The works presented are part of a series of mixed media collages called Let Me Be Magic. In this series I consider the psychic scars passed down to Black women and question whether leisure and frivolousness is possible within the shadow of so-called Black Girl Magic.

I use motifs and repetition as a way to represent the inherited burdens that are unknowingly carried through the generations. The artworks grapple with the contradictions that have defined my experiences and exposure to Black womanhood - weakness/strength, pride/shame, and faith/fear. I also incorporate pages from an instructional book on bird watching as both a symbol for unrestrained leisure and a reminder of guided structure.

This series was inspired by my own experience of bird watching as well as the racial profiling of a birdwatcher in New York City in May 2020. Both experiences were disorienting, visceral and familiar in their contradictory nature and I created this body of work to challenge the normalcy of holding all these competing feelings and experiences in one place.

BIO

Nandi Jordan is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in exposing the complexities and contradictions in her everyday Black life. Trained as a sociologist and self-taught as an artist, Nandi’s work weaves the personal with the cultural and historical, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of image and text. She found her way to art and media while earning her doctorate in sociology, often repurposing seminal texts and personal images as a way of finding her own visual language. Her works on paper use both personal and found images alongside book pages to interrogate her own life experiences within the context of the broader Black experience. Her film work explores the boundaries between ethnographic research, social justice and nonfiction storytelling. She is currently developing digital works and installations that explore the intersection of Black popular culture, knowledge production and digital archives. Nandi has Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and a B.A. in Economics from Emory University. She lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and two children.

Nandi Jordan
IG: @its_nahn_dee
WEB: nandijordan.com