APP Alumni Ladi’Sasha Jones contributes to “Black to Black,” a special supplement issue of the Gagosian Quarterly.

APP Alumni, Ladi’Sasha Jones worked on part of “Black to Black,” a special supplement guest-edited by Roxane Gay for the Winter 2022 issue of the Gagosian Quarterly. In her wonderful contribution, she explores Black women artists who utilize archives, such as Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lauren Halsey and Xenobia Bailey, among others, writing “There is art in telling one’s story, any story, through the cumulative process of storing associative files, images, and objects.” 

Jones has had a strong tie to the material and process of archives starting which began during her time as a student in a public program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, New York, where she later found an internship with the library’s Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books division. Through this, Jones fell in love with the intimate engagement with the archive of Black women artists. This experience offered Jones more depth in the learching around research and storytelling. For Jones, this position encouraged her to approach archiving as an artistic device that transmits values around determined narratives and knowledge systems. Jones works to find the art in storytelling and in keeping it alive. She argues that “the archive is a site where tactile conditions of intimacy not only exist but matter.”