otherwise arts aab is the foundation for Ashon Crawley’s continued exploration in his personal art practice. his arts practice is performance-based—sometimes using sound, virtual reality, augmented reality, holographic technologies, as well as paint, ink, dye, fabric. ashon Crawley’s practice is an interdisciplinary approach to audio, visual, and choreographic methods. he uses choreography to create mystical paintings, dancing—what Blackpentecostals call “shouting”—on paper or canvas with pigment powder, clapping my hands with paint, letting it splatter on surfaces, sometimes singing, based on the rhythms of the Blackpentecostal Church.
he uses paint, ink, canvas, paper, and other surfaces to visualize that which remains after his body moves to the sound of the praise music, to more fully consider residue, lingering, that escapes capture. he uses augmented reality, digital tools and architectural methods and creates sound based art objects too. crawley’s art practice lets him consider the ways the religious as a conceptual domain and field of thought has sequestered, and in sequestering not holding with care, particular kinds of meditative, transformative, collective modes of existence, reflection, behavior. with audiovisual practices, he has occasion to think about hiddenness, about the practice of composing and constructing, of putting ideas and concepts and colors and sounds together, taking them apart.
an author, his first book, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press 2016), was published as part of the prestigious multi-university press and Mellon funded American Literature Initiative and won the 2019 Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society. his second book, The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press 2020), won both the 2020 Believer Book Award for Nonfiction awarded by The Believer Magazine and the 2021 Lammy Award in Nonfiction awarded by Lambda Literary.
writing from both Blackpentecostal Breath and The Lonely Letters have served as conceptual and foundational frameworks for art exhibits, including “Enunciated Life” at the California African American Museum, curated by Taylor Renee Aldridge, an exhibit in which he had two visual pieces; “Otherwise/Revival” at Bridge Projects in Los Angeles, curated by Jasmine McNeal and Cara Lewis, taking Crawley’s theorizing of “otherwise possibility” as the grounding concept for the exhibit that included two of his paintings a sound installation, and a collaborative experimental film created by myself and visual artist Christina McPhee. “i know it’s the end & i am full of beauty” in Columbus, Ohio, curated by Reg Zehner, too, is based on theories found in The Lonely Letters. And writing from an essay, “Otherwise, Ferguson,” was the foundation for a show curated by cheyenne turions titled, “Talking Back, Otherwise,” at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto, Canada.
He moves in and out of various genre registers in order to sound out a critique of the normative world, to sound out the possibility for alternatives, for otherwise. And as a sound, visual and digital artist, he has shown visual, sound and collaborative film works at the California African American Museum, Bridge Projects, New City Arts Initiative’s Welcome Gallery and Second Street Gallery. He was a 2021 MacDowell Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts and a New City Arts Initiative 2021 Fellow and has been invited to the Yaddo residency, without application, for visual art, which he will use in 2022. In addition to being a finalist for a Creative Capital Award, he is recipient of a 2021 UNDO Fellowship given by the UNIONDOCS Center for Documentary Arts.
