There are two images I did not get to share when I introduced Angelo at Constellations this past weekend. 

The first (fig. 1) is an ad for a Motorola TV set featuring Jackie Robinson “stealing home” (the signature play he imported from the Negro Leagues) alongside an ad for a refrigerator, door wide open, featuring “adoring throngs” mesmerized by its spectacular content, that is, the eager citizens of an emerging Consumers Republic (Lizabeth Cohen, 2003) – the post WWII promise of democracy through consumption—within which the “Integration Story” was immediately subsumed.  At least that was the argument I made in the writing sample I submitted for my job interview in the Communication Department at GSU, which is when I finally met Angelo in person—although his reputation far preceded him and I was very excited by the argument of his first book, The Cinema of Economic Miracles. Angelo had carefully read my materials so that, as I was answering a question about the non-medium specificity of “visual culture studies,” he finished my sentence: “… and that’s how Jackie Robinson slides into the home….”

The second image is connected to the second installment of the Rendering (the) Visible Conference first co-organized with Angelo and Jennifer Barker in 2011. The 2014 edition was to focus on “the figure,” after Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon. One evening in the summer of 2013 we met at Angelo’s for dinner (risotto!) to write the CFP and select the keynotes. Although she knew Angelo and Jennifer very well and was no stranger to work meetings/events, my daughter Margot, then 9 years old, was suspicious of her ability to enjoy the gathering so I (randomly) suggested she paints. To help me focus on the task at hand, in the weeks leading up to it I had printed and laid out around the house works from both Francis Bacon and Basquiat. Margot wasn’t immediately thrilled with Basquiat but, as we were discussing potential keynotes, she painted her own version of a Francis Bacon tryptic which was then used for the conference poster (fig. 2). 

The point here is not to praise my daughter’s painting skills—which she had not exhibited before and has not exhibited since—but, rather, to notice how what was happening around her gave her the focus and confidence to make those improvised and yet self-assured marks. 

More importantly, the point is to claim Angelo as a crucial node in parental matrix—an extended queer mentoring family, an intergenerational pedagogy—that included the World Picture Conference (Brian Price, Meghan Sutherland and JD Rhodes, especially during the formative years in Stillwater, OK), Rendering (which was directly inspired by World Picture), and, eventually liquid blackness, which began just a few months after this dinner. What carried through all of these iterations was the particular conjunction of scholarship and hospitality: the commitment to creating environments that are conducive to thought. 

These are space-making practices—each conducted with different flare and sensibilities—that are free from non-proprietary attachments. In this intellectual world, no student is “yours,” although they might claim you as their (or one of their) mentor(s), but they are rather shared across an expansive network of friendships and queer intellectual kinships. Pivotal within this parental matrix, Angelo was therefore crucial in establishing not a logic of surrogacy—for example, Jenny Gunn is not Angelo’s replacement in FMT, although she might teach some of the same classes—but, rather, a broader and more consequential “conspiracy.” Which is, frankly, what we need, and certainly not the type of “study” that academia values, prioritizes, or even acknowledges. 

Come as You Are

I’ll never forget when Meghan answered my concern about delaying the third edition of Rendering (Jennifer and Angelo wanted more time in between editions) with: “remember, you can do it alone.” Which turned out to be both somewhat untrue and very true, insofar as liquid blackness cannot and has never been an individual project, while, at the same time, I know how Meghan was telling me that, even alone, I could still put its vision out there into the world. And people would follow. Again, Angelo was central to this “space-making” project and an early supporter and contributor to liquid blackness events and the journal that I started at the end of 2013 with grad students and alumni from FMT. 

The legacy of this reticulation of practices came together in Jenny’s and Jordan’s expert leadership in the Constellations gathering, including the reading group on Angelo’s work leading up to it, a practice that Angelo himself initiated in 2010 when he invited Dudley Andrew to a workshop on his work. That is, the legacy grows and, of course, it comes back around. Similarly, even though the younger cohorts may not have met Dudley, Angelo always channeled some of his sensibility alongside his field-defining work. 

Said more directly, at stake, is the practice of making space for the practice of making such space. Or, as we now explore more directly in liquid blackness, the difference between best practices and better praxes.

But, again, no one can do it alone and I could not have kept my eyes on the (always elusive and ultimately inconsequential) prize, so to speak, without Angelo’s sometimes vocal and sometimes silent (but equally effective) co-conspiratorial partnership. And his unrepenting determination to “come as you are”—one that shows how one can be original without claiming originality and how brilliance does not have to be loud and even less self-promoting because it is naturally attractive.

Come as you are, because… if you are Angelo, it’s going to be fab.