Sedrick Miles is a self taught artist, activist and scholar. His artistic and academic work focuses on themes related to identity, negritude and surrealism. He often exhibits large scale monochrome, color, mixed media, and installations with a goal to force a negotiation of gaze between the image and viewers that is simultaneously both comforting and unsettling. His work expresses a spiritual link between documentary, fine art, and subjective narratives. Making great use of a double-voiced rhetoric, the signifying style of cultural critique, he cleverly initiates his view of this world with a formal visual vocabulary applied to the African Diaspora.

 

“I use image making and digital spaces to engage in transnational dialogues and critical thought about black diaspora modernism. I’m so thankful everyday to be blessed to see my people reflecting so much light, magic, strength, and aesthetic. I couldn’t imagine a life without it. I simply believe that our humanity is quintessentially beautiful. I want to leave artifacts for my decedents to know what I saw and loved in the moments of my life. My deepest passion is to create at least one object that lives forever as fuel for the struggles and during the celebrations.”

 

AGT: How do you conceive of the African diaspora?

SM: I see diaspora as the primary framework for black modernity as it relates to my life and work. It’s common knowledge now of the large Black populations outside of the United States, but after living and experiencing community in Northeast Brazil, my view of the world has rotated, so to speak. There is quite a different view of [the] Black American position in the world for me now and a different level of responsibility. For me this means exposing my view, my witness, even more than I had anticipated at this point in my life.

AGT: In what ways does does this inform your artwork?

SM: At this point it’s impossible for me to see anything other than the blackness that connects us and as well as the systems of whiteness that connects us as well. I feel a sense of Negritude and a surrealist attitude moving through our cultures and manifesting in such an ordinary and beautiful way. Image-making plays a great role in this for me. Two quotes by photographers I look up to speak to this:

“Observe the life moving like a river around you and realize that the images you make may become part of the collective history of the time that you are living in.”- Eli Reed

and

“The artist creates the material that we look back upon as part of history.”- Roy DeCarava

For the last decade I’ve been motivated by the personal mantra of “Authentic Cultural Aesthetics.” I’m so motivated by this growing change, that I’m updating my mantra to “Authentic Cultural Surrealism.” This history of time is showing me how we are applying our past and our future imagined to our situation right now. And in the face of extreme white aggression throughout the diaspora, we are showing a great amount of intelligence—black modern thought—and I try to make my work readable in this context.

AGT: How do you see the idea of Blackness in Brazil?

SM: Black identity in Brazil is more physical and more psychological than our contemporary experience in the the States. There is a historical tradition influenced by the false social doctrine of racial democracy, which causes blacks outside of latin America to believe that Brazilian racial mixture eliminates the concepts of black/white there and in other Latin American countries. But this is obviously untrue. In Brazil, a great way to look at it would be to understand how whiteness works. During the early years after independence, Brazil invested lots of money over decades to import white Europeans into the country to whiten the population. So even now, the idea that any amount of whiteness in your ancestry and especially any traços finos (fine features)— basically perceived White European features especially a thin nose or straight hair—means that Brazilians experience an opposite version of the “one drop rule” that defined concepts of race in the United States. Despite this, race dominates and determines the social conditions of Blacks, who make up the majority of the population.

AGT: What are the specifics of the festival that you documented in these photographs? What’s happening and how is it connected to this discussion of Blackness and the Brazilian experience?

SM: August is festival season in Cachoeira, Bahia, Brazil, centered around a very rare, baroque Catholic confraternal sect called Irmandade da Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (The Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death). It’s one of a very few, black sisterhoods and they have only a couple dozen members. Cachoeira was historically a center of sugar production for several centuries. The sisterhood was created in the 19th century after the Haitian Revolution echoed through the diaspora. Black women, free and enslaved, used this opportunity to take advantage of whites’ fear by creating a syncretic Afro-Catholic order made up of many ethnic groups—including many Yoruba—in order to institutionalize a space for candomble spiritual practice. The Sisterhood was also greatly influenced by the Muslim slave revolts happening around the same time, evidenced in the wearing of white and the covering of the head.