We’re in someone’s house. Judging from the belongings cluttering the kitchen table and the voices on the speakers, we’re in the Black South. The voices are loud—they have to be, to be heard over the funk beats—and they belong to kin, batting around an old recipe for banana pudding that keeps changing with the telling.
That scene is a sound and sculpture installation at the Northwest African American Museum. The artist Tariqa Waters made it for her first solo exhibition in Seattle, a show that’s full of masks and secrets in honor of the Southern women she comes from.
The kitchen table and chairs she put on display are spray-painted gold. The golden furniture is cluttered with mess: plastic bags from the dollar store, child custody papers, magazines, family photos, toilet paper, Black Barbie, Jim Beam, Newports:
