Explain some of the thinking around the work you made for your 2019-2020 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Artist-in-Residence exhibition at MoMA PS1, “This Longing Vessel”. In what ways did it explore the intersection of Blackness and queerness?
MHYSA: I started my residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in October of 2019 along with artists Elliot Reed and Naudline Pierre. The AIR group show “This Longing Vessel” opened in December of 2020 at Ps1. I think Blackness and queerness interacted for each artist in the show in our own way and I can only really speak for myself. Being a Black and queer person, Black culture, and queerness as a way of being in the world always shape my lens. This is how I see the world and my art comes from how I interpret or dream about what I see. I think about Black women’s culture, what it means to be a Black femme, what it means to channel feminity in a Black body, to claim the signifier of the feminine, and what the traditions of Black feminity are. There is a queerness inherent to Black feminity inside of a colonial framework, because femininity is white inside of white supremacy and Black women and femmes are being judged based on a white ideal of feminine performance. We Black people have created our own thing while trying to emulate this ideal, and I believe MHYSA also engages that tradition of the Black feminine archetype but sometimes I intentionally fuck with the tradition. In the work “In lieu of an explanation or an appeal, they shouted and stomped and screamed. How else were they to express the longing to be free?” (2020) which I titled after a line about a protest in a women’s prison in Saidiya Hartman’s essay “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” shows me performing the track “BELIEVE” from the