Alanna Fields: Unveiling

Unveiling is a conceptual monograph comprising past and recent artworks connected to Alanna Fields’s projects, including As We Were, Audacity, Mirages of Dreams Past, and Constellations: Our Love Was Deeply Purple. These series are center on Fields’s ongoing research on Black Queer Archives and the power of representation and speculation through vernacular imagery. As both a book and an object, Unveiling symbolizes the complexities and limitations of visibility and invisibility, while breaking open veils that reveal audacious queering. Meditating on Black Queer memory, vulnerability, and desire, this monograph brings to focus everyday representations of Black Queer life in the U.S. between the 1920s and 1990s. The design of the publication is closely connected to the tactility and visual properties of Fields’s original artworks, where painting, layering, repetition, fragmentation, opacity, and transparency become intermediaries to unveil the identities of the figures pictured. Throughout the immersive imagery in Unveiling, whispers of poems and reflections on queer introspection by Sumia Juxun thread and weave each section of the book together in a beautiful cadence.