Artist
Montenez Lowery

Project Title
A Darktown Cakewalk

Grant Amount
$1,692.65

Website
www.montenezlowery.com

A Darktown Cakewalk is a multidisciplinary project by Montenez Lowery that employs pinhole photography, sculpture, and sound to interrogate histories of Black cultural appropriation and authorship. The project engages the legacy of At a Darktown Cakewalk, a 19th-century minstrel show that appropriated the cakewalk—a dance created by enslaved people as an act of quiet resistance. Lowery positions the work in dialogue with this lineage while challenging photography's role as a colonial tool that has historically distorted Black identity.

Cultural objects contributed by participants are made into pinhole cameras. Objects and representations of concepts they have witnessed being appropriated, and or signify their Blackness, are now used to capture their portraits.  Before exposure, the participant's body and object physically alter the film, producing an inseparable record of the subject, object, and process.

These images are accompanied by recorded conversations played through deconstructed cassette tape installations that decay over time, gradually distorting the audio. As image, object, and sound shift and deteriorate, the exhibition continually transforms toward a singular moment in which altered portraits, worn objects, and decaying sound briefly align—a harmony where Lowery locates the most truthful articulation of Black cultural representation.