Essex Hemphill visited London for the primary time in 1986. At the moment, the poet was already a fixture within the Washington, DC homosexual neighborhood. The comparatively sleepy US capital was a part of an archipelago of cities alongside the American East Coast the place homosexual males might join at underground golf equipment and bookstores, debate in impromptu row-house salons or cruise at parks akin to Meridian Hill, not removed from DC’s Dupont Circle. Hemphill was there for all of it; performing round city and dealing with different younger artists.
Nonetheless, London was a revelation. Hemphill wrote to his pal, the activist Joseph Beam, of that different capital’s bustling cosmopolitanism, its scale and of the way it helped him to find out about his position and identification: ‘I belong to the world and never anybody motion.’ Whereas there, he sat for a sequence of evocative portraits in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Brixton studio, and would go on to report a verse for British film-maker Isaac Julien’s 1989 documentary-drama Searching for Langston (the 2 having met earlier that 12 months at a convention in Los Angeles). Whereas Hemphill had intentions of staying in London for a 12 months, possibly two, he returned prematurely, holding the dialogue with Julien open from afar. In 1988, he recorded for Julien from Washington DC, together with collaborator Wayson R. Jones. In 1996, a 12 months after Hemphill’s loss of life in Philadelphia from AIDS-related problems, Julien reworked the out-takes from these classes. Within the resultant quick movie, Portrait in Blue: Essex Hemphill – on show now at The Phillips Assortment’s trenchant exhibition ‘Essex Hemphill: Take Care of Your Blessings’ – Hemphill reads extracts from his personal and Langston Hughes’s poetry, his voice like a radio play, his between-cuts banter filled with mirth.
To see Portrait in Blue is to catch a glimpse of why Hemphill was such an efficient connector of individuals. In these pre-internet days, all life – however particularly a countercultural life – needed to be lived in the true world. Networks have been constructed by folks assembly within the flesh, or ferrying chapbooks, vinyl or videotapes from place to put. As an illustration, an precise cassette of Searching for Langston was first delivered to Hemphill by none aside from the filmmaker Marlon Riggs (to whose 1989 movie, Tongues Untied, Hemphill additionally contributed). Equally, Hemphill seems steadily in photographer Lyle Ashton Harris’s sequence of candid color snapshots forming the ‘Ektachrome Archive’ (2017–18). In a single such picture, relationship from 1991, he reclines mid-conversation, clad all in white and haloed in pink, a cigarette held between loosely curled fingers. The impression of Hemphill’s writing is manifested within the latest quantity of chosen poems, Love is a Harmful Phrase (2025) – as mentioned in Danez Smith’s lovely column within the pages of frieze’s Might 2025 problem. In the meantime, Harris’s images doc a Black queer inventive intelligentsia that thrived within the wake of, and despite, the HIV epidemic; in no small measure as a result of the folks in his images travelled, corresponded and gave their vitality to conferences and performances. They constructed a scene.
The present at The Phillips Assortment recrates components of that scene. One in all Glenn Ligon’s glimmering reworkings of images from the 1995 Million Man March hangs close to a number of moody Harris c-type prints in purple (The Watering Gap III, IV, VII, 1996); Julien is there, however so are less-lionised figures akin to Joyce Wellman – together with her whorls of oil stick in black and blue – and Sharon Farmer, whose Nineteen Eighties-era images of Black life in DC have been paired with Hemphill’s poetry within the 1988 challenge ‘Pricey Muthafuckin Goals’ (carried out at New York’s Franklin Furnace, amongst different venues). One in all Farmer’s photos exhibits scores of palms outstretched within the air on the Takoma Park Competition (1982–89), devoted to lesbian artists and musicians; one other captures a silhouetted determine strolling alongside a balustrade, the faceted prow of the Washington Monument looming improbably within the distance.
Taken collectively, these works map factors – circuits of contact – wherein Hemphill was a significant present. In addition they hark again to a misplaced time when DC (then referred to as ‘Chocolate Metropolis’) was extra working class; when folks might afford to take inventive dangers and had the need and area to take action. Town was an necessary locus within the membership cultures of the late twentieth century, and in addition contributed home-grown genres – just like the boisterous offshoot of funk referred to as ‘go-go’ and a politically uncooked type of hardcore punk galvanized by Dischord Information within the Nineteen Eighties. Whereas bureaucrats toiled downtown, distinct however allied subcultures, organized round church basements and seedy upstairs dives, shared the billing on the legendary d.c. area at seventh and E streets – across the nook from the Nationwide Mall, and now the positioning of a Starbucks.
In some ways, this can be a now-familiar churn; of wealth discovering its manner into new pockets of chic, previous bricks-and-mortar. That cycle accelerated in earnest through the Clinton years. Again then, Dupont was nonetheless a homosexual mecca, dangerous little kiddies danced at warehouses on the banks of the Potomac, and a middle-class household might nonetheless afford a row home. However not for lengthy. New stadia, new condos, new gut-renovation initiatives have ceaselessly remodeled town over the previous 25 years. That’s to not say that there isn’t any longer nice artwork or nice music in Washington DC, simply that one has to pay way more to see it. Small non-profits, akin to Hamiltonian Artists, persist, as do glorious one-off exhibitions on the Smithsonian; however ‘tradition’ right here is basically the province of larger venues, with a bearing towards touristic spectacle (as within the brutalist Hirshhorn Museum, or the majestic grounds of Glenstone) or well mannered preservationism.
One piece from ‘Take Care of Your Blessings’ expresses it neatly: Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Brass Rail (After Essex) (2017). This wall-mounted fragment of tubular staircase railing, angled like a Dan Flavin or Constantin Brâncuși, suggests an upward passage. For McClodden, Brass Rail is a small monument to the (in Hemphill’s estimation) ‘raunchy Black homosexual membership’ of the identical identify, which served as a DC haven from 1967 to 1996. It’s poignant that the rail is now put in within the previous Duncan Phillips mansion off embassy row in Dupont: an early bastion of modernism in a tony precinct, the gathering, too, might have drifted into dusty complacency. As a substitute, on this exhibition, embers of an earlier spirit nonetheless burn. And only a ground under are the numerous painted panels of Jacob Lawrence’s depiction of hundreds of thousands of Black People migrating from South to North from only a era prior.
The nation modifications, town modifications, museums change, however a hopeful impulse stays. Because the exhibition’s curator Camille Brown wrote to me: ‘Essex isn’t new to any of the youthful artists included, every has created a number of works impressed or drawn from his writings. The concepts Hemphill explored round love, intercourse, loss, politics, grief and loss of life are at all times related and have been deeply generative for artists throughout disciplines.’ A missive from the previous then – it was by no means straightforward.
‘Essex Hemphill: Handle your blessings’ is on view at The Phillips Assortment in Washington, DC, till 31 August
Important picture: Lyle Ashton Harris, Essex Hemphill, LA Up to date Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 1992, chromogenic print, 2025. Courtesy: © Lyle Ashton Harris
