Blackberry Pastorale: Symphony No.1
Video Installation at KALA Art Institute Fellowship Exhibit, 2017
Music "Fantasie Negre" composed by Florence Beatrice Price
Blackberry Lexicon, Letterpress and Blackberry Ink on Paper
Yusef Yomunyakaa's Blackberries, inkless intaglio print on paper
A Pastoral Hanging, 8 Button-ups
BLACKBERRY PASTORALE: SYMPHONY NO. 1 examines the complex cultural coding of Black femininity through the metaphor of the blackberry. Drawing on the loaded adage "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice," this multimedia installation weaves together video, printmaking, and sound to explore the paradoxical ways Black feminine bodies are simultaneously desired and degraded.
The central video piece creates a cinematic meditation on the blackberry as a racialized figure, while accompanying letterpress prints and garments incorporate actual blackberry pulp as ink—creating marks that evoke both bodily traces and sites of violence. This material exploration dialogues with literary antecedents, including Yusef Komunyakaa's "Blackberries" (1992) and Wallace Thurman's "The Blacker The Berry" (1929), to excavate historical associations between Black bodies and notions of consumption, desire, and worth.
The installation's soundscape features Florence Beatrice Price's "Fantasie Negre," a composition by the first Black woman recognized as a symphonic composer. This layered orchestral piano score infuses the work with historical resonance while underscoring the choreographed destruction of blackberry fruit, creating an unsettling contemplation of beauty, violence, and the American pastoral tradition.
© 2017 Leila Weefur. All rights reserved.