Entering Womxnhouse Detroit’s 2024 installation feels like being in my grandmother’s living room. Tables are crowded with knickknacks, lottery tickets, and those ceramic good luck elephants. Walls serve as a family tree decorated with photos of relatives and occasionally someone will pull out a VHS of home videos.
The Womxnhouse living room is a warm space but in the crevices of smiles and grandma’s couch cushions are bottles of booze and whispers of generational trauma.
“Nothing Leaves This Room” is Gyona Rice’s mixed-media installation for this year’s Womxnhouse — a yearly cohort of women and gender non-binary artists who fill every room in a Grandmont-Rosedale house with art. It’s curated by Norwest Gallery of Art owner Asia Hamilton and Laura Earle and is on display until November 17.
This year marks the third iteration of Womxnhouse Detroit after a short hiatus in 2023 and the fourth installment in Michigan. The first two Detroit rounds filled Hamilton’s childhood home with installations, but it’s moved to a different location in the same neighborhood this year. The project is based on the 1972 feminist “Womanhouse” project in Los Angeles which inspired Earle to curate Michgan’s first Womxnhouse in Manchester in 2018.
“Womxnhouse for me, really was an opportunity for women to get together and support each other,” Hamilton says. “It was a necessary thing because there’s not enough safe spaces for us to really express ourselves and be vulnerable... We’re expected to take so much.”
In addition to Rice, this year’s house features work by Michaela Ayers, Kashira Dowridge, Laura Earle, Takeisha Jefferson, lauren jones, Elise Marie Martin, Danielle deo Owensby, Megan Rizzo, Brittany Rogers, and Cat Washington.
Back in the living room, Rice reflects on how her childhood trauma from alcohol abuse does not define her and she loves her family regardless of what she may have experienced. She’s a printmaker and includes linocuts she created of her grandmother, mom, aunts, and sister in the installation to honor them.
“Regardless of all the trauma and things that might have seemed negative, I was able to go to college, I was able to always get all A’s, [and] I was able to do great things,” she says. “Especially in Black households, we’re always told, ‘What goes on in this house stays in this house,’ so I would like you to interact with it. Write your feelings and what you feel like you want to stay in this room.”
Venturing further into the dining room, photos of women in Takeisha Jefferson’s family shot by the photographer look over a buffet and table hoarded with overflowing bills. The room is chaotic, with the table ready to buckle under the weight of a woman’s burdens that she is struggling to bear.
“What you’re seeing is a room caught in time, almost paused,” Jefferson explains. “A woman [who is] overwhelmed… A woman who is looking at affirmations to try and see how she can press forward to do something different in her life, all while trying to maintain and hold her household together.”
The walk up the stairs confronts me with invasive things people have said to Elise Marie Martin like, “You’re too young for all that makeup,” and, “What if you change your mind about having kids?”
Then Michaela Ayers’s lush room transports me into a sensual oasis of opulence in a garden of thriving green plants and low lighting. As I enter through a lace curtain I am graced with a candid moment of Ayers in a bathtub with sunflowers brushing against her bare skin as they swim in the tub of self indulgence. Incense wafts across deep red walls held in incense burners the ceramic artist has crafted alongside plant holders also made by Ayers’s hands. Several other erotic photos of her decorate the walls, shot by her fellow Womxnhouse artist Jefferson.
Many of Ayers’s ceramics are imbued with spirals, like an unending journey, always shifting, changing, and evolving. She sees them as ceremonial but also multifunctional as sculptures double as incense holders and smudge stick trays.
Growing up in a religious household where sexuality (especially outside the heteronormative) was taboo inspired her photos.
“I was really wanting to explore my divine feminine energy, what that looks like for me in my most raw state, and I can’t think of a more raw state than allowing myself to really be seen,” she says. “There’s also, in conversation with these photographs, a desire to interrogate boudoir photos from the 1920s. Very rarely, in my experience, would I see representation of Black women in these photos, and those were often the images that were upheld as standards of beauty. And so with these images, I also wanted to disrupt that.”
Across the hall, in contrast to the sultry reprieve of Ayers’s work, a bright pink room draws in sunlight through curtains fashioned from kanekalon braids. This is poet Brittany Rogers’s room where adorning the body is explored as a protection ritual. Flowers with petals fashioned from acrylic nails dot the room and her poem, “Self Portrait as Aretha’s Gold Purse” proclaims, “Why should I make myself invisible?” Rogers’s debut poetry collection, Good Dress, is due out in October from Tin House.
“As a Detroit femme… beautification becomes a type of grounding, essentially like armor, what we need for survival,” she says while sitting at a vanity with the question “When was the last time that you saw yourself?” written on it. Photos of her matrilineage including her mother, daughter, and cousins line the wall above.
“Beautification is what keeps me alive,” she continues. “The ability to wake up and look exactly the way that I want to look on any given day makes me feel very grounded. And I think the world can be so jarring, can be so violent, especially toward Black queer folks, that feeling like myself, at the very least, is my start to be like, OK, nobody can disrupt me.”
In a nearby closet audio plays of femmes telling her about a time in their life that they felt the most beautiful.
Back downstairs, in a foil covered room Kashira Dowridge’s film Time Will Tell plays like the house’s soundtrack — an ode to reclaiming, rediscovering, and loving herself.
Cat Washington’s crochet work pays tribute to Black women killed in their homes by police like Sonya Massey and Breonna Taylor while Megan Rizzo brings us into the heart of her family’s home — the kitchen. Elsewhere lauren jones creates a den of ancestral memories with an archive of Black books and photos where a prayer plays on the other line of a telephone receiver.
Tea-stained pages of affirmations in Jefferson’s room look like burnt Bible passages making me recite scriptures of self love as I read them, passing back through the dining room archway. “I walk through this world with purpose and grace.” “I carry the wisdom of those who came before me.” “Stop caring what anyone else thinks and focus on building your own lane.”
The house feels like a sanctuary, with the air of a woman dancing as fluid as water, any imprints of society’s projections of womanhood dissipating from her aura like a cloud. As I begin to step out the door, words from Dowridge’s film ring in my ear, “Don’t stay too long in the shadows of disbelief.”
Editor’s note: The author of this article was a featured artist in Womxnhouse Detroit 2022.
Womxnhouse Detroit 2024 is on view through Nov. 17 at 14620 Grandmont Rd., Detroit. Tickets can be purchased at womxnhouse.life for a $35 suggested donation.
