Field Office Fellowship: Amoke Kubat and The Sick & Tired of Being Sick & Tired Chair

We met Amoke Kubat earlier this year when we were putting together our Solutions Twin Cities event at the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis. We asked neighborhood residents and community leaders who they thought was doing creative, exciting, impactful work and a number of people pointed to Amoke, an artist, writer, mother and educator living and working on the Northside.

Since meeting Amoke and helping her to put together her Solutions Vol.4 presentation in March we’ve been fortunate to continue conversations with her about the role of art in community; and creativity as a personal act of healing and resistance. Her perspective has really shaped our own thinking about the power of collaborative making and of simple public acts of creative resistance.

This past summer Amoke was one of 8 artists participating in the pilot year of the Field Office Fellowship project that Works Progress is co-presenting with the Walker Art Center’s Education & Community Programs Department. As part of this project Amoke explored her ongoing interests and work, finding a focus for her energies in the idea of a Sick & Tired of Being Sick & Tired Chair - a place to rest and to explore “sitting as an act of resistance and an art of resistance.”

In early September Amoke worked with ROLU, an art and design studio based here in Minneapolis, to lead a chair building workshop for woman that were part of Amoke’s YO MAMA! Mothering Mothers Institute & Art of Mothering Workshop series. About 10 women (and a few men & children) gathered at the Walker on a beautiful Saturday morning to learn how to build a chair together with plans designed by ROLU, who led the workshop and also enagaged with Amoke and other participants in conversation on a variety of topics.

Here is Amoke’s summary of the project, which she’ll be sharing in person this FRIDAY, September 30th, from 6-7PM in the Walker Art Center’s Flatpak House:

“As YO MAMA continues to grow and shift into its own entity, art has become a strong core value in the expression of mothers, ‘mothering and being mothered’ and the acquisition of our primal feminine energy that brings worth and supports all life forms.

In my investigation of black mothering through writing, teaching, parenting mothers through education and valuing an ‘each one teach one’ experience, I began to hear Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist. She kept whispering, ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ I did not know her. However, I truly knew what that felt like.

As mothers gathered to do art together, I noticed a collective fatigue. There is way too much disrespectful out sourcing of our mother loving, nurturing and mother wit. The MAMAS are at a tipping point to the bulldozing and breaking down of our ways of communicating and doing things. We are returning to our cultural legacies for empowering ourselves; finding our tongues to express all truths and standing taller upon the shoulders of maternal ancestors, to creatively share our collective experiences and becoming healthy in mind, body and soul.”

If you are in the Twin Cities and have an hour to hangout and listen/talk with Amoke about her project before the weekend begins, please join us. You won’t regret it.

For info, email hello at worksprogress dot org