(Re)claiming Sanctity:
Harmony Holiday’s Black Backstage

Harmony Holiday, Industry Plant (detail) (2024). Half-circle stage, cotton stems, archival magazines, microphone, and headphones, dimensions variable. The Kitchen, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen. Photo: Kyle Knodell.

In her 2020 essay for Triple Canopy, “The Black Catatonic Scream,” multidisciplinary Los Angeles-based artist Harmony Holiday reframes the polarities of emotion as something more elastic. “Black music is a bridge between elective muteness and the scream, between excess and disguise,” she writes. She marks how, emerging from the Middle Passage, captive Africans used sound to communicate despite the language barrier among the different tribes: “On the passage…we encounter low hummed sounds, hysterical sounds, requiem sounds, healing sounds, masochistic sounds, unsounds, murmurs, and, in dire conditions, we refuse all sound.” Holiday notes the importance of silence in this hellish landscape: It provided a break in psychosis and a means of refuge. “We need silence to redirect meaning,” she explains. “To escape the sad, rabid demographics of struggle and criminalization and running away to seek a Mecca offstage, backstage, elsewhere.”¹ This silence is a framework for the “Black backstage,” a term that Holiday uses to describe the psychological space where Black performers go to engage in silence—a space where, through seclusion, they are empowered to role-play, live out fantasies, or embrace their private interior worlds.² Holiday often places her own practice (of writing, archiving, and experimental filmmaking) within this framework by taking us on her journey through the interior world of each person she studies. This approach also structured her exhibition, BLACK BACKSTAGE (2024), recently on view at The Kitchen’s Westbeth location in New York City.

The immersive exhibition offered intimate portrayals of Black musicians throughout time—a study in how their public and private lives became vulnerable to spectacle, and how a withdrawal from the limelight ultimately altered their public-facing personas. Harmony captured musicians’ meanders between quietude and hysteria in an effort to safeguard their interior worlds. Her culturally dense installations were spiritually charged, fusing factual narrative with mythology. By repositioning the notion of celebrity to privilege humanity, she wields graceful and complex portraits of Black musicians to absolve them of one-dimensionality. Across her practice, Holiday mobilizes the Black backstage to repurpose the biographies of her muses, allowing them to retreat and to (re)claim sanctity.

Entering BLACK BACKSTAGE at The Kitchen’s lofty temporary outpost felt like I was gearing up to interview a star in her green room. The exhibition comprised various installations, each imbued with the behind-the-scenes ephemera of a performer. In the left corner was Life of the Party (all works 2024), an onyx Hollywood vanity set suited for any starlet’s boudoir. On its surface was a 1960 issue of Jazz Quarterly, which sat just inches away from a floral rhinestone clutch, a trail of incense ash fallen to the wayside of its holder, a cool hot comb, a thick binder filled with printed articles on Black musicians, and a vintage Sony TV-720U that played a silent video of Black performers. A picture of D’Angelo and Grace Jones, staring at one another in equal admiration, was plastered on the mirror. Together, this assemblage of memorabilia and personal accoutrements act as a portrait of a musician just moments away from performing. Viewers could sit at the vanity and look at themselves under the warm lights while paging through print-outs of Margo Jefferson’s essay “Ripping off Black Music” (1973), Miles Davis’ last major interview with SPIN magazine, or John Edgar Wideman’s essay “The Silence of Thelonious Monk” (1999). The installation’s elements gathered a sense of the complex history of Black music, exemplifying the level of grace and beauty required for its creation.

At the right of the room was Industry Plant (2024), an onyx-toned stage that took the form of a low half-moon table. Its face was littered with archival tabloid and editorial articles on Black musicians featured in Jazz Journal and Downbeat and a pair of black over-the-ear headphones. Other musical paraphernalia—a retro wireless microphone and a mini speaker—accompanied a spread of cotton bolls that formed a half circle on the floor, connecting with the table to complete a circle. The work felt like a shrine to Black cultural production, hosting a séance that unearthed the histories of labor that intersect with notions of celebrity and authenticity. As cotton bolls outline our recent relationship to African enslavement in America, Industry Plant threads a line between the creation of the blues and the tolls of Black labor that developed the genre and the country alike.

At the heart of the room was a supple, white leather Le Corbusier Grand Modele sofa placed in front of Holiday’s 37-minute video Abide With Me, which ran on a loop. The video was a work of fabulation, for which the artist stitched together found archival footage of Black performers to reimagine the three years of Thelonious Monk’s life when he went off the grid and waylaid his nascent musical career to tour with an evangelist before signing with a record label. It largely features archival footage of Monk himself and clips of musicians performing: Videos of North West performing live in Paris—sourced from TikTok—intermix with footage of Eric Dolphy playing a hymnal. These visuals are overlaid with the voice of cultural theorist Fred Moten, who reads an essay by Holiday. Each element merges to create a layered score. As the video shifts between full-color and monochrome, red light beams from behind the screen, spilling over the edges. The video aims to reconstruct Monk’s interior disposition in his time away from the public eye. The collaged footage evidences Monk’s spiritual transformation through the lens of other musicians, nodding to the transcendence that came from his retreat.

Suspended from the ceiling throughout the exhibition space was Runners, a series of double-sided screen-prints on cotton. On each of the four prints, Holiday layered images and poems to reimagine the lives of Black performers, including Billie Holiday, J Dilla, Billy Strayhorn, Sam Cooke, D’Angelo, Ye, and Michael Jackson. The pieces work to restore a humanity often stripped in media outlets by showing a fuller scope of each individual, tapping into backstage spaces where performers create new identities to protect themselves. In one print, Holiday overlays an image of Ye that warps distinguishable features, blurring his face and aspects of his body. On the opposite side of the panel, a collage of screenshots stitches together a news article from the fictional Dail Ye News. The article includes screenshots of real quotes in which Ye praises Michael Jackson, who he says inspired him to be larger than life—to be free. By quoting Ye, the artwork advocates for his humanity while manifesting the Black backstage to create a speculative space in which the artist can freely explore his inner world.

Harmony Holiday, Industry Plant (installation view) (2024). Half-circle stage, cotton stems, archival magazines, microphone, and headphones, dimensions variable. The Kitchen, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen. Photo: Kyle Knodell.

Harmony Holiday, Runners (installation view) (2024). Four screen-prints on cotton fabric, 48 × 36 inches each. Prints designed in collaboration with Angelique Rosales Salgado. The Kitchen, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.

⁂

The notion of Holiday’s Black backstage is a perennial reference point in Black studies. Ideas of quietude and interiority came into theoretical consciousness through the likes of Kevin Quashie and Elizabeth Alexander, whose scholarship highlights the scope of Black people’s emotional composition, ranging from shyly reserved to extroverted bravado.³ Holiday’s writings refine this rhetoric, giving language to how musicians use quietude and interiority to safeguard their private lives against public intrusion.

In Holiday’s Substack, Black Music and Black Muses, which she began publishing in early 2021, she speaks to Black mythologies at her own pace, outside of the exhibition space. There, she fulfills the role of a melodic archivist and caretaker, where essays on her musical muses double as cultural anthropology and autofiction, similar to works like Margo Jefferson’s Negroland (2015). Equally, the newsletter becomes a platform for her to perform as she entangles herself with Black music that she loves deeply. Black Music and Black Muses gets its name from the late Amiri Baraka’s Black Music (1967), a collection of groundbreaking essays on modern jazz and Black icons, including Cecil Taylor, Sonny Rollins, and Wayne Shorter. Working in the vein of Baraka, Holiday takes a grassroots approach to cultural criticism by recontextualizing Black music, stating, “I have felt that people have been sort of lukewarm about doing real, on the ground, in it, music writing since Baraka’s Blues People and Digging. A lot of that work since then has gone into academia, the closest thing is probably Fred [Moten’s] In the Break.”⁴ Through Black Music and Black Muses, Holiday embraces the tenacity of writers who have skillfully analyzed the blues tradition: She inherits Baraka’s quick-witted bravado, Moten’s suave doublespeak, and writer Greg Tate’s earthbound cadence that uses cultural slang as standard grammar.

Harmony Holiday, Life of the Party (detail) (2024). Vanity mirror and chair, found archival magazines, Xerox reader, hot comb, Sony TV monitor, headphones, and liner notes, dimensions variable. The Kitchen, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.

Harmony Holiday, Abide With Me (installation view) (2024). Digital color video with sound, 37 minutes and 31 seconds. Narrated by Fred Moten. The Kitchen, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.

Her lines hit you like a jab to the face and can be used as salve once the bruise appears: “Maybe love and peace are their own propaganda and all of us are secretly out for blood but one consequence of unrepentant genocide is that from its clutches, you’ll never catch the delighted fantasy hidden between your justifications for hatred and eventually, uninterrupted, there will be no one left to hate but yourselves,” she writes.⁵ Her honesty and wisdom become lyrics that strike a chord before an internal resolve of the reader is met. Occasionally, she mixes her writings with screenshots from social media platforms like TikTok or interview clips from YouTube, riffing on the online memeification of Black aesthetics, which can be read as its own kind of spectacle, depending on how the material is used. Ultimately, Holiday creates an air of familiarity through navigating the contours of her muses. Through her delivery method, they become approachable people rather than idolized figures.

Holiday captivates her readers by connecting the threads between her biography and the lineages that precede her existence. Beyond her devotion to writing outside the thresholds of academia, Holiday’s appreciation for music blossomed through her father, the late musician Jimmy Holiday. Mr. Holiday, a singer-songwriter with two albums under his belt, spent most of his life struggling to find consistent and lucrative success in the music industry. In one essay, Harmony tells the story of Mr. Holiday showing up at Ray Charles Enterprises unannounced with two briefcases: one filled with demos and the other with revolvers. He refused to leave until they heard his music.⁶ (He would go on to co-write Charles’ “All I Ever Need Is You” and Jackie DeShannon’s “Put a Little Love in Your Heart.”)⁷ Holiday’s father’s life trickles into her meditations on Black performers whose radical essence and mental illness sway between public and private life. Mr. Holiday struggled with bouts of paranoia, worsened by his prescribed daily dose of the controversial antipsychotic Thorazine. At a young age, Harmony recalls seeing him threaten people with guns, including her mother. Holiday grapples specifically with guns as a dual symbol of danger and freedom, a notion that calls back to the full scope of Black interiority. “I understand why my father carried those weapons with him,” she writes. “There’s a majestic intentionality within the idiosyncrasies and hypervigilance that others called his madness…And it’s equally mind-numbing to be made a vessel for propaganda about the trappings of blackness, the redundant spectacle of lost men and traumatized daughters.”⁸ In contrast to his bombast, Harmony paints more peaceful memories of her father, in the quiet of their home where he practiced his music.⁹ In a sense, Holiday memorializes her father through BLACK BACKSTAGE by building complexity and context around the public narratives of hypervisible musicians. She critiques the relentless appetite of media, especially as it mirrors the plantation system’s cycles of surveillance, punishment, and ridicule.

Across her practice, Holiday depicts an interior space where hushed tones and screams collide into a glitchy index of the Black aesthetics. Holiday’s concept of the Black backstage redirects the oppressive confines of celebrity. To be backstage is to be hidden from the public eye, to allow the public persona to fall away. Through this framework, musicians who resist legibility and public approval inherit instead the frantic and tranquil sounds that transform music into a manifesto. The clarity of the Black backstage is available to all of us: Retreat offers us an opportunity to be beholden to only ourselves —to our inner worlds, to our fantasies.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 38.

Harmony Holiday, BLACK BACKSTAGE (installation view) (2024). The Kitchen, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen. Photo: Kyle Knodell.

Shameekia Shantel Johnson is a writer, curator, and researcher of Afro-Caribbean descent from New York City. Currently, Johnson is perfecting her nomenclature Red Notes, a body of work that meditates upon the color’s psycho-spiritual relationship to black being and how it conceptualizes in social space.

More by Shameekia Shantel Johnson