Mahari Chabwera
Spring Resident 2021
Mahari Chabwera is an artist and curator living and working between Newport News and Richmond. Shortly after receiving her B.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from VCU in 2017, she began cultivating communion rooted in radical black well-being and self-determination. She was the 2019-2020 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, and the 2020 recipient of VisArts’ Emerging Artist Award.
Three years ago in Vermont I began a tapestry painting that would become the first in a series of 7 interpretations of archetypal energy, at Tiny Birch I anticipate working on the 5th of these paintings. - Mahari Chabwera
Womanifesto 2020
In time
I am
sittin in the doorway of Mommy’s bedroom
with my legs open
lookin between myself.
What lies within me frees me.
Daddy taught me to seek
Unlike him tho I know
there are things I cannot know,
and cannot say,
and cannot understand.
I can give em life tho.
It’s my practice to give them life.
It’s useless tryin to defend them.
Imma live them.
Imma make my many deaths nourish the soil in which I root.
These shared limbs hold me deep
beyond death and joy and pain and water and whim.
Beneath the grit we wipe away again and again.
My soul nourishes the s(k)in I’m in.
I hold myself 2
in the light of my love.
I am my Messiah.
I am my own promised land. I can do all things by the light of the Source within.
I am the ballad in the chest of an open sky. 1
I am the vindication of immeasurable dreams deferred.
I am already full. I carry the weight of bein well, well. 2
I am Nana Buluku, self-fertilizing on holy ground. (It’s all holy ground.)
I am a soul wrapped around a dream bearing a gift unto myself.
I am the secret to joy.
I am wholly holy.
I am the cool.
I paint, pierce, scar, mark, move, and adorn my body, remembering its oath to its soul.
I’m claimin myself for myself.
I do not fear myself.
I am open, I am strong, I am willing to see
what lies within me frees me.
I am the living embodiment of Life itself.
I am safe
guiding hands help me everyday.
I’m shapeshiftin,
I’m fire to the deaths I live.
I am the vindication of immeasurable dreams deferred.
I am the bloom. Maya’s bloom. Audre’s Bloom. Octavia’s Bloom. Jill’s Bloom. Erykah’s Bloom. India’s bloom. Ruby’s Bloom Big Mama’s bloom. GG’s bloom. Titi’s bloom. and Mommy’s bloom.
May our many deaths nourish the soil in which we root.
Our blood is the lesson,
“I welcome the wise to teach.
Appreciator of my culture,
thick not just from bone dense and eat.
I have a rhythm in my ways
and a practice in my seek.” 3
Yes, I am safe.
I am not bound by the borders of this place.
What I am when I’m not blackened?
What I am when I’m not wounded?
What I am when I’m not bodied?
Here, in the powerful loving darkness
beckoning to myself.
1. Aja Monet, Sawt al-Hurriya
2. Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
3. Jill Scott, Womanifesto