a shared burden. It is not one to do individually. We need each other.’ That’s what this residency is saying and doing. It’s saying that we need each other, and we can show up for one another. And it’s been powerful.”
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Trelani Michelle authored seven books and ghostwrote even more. She graduated from Savannah State University with a Bachelor’s in Political Science then SCAD with an MFA in Writing. After facilitating workshops for faculty, staff, and students at SSU, she began teaching high schoolers a mix of creative writing and social activism. After a 10-week internship with the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, she published a catalog of Black Savannah’s biographies called Krak Teet, centering the lives of 19 Gullah Geechee elders over the age of 80. Crowned Savannah’s Best Local Author, Trelani teaches the Black history that school textbooks overlook, demonstrating that personal history is family history which is community history which is world history. She’s presented her work at The Highlander Research and Education Center, Georgia Council for the Arts, SCAD, UNC’s Black Communities Conference, and more. Today’s Zora Neale Hurston, life stories are Trelani’s thing, so she helps people write about their life in the form of books, bios, business pages, and speeches. Learn more about her writing services at SoFundamental.com and her Black history lessons at KrakTeet.com. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @KrakTeet.
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