Johnson and Bennet are two of the U.S.’s foremost black transgender artist/activists. Johnson and Bennet’s work centers on healing and transforming communities. With a combined 30 years of experience in community organizing around gender, racial, and economic justice, they collaborate on the Justice Fleet, a mobile social justice museum that fosters healing through art, dialogue, and play. Over the course of a week at Davidson, Johnson and Bennet ran three workshops from the Justice Fleet and gave a public talk on their photography, oral history, and painting series Transfuturism, which was installed in the Wall Academic Center for three weeks in Spring 2019. The first workshop, Radical Forgiveness took the perspective that in a socially unjust world, we experience moments that require small and large acts of repair. Radical forgiveness is a fluid and deliberate process that allows us to repair the tears, rips, and gaping wounds that impede us from being better versions of ourselves and bettering our world. Visitors began the exhibit with a display on Radical Forgiveness and engaged in an art-activism project called the Forgiveness Quilt where they shared their own biases and sought forgiveness. The second workshop, Radical Imagination, had people work in groups to create their just worlds from the available supplies. Then, as a large group, participants talked about their worlds, the societal structures they built, how those structure challenge or perpetuate social problems, and ways we can begin changing our world.
The conversations were documented and photographed and became a part of the exhibit’s display to encourage more dialogue, questions, and imagination. The third workshop, Activist Comics, was a hands-on workshop on art, activism, and futurity. Johnson and Bennet also gave an Artist Talks, Humanizing Equity through Art: The Justice Fleet’s Transfuturism Project, in which they discussed Transfuturism, a photography, oral history, and art activism project that utilizes Afrofuturistic art to render the lives of black trans and gender non-conforming folk complex and visible. Bennet and Johnson photographed and recorded the narratives and lived experiences of trans and gender non-conforming people to illustrate how transgressing gender affords a particular form of liberation, but also leads to new forms of identity challenges. Then they produced a large-scale painting that transforms the participant into an Afrofuturistic super hero.
Just under a hundred Davidson students had the opportunity to learn from the scholarly and experiential knowledge of two black transgender artist-organizers—an opportunity they would not otherwise have had at Davidson, where few faculty are African American and none are openly trans. In addition to learning about the history and present of transgender of color activism, these students became acquainted with best practices for equity and inclusion during the Justice Fleet’s artist talk, practiced forgiveness as an integral aspect of social justice work, and engaged in dialogue about how to build more just communities.
