Leila Weefur is a multimedia artist, writer, and curator based in the Bay Area. Across video, still photography, and artist books, they craft lush metaphors that illuminate blackness as an existential state, and that speak to those whose endurance is daily tested by the world’s judgement, rejection, and insults. Installed at Oakland’s Aggregate Space Gallery earlier this year, Weefur’s Between Beauty & Horror plumbed the cultural messaging that shapes black identity and examined how that messaging is internalized and eventually turned outward.

Of late, Weefur’s research and creative practice has centered the blackberry as a symbol of black existence. The earlier combined video and print installation Blackberry Pastorale: Symphony No. 1 (2017) examined the black femme body as it is interpreted based on signs and symbols within a racially coded cultural context. For Between Beauty & Horror, Weefur situated blackberries as symbols of the toxic stereotypes that shape perceptions...

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