This New Perspectives tour explored the mythmaking quality of blackness through black art that creates worlds in which black people can imagine themselves as free. Alongside explorations of work by Diedrick Brackens, presented in the concurrent exhibition “darling divined,” and of Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith in the exhibition “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” participants were encouraged to envisage other ways of being for black folks through material and virtual means that would not tether them to apparatuses of antiblack violence and control. In both cases, participants considered several questions, including: What worlds, or considerations of worlds, are made possible in Brackens’s woven textiles and in the video performances of Mirror/Echo/Tilt? How might black folks already inhabit these worlds?

New Perspectives tours are led by a New Museum Teaching Fellow, an emerging scholar in art history or a related field. The topics of the tours are based on the Fellow’s ongoing research and change monthly, engaging participants in uniquely focused examinations of selected objects and installations. These tours, which took place on July 7, July 14, July 21 and July 28, were led by New Museum Teaching Fellow Troizel Carr, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, whose research questions the (im)possibility of black childhood through fairy tales and black children’s figurations in post-emancipation art and literature.