STATEMENT

My ongoing practice encompasses interdisciplinary installation art, hand-sewn fabric assemblage, performance and socially engaged community ritual. As a yogi and artist of over twenty years, it is through my Art practice that I began to develop a modern sense of the spiritual anchored in archetypal female power. Motivated by an unsettling, painful urgency to regenerate my tribe, heal my ancestral burden, reclaim female sexual power and suture sweetly the vibrant scroll of “Mother Tongues” the world over, I make art crystallizing around bringing the power of consciousness back to sexuality. This work traces the burgeoning sacred geography amongst the underground, pan-sexual, pan-global stages we can define loosely as hip hop, queer, new age and feminist.  Probing the archetypal realm for intersectional, intergenerational and ancestral healing, my installations, wearables and happenings are an Art form bloated with the genital poetry of the Goddess. My textile works are hand-sewn, fabric based sculptural pieces made from recycled materials that have multiple uses as ritual talismans, wearables, ecstatic birth blankets, dreamcatchers and traveling altars. Each has its own total vision and tapestry of meaning. All these aspects function as would yantras - crystallizing my relatedness to all that is, the woven, devouring nature of reality. More immersive installations become experimental spaces for ritual, play and performance for creatives inclined to the sacred arts. Unorthodox Yogis blending spiritual practice with indigenous intuited herstories, hip hop artists fusing the rap cipher and Hindu kirtan - “mother tongues” based on the power of call and response. This transformational work lies under a sacred canopy of co-created ritual and magic to align with higher consciousness. This work is based in my long-term, active engagement cross-pollinating the languages of embodied astro-feminism, yoga, folk-mythologies, the shamanic impulse and holistic hip hop. As a femme, able-bodied, racially mixed women with white privilege, I acknowledge my privilege to pick and choose what aspects of Blackness I shoulder. Ancient practices rooted in traditions of the greater African Diaspora fold into my practice as agents of healing; accounting for Africa as the cradle of humanity and American popular culture and music as quintessentially Black. Disavowing the culture of white women’s body-dysmorphic toxic positivity and competition that has throttled the expansion of Yoga in the West, I continue to imperfectly explore in my work the true nature of ancient earth-based wisdoms reemerging within Hip Hop, Yoga and Art. Tracing back to when India and Africa made up one supercontinent. In the realm of its Queen Mothers, the yogic Lotus symbol of light into dark “Heaven on Earth” was a symbol of fertility, a living metaphor for the perpetual cycle of life, death and renewal. This is a multifaceted practice dedicated to the resurgence of the archetypal Goddess and restoring to sacred status women’s genitalia and symbols of fertility.

ABOUT KATIE

Katie Cercone Or Nah is an artist, scribe, priextexx and spiritual gangsta hailing from the blessed coast. Cercone has performed or shown work in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Dallas Contemporary, Momenta Art, C24 Gallery, Changjiang Museum China, Dodge Gallery and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. She has published critical writing in ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Utne Reader and N.Paradoxa. As co-leader of the radical, queer, transnational feminist collective Go! Push Pops, Cercone spearheaded a 400-women strong takeover of the Whitney Museum in 2014 known as “The Clitney Perennial,” and was awarded the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice the same year. In 2015 she was a J.U.S.F.C. Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo. Her work has been featured in Dazed, MILK, Interview, Japan Times, Huffington Post, ART 21, Hyperallergic, PAPER, Art Fag City, Washington Post, and Art Net TV among others.  Cercone has curated shows for Momenta Art, KARST (UK), Cue Art Foundation, Local Project and NurtureArt. Cercone is adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts where she teaches GENDER TROUBLE in the Visual & Critical Studies Department. A pioneer of Hip Hop Yoga Katie was awarded the Franklin Furnace Award Fund in 2020.

Follow her on Instagram @parvati_slice