Marigold Opacity by Amy Rosenblum Martin

2021

Marigold Opacity

Essay by Amy Rosenblum Martín

For the Greenwood Art Project, Sarah Ahmad created The American Dream (2020), a sanctuary in Tulsa’s forest for healing from personal and generational trauma, especially the horrific violence of the race massacre in 1921. Her structure recalls a refugee tent like those she saw growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, which she remembered when seeing tents in photographs documenting the massacre in Tulsa. The reference is subtle, however, as Ahmad chooses not to indulge the imperative to produce overtly activist art. Instead, her project focuses on personal wellness through liberatory frameworks by cultivating ecotherapeutic practices with survivors of atrocities. In doing so, the artist stages her own rebellion within the ongoing rebellion for equity being fought within the US art world. It’s a continuous contest and recombining of tactics—ranging from overt to covert, from iconography to activist uses of art—all working toward justice. Ahmad explains, “My work is about healing and renewal versus reprocessing of trauma; it provides a break from the upheavals of life, a space for respite.”

It turns out that Greenwood is neither green nor wooded. This surprised Ahmad when she relocated for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in 2019 after getting her MFA in Memphis, which marked an era of personal growth. Hiking had become her preferred restorative modality and she was learning more Black history, two concentrations she connects with this project. By expanding the power of forest bathing as self-care into communal healing of communities at risk, Ahmad’s thinking resonates with Audre Lorde’s assertion: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Visitors approaching The American Dream through the deep woods and along lakeside trails smell Ahmad’s installation before they see it. Marigolds, which cover her structure, open the work to sensory, political, cultural, and spiritual associations, which may be subjective, culturally specific, and/or universal. Their perfume—common yet eccentric, seductive yet repugnant—is gender neutral and enables effortless deep breaths. Having both female pistil and male stamen, marigolds defy hierarchical binaries. They also resemble the firebombs that destroyed “Black Wall Street” and the US drone bombs that shattered northern Pakistan from 2004 to 2018, both of which dispossessed communities and left mental health crises, as well as corpses. Originally from Mexico, marigolds were sacred for Aztecs who used them medicinally and spiritually to help spirits find their way home or to enable one to cross a river safely; for example, they still adorn the Day of the Dead, symbolizing death as the birth of the cycle of seasons and new life. Cultures throughout South Asia adopted the flower and put it to widespread use in transitional ceremonies, like weddings and funerals.

While Ahmad’s work in general is known for its light and transparency in experiential terms—for example, viewers shine flashlights as they walk through her colorful, lacy, geometric installations in darkened spaces—she instrumentalizes opacity at the conceptual level. Her efforts bring to mind conditions Édouard Glissant theorizes in which colonizers viewed the colonized as “Others” and demanded transparency in order to be able to categorize and rule them. In claiming the "right to opacity," he asserts that oppressed people should be permitted to be opaque, not fully understood, and simply to exist as different. Raised in a postcolonial context, Ahmad uses abstraction—one of her conceptually opaque art approaches—to hint at the universality of oppression and to protect her personal mindspace. For her, artistic opacity defies prevailing notions that activist art must make obvious political statements. She deliberately challenges US assumptions about what a politicized and racialized Pakistani woman artist “should” produce. She insistently exercises her freedom of self-determination, asserting it as a basic human right.

The American Dream resonates with Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s Black Power Naps/Siestas Negras (2019), an installation designed as a fanciful place for viewers to sleep for antiracist, decolonial, and postgenderist reasons. As the artists explain, “After learning who benefits most from restful sleep and down time, we are creating interactive surfaces for a playful approach to investigate and practice deliberate energetic repair.” Likewise, Ahmad chooses beauty, pleasure, and curatives—albeit in a natural setting, not a museum—as an antivictimist hack. The American Dream reprograms art, gracefully using the Greenwood Art Project to draw Tulsan survivors into a restorative haven in the woods. As Ahmad’s participatory installation conveys, reparations must include the redistribution of rest, relaxation, downtime, the privilege to focus, and indeed, forest bathing.