When you visit Michi Meko’s website you are greeted with one word,

– INWARD –

this serves as a simple direction leading the viewer to his work but could also be a reference to the work itself. Michi Meko’s paintings are dark, all shades of black are explored: charcoal, shadow, burnt wood – reminders of the darkness of sleep or the unconscious mind. This blackness is punctuated with sudden bursts of color – blues, golds, oranges, reds and whites inform the psychogeography that Meko traverses.

Trelani Michelle tends to move in the other direction – her work as an oral historian leads her outward, into the community, to collect the oral histories of folks in the Gullah Geechee community in Savannah, Georgia and beyond.

Trelani and Michi made time to plumb the depths of Meko’s work and share their thoughts on the experience of spiritual retreat in the wilderness, the gifts of Mami Wata, the joys of fly-fishing, painting, and why Michi Meko is the King of Collards.

Trelani Michelle: When speaking about your work you’ve said “The use of navigation is one of the skills required for any journey” and that oral history is also a framework. While oral history was practiced by all people, I feel like it's inherently ours. I read something about the characteristics of white supremacy and the worship of the written word, which automatically devalues, within the white worldview, the spoken word and the feeling and intuition of the thing. That’s something that I feel within your artwork: a lot of intuition and feeling. Because that written word can kind of be unyielding, right? But oral history allows for more flexibility, more changing with the times, and maybe even more buoyancy.

I was looking at your Artist Statement, and the first line took my breath away: “In the summer of 2015, I almost drowned.” That is brilliant storytelling, it hooked me right away. The ocean holds so much trauma for our ancestors, yet it also offers so much healing to our bodies.

Also in your Artist Statement you say: “We’re navigating public spaces… we’re consistently threatened while remaining buoyant within them.” So that buoyancy and navigation – those are central figures in your work.

Michi Meko: In 2015, I almost drowned in a river, so from that experience I began to invite that event into my artwork and accept what that was. And in a way, it became – I guess a near-death experience becomes like a reset. And after the event, I began to look around and think about what it meant to be buoyant. And so I went on a journey to try and figure out, historically, why Black people fear water, why Black people can't swim, or why Black children drown more than white kids. Why I'm a very proficient swimmer, but still almost drowned in a kayak, you know what I mean? So it just sparked all this kind of stuff.

And then I had a friend who is an anthropologist tell me about Mami Wata and that belief system. And things were then starting to happen to me. Like, yes, I became very calm. Yes, she took the best of what I had. Yes, I did begin to make money. And yes, ladies began to say I was handsome and all this other stuff, right. Then all these things began to happen, and one night in a dream, she appeared and invited me back. And it was just like, I have things to do. And she was like, Are you sure? And I was like, Yeah. And then boom, didn't see her for a while. So I just began to think that was strange or was a part of my subconscious working; or, there's something really to this, you know what I mean?

And, because I am a fisherman and outdoorsman, I would then go – I still do – take gifts to the water. And the one time that I didn’t – I used to wear this beautiful necklace that had a chain and float on it, that someone made me to keep my head above water. And it seemed like that chain just broke off for no reason and fell into the ocean. Then when I pulled out my crab basket, I had more crabs than I've ever had. The quickest I've ever gathered crabs. So I thought that was kind of strange or funny. And so I just began to invite that situation and those thoughts into my work. I began thinking about my father and his inability to swim. I was thinking about Jim Crow and what that did for a generation of swimmers - the fear that caused and the fear that continues to cause. Then I began reading historical records about the Africans being very proficient swimmers.

So it was something that was very strange to me, that there’s this thing that we've lost. So I just began to make work about that, and to be very considerate of what it is that I was doing and how it related to Black people.

So far as white supremacy and all that, that's white people's problems and my work don’t have nothing to do with white people. I do not center them at all. It is only about me. Things that I think about, things about my family, philosophical thoughts that are mine, and the things that I develop or research and try to create a pedagogy for. But so far as white supremacy like that, that's on white people, that ain’t on me.

TM: Yes, oh yes. So it's like… it exists. It's out there. But when I go home, I close my door, I get in my car, when I’m walking down the street with my earpods in – that ain’t got nothing to do with me.

MM: That's not my problem.

TM: Right. And it's evident in your work like, it’s all things blackety black. I knew you were Southern – I saw that you were Atlanta-based – I had to do a little more digging to see the Florence, Alabama. But when I saw that cast iron skillet, that Cash Money-looking album cover, the work songs – spirituals, really – and the collards, I was like, no, he is like, Southern, Southern, Southern. He's like that Great Migration – we didn't leave, we stayed – kind of Southern.

MM: Yeah.

TM: Did you grow up in Florence, too?

MM: Yeah, I grew up in Florence. And a lot of my work is about that statement you just said, right? It’s about recognizing the cultural retentions and how they stayed and how we continue to thrive or use those in our everyday lives. And yeah, we may not be Africans. Yeah, we are Americans, but we still have those cultural retentions that definitely tie us to that land. And my thing is – I am very proud of who I am as a Southern man. I'm very proud of our contributions to American history and to culture. And I think it's up to me with that work or some of my work to tell these greater narratives - beyond Black trauma.

TM: You named your mother as an artist. Did you always see her that way, or just in retrospect?

MM: Um, no. She was the one who kept me flush with paper. She was the crafty, creative one. My dad was the scientific one. And I kind of credit her with that, with sort of fostering that – what do you call it? I don't know – the creative whims. But then as I've gotten older, the later work has become more science-based – they’re more about my father. And so the skillets and all of that was more about my mom. Because she gave me a set of skillets, and she told me that “these skillets will outlive you if you take care of them.”

Which threw me down the path of thinking about how these are our heirlooms. We may not have material wealth to give to our kids or to hand down, but the pride in taking grandmother’s skillet – there's something to that. So I begin to think about these objects as symbols of wealth, and they begin to then take on a life of their own within my imagination. Thinking about how I'm going to die at some point, my mom's going to die at some point, but this skillet will still be on earth, you know? And that's strictly from her statement. So I began to want to make skillets that went into permanent collections or went into the histories of this narrative that I'm telling – and have someone handle them with care. It is simply a selfish move.

So that sent me on a journey chasing how far I could trace back a collard green recipe in my family. And then, as my family is all competitive, to see who can make the best greens. That's why I say I'm the king of collards, because I make the best ones.

So, that's a bragging rights thing. Like, who can grow the best garden, who is the best fisherman? One of my cousins, older cousin, passed away and his son stood up in the funeral to eulogize his father and he goes, “At least I'm the best fisherman in the family now.” And all the boys in the family in the middle of this funeral were just like, “Hey, wait, what?”

There was a real eruption about what that meant. So that's something I take a lot of pride in. I don't have to continue to celebrate great trauma. I can look at who we are as a people and what we've contributed beyond just physical labor. But then, within that labor, there are good things that have come out of that.

TM: Word. What did you want to be or do when you grew up?

MM: At first I wanted to be a drag racer.

TM: Interesting!

MM: Yeah [laughter]. Because I had an uncle who raced cars and built cars, so I wanted to do that too. And then at some point I got into skateboarding, so I was going to try and go pro at skateboarding. And that was a time when there weren't a lot of Black skateboarders.

TM: Yeah - still! So then that ties into your graffiti. I see the skateboard-graffiti connection a little bit. Is that around the time you started doing that?

MM: Yeah, but graffiti comes out of hip hop. My lens for my work is graffiti and street based, but it's also Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, all the great artists – Jack Whitten – who came out of Alabama. But then, like, what? What does that sort of tradition translate into when you give a kid MTV? You know what I mean? And so my foundation, or the way I think about stuff and the way I talk to my other friends in the art world about what it is we make and what it is we do – we describe it in terms of funk and hip hop.

But the art was always there, and I knew that would be the thing that I would do. At some point I got into rap groups, and we had a production deal with Jimmy Henchman. That didn't work out – and I'm thankful for that. But it was always there, the art was just always there.

TM: Yeah. My son who is 17, when he saw your work, he was like, “I don't know, something about it reminds me of Big K.R.I.T.” And I was like, “that's interesting you say that, because he's from Mississippi.” Isn’t he from somewhere around there, Big K.R.I.T.?

MM: He’s from Mississippi.

TM: But I was like, “I can see it, CJ!”

MM: Yeah, he hit it, even though he went off his gut, right? That's what that's about. These kinds of communications that we understand – it's coded, it's heavy, it's laced, but then it's so universal that it just becomes Southern because a lot of our experiences are a lot of everyone's experiences, from the poor white to the poor Black.

There's a lot of comedy in my work. There's a lot of jokes. The titles have things that I want people to see within the work, things that I want to see on a notecard or on the gallery card, things that I want to exist in history, language I want to get into history.

For a while, I named a lot of my paintings after rap songs. Lately I've been having fun putting curse words in the titles. There's a show I finished last summer – one of my favorite ones was called Cucka Bugs.

TM: That’s Southern.

MM: Yeah, which is actually the little burr that you get on your pants, but then also the gnats in the back of your head. So there’s a lot of jokes – but then these coded messages. So it’ll be like, ha ha, here's some super Black shit, but here's some funny shit, and then if you can decode it, you can get the joke, kind of. But then it's a very serious thing that I'm trying to say, at the same time. I'm just a dude who overthinks it.

TM: Perfect. That approach reminds me of the Atlanta series, because it was so serious, so teachable, but so hilarious. When do you know you're done? I saw a meme that said, “When we season our food, the ancestors will whisper, ‘That’s enough, child.’” Is that when you know you're finished with a particular piece, or a series? Or how do you know when it's done?

MM: Yeah, it's kind of like that. But I don't know if mine might say, “that’s enough, child.” It’s more like, “yeah, I’m finna do it now. Like, that’s it, you’re on - oh shit, wait til they see that.”

Yeah, I feel like the painting starts dancing. It starts being like, “yeah, that’s what I needed.” Or it’ll say, “I need one more thing.” You know what I mean? So, again, in terms of hip hop, it'll just be like, yeah, you’re gonna kill it with this one. Yeah, I’m on now. And then I'll send it to my homie – and he's from Jackson, Mississippi, and he makes art at a high level - Felandus Thames. And if I can get the seal of approval from Felandus, because he knows the language that I'm speaking through material, the subject matter – he’ll be like, “yeah, that's it, cuz.” Boom. Like, we'll throw all the high art talk out and just barbershop talk, you know what I mean? About art.

TM: Yes. Bilingual.

So one of my favorite Zora Neale Hurston quotes – because she's an anthropologist too, she says she hates routine. She said, “Don't be surprised if I take to the woods.” Which, you do that! When you go out to the woods – what’s happening while you’re out there? What are you doing, what do you think about?

MM: I always say you’ve got to face the demons. And as a kid, you know, you grew up in the church, and old people would testify and say the devil tried to make them do all this stuff. One I remember fondly and laugh about was a lady testifying about getting a flat tire, and she said the devil got into her tire and, you know, made it flat.

But then you go outside and look at her car – the tire is bald! And it’s like, it wasn't the devil, it was you. You need to buy new tires. She tried to put that on the devil. And that's when I began to realize that we were the devil.

And so that’s what shifted my thought: in church, people would testify, “The devil tried to do things.” And I would just look at them and be like, “Huh, you're the devil.”

As I got older, I began to think about it like, “I have to go out and face my own demons, and be real or be true to myself.” But for the most part, I was trying to find a way to deal with my bullshit. And I think that's something we don't do often. And then, when you think about it from a Black male’s perspective, there's never much conversation about Black males sort of dealing with their bullshit, and how we deal with our bullshit. So running off to the woods and doing all these things sort of helped me deal with my bullshit.

TM: That's a powerful practice. That actually reminds me a little bit of something too. I’m reading a book, ‘Rest is Resistance’, and [Tricia Hersey] talks about how a grieving person is a healed person, but our country doesn’t want – capitalism doesn’t want – healed people in it. Because if you aren’t healing and you aren’t grieving and you’re just pushing through, you’re just grinding through – you’re just working, working, working, smothering it down. But now you go out to the wilderness and let it all come up. That reminded me of something you said in a Hulu Artist-in-Residence clip: you make work that’s poetic, but then there's a darker side that you enjoy most.

In another interview, you mentioned that the darkness is a space we can’t avoid - you have to go there. And that you had to go visit the beach once to release the remnants of that dark space that you entered. So it's like, it is hard. That dark place is necessary. I totally agree. And I also agree that it's difficult. But you said you enjoy it the most. Why do you enjoy it?

MM: Because you get to face it. I don’t know, maybe I'm sadistic, but you get to lighten the load. Like, there's a lot of room – that’s a good question, shit. I’m usually not stumped, but like – why do I enjoy the dark part? I don't know, yeah, I feel like I'm lightening my load. It’s a good place to sit and just face it. And that sort of honesty with oneself, there's something very freeing, something very liberating in all of that.

TM: It is. Actually, I think you hit it on the head without needing whatever the word was, the right word you were trying to find. I deal with my own grief and darkness, but when I acknowledge I'm there, I want to get on up out of there. Let’s open up these blinds. Let's turn on some music, because we’ve got to get up out of here, we can’t stay in this feeling. But, like you said, – now I'm walking around with a lot inside – it’s like I look forward to the breakthrough moment. Like when we talked about the church, right? Those breakthrough moments, when you just break and then you flood and you’re like, ok, it’s all out. So you just go into the woods and just lighten the load. You get all of that day-to-day, moment-to-moment, goal-oriented, success, failure – you just get all that shit off.

MM: None of that’s important really, right?

TM: Yeah. Speaking of what’s not important: you ain't on social media like that. You know, artists are booming – social media's one of the greatest tools ever for artists. You don't feel like you're missing out?

MM: I make good work.

TM: I dig that. That’s timeless. Social media ain’t always been here.

MM: The reason for that though, for real, is that I began to have some anxieties about it, I began to recognize mentally that something was not right. I've never felt these feelings, why am I feeling this way? Why am I comparing myself to people? And I heard a quote from Jack Whitten, “we do not know the long-term effects of social media.”

That resonated with me. And I just began to think: what photo can I even put up that would mean anything to anyone? One of my favorite photos is Yves Klein, where he takes the leap. I thought, if I can't produce a photo that's just as intriguing or as beautiful or as poetic as that, then what am I posting? It's just bullshit, right?

I then began to think about mythology, and was there a way to be visible while being invisible? Could one go against the algorithm by participating in it slowly, curating whatever these experiences are that we're having on social media or this thing that we’ve become addicted to? And I was like, okay, at this point I am going to repel ghosts and I'm going to disappear.

So I set about creating another Earth. I am in an experiment of trying to be visible but invisible. Trying to be invisible within my invisibility online. And so I only post stories, and those disappear. So there's something very ephemeral about that, that I like.

But then, within all of that I just knew it was fucking with me. It was messing with my brain. And then after being off for a while, I was like okay, I'm starting to feel better. Like, these things are more important, whatever. And then start to realize that people kind of miss you, but not really.

And so I disappeared. And I sort of just added to the mythology of being visible, but being invisible at the same time.

TM: Yeah. And that's – if you ain't got that curiosity, willing to explore and and see what happens, you know, you ain’t no real artist. And not just on the canvas, or just in your work, but in your life. You’ve got be forever curious, and willing to just see.

MM: Yeah, I just disappeared and recovered. So it was that sort of thing that I've sort of wanted to create for myself to add to the idea of a mythology that I'm sort of working on in my head. It’s a giant conceptual thing.

TM: It is. Do you consider yourself successful?

MM: I've had a studio for 20 years. That has always been my measure of success, whether I could keep a studio.

TM: I love it, I love it. So if you cease to have your studio, you wouldn't consider yourself successful anymore?

MM: Yeah, because that means I didn't do what it took to maintain that. The thing that I say, “I love this, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life” – if I can't maintain a space to do that, then I just lied to myself.

TM: I dig that. You've got to be a little buoyant and take your studio in the house if that happens, though.

MM: Yeah, so like I said – always maintain the studio.

TM: Always – yeah, no matter what that studio is, always maintain the studio. You mentioned analog Afrofuturism too. Can you elaborate more on that concept?

MM: Everybody wants to go to space; they just want to run to space. Everybody just wants to disappear. Everybody wants to go to the future, but nobody wants to build a spaceship. And by the way, somebody's got to stay on Earth and build a spaceship, or somebody's got to start the plans, or somebody's got to begin to think about right now. Because if you don't solve the problems now, you only take them into the future.

So the idea of Afrofuturism is just bullshit if you don't try to solve it now. We've always been futuristic. And I don’t need someone else’s language to describe my futurism.

TM: That’s that Southern in you too, that’s that whole, “I’m not migrating up north. I’m staying where I’m at.” That’s that church saying, “Noah had to stay to build that ark.” So yeah, it's a convergence of all those things. It’s a family reunion in thought. I like that.

MM: Do the work.

TM: Do the work, right – daydreaming is important too. Migration is integral, I get that too – but there’s still some work involved. Then you can retreat to the wilderness, but you have to work.

MM: Everybody’s painting and styling themselves as futuristic negroes, but then it’s like, for what? Y’all ain’t even got no blueprints. How are we going to get them? Have you sent a team out to see what even grows there? If you look at some of my work, it's got seeds on it. It’s got dry seeds like okra. That would be the one thing that I would take.

Like it’s the one thing we took. So you can be philosophical about it all you want. But we can’t walk inside a building that W.E.B. Du Bois built. We can walk inside in one that Booker T. built.

TM: Yes. Now you took it back to the Du Bois and Booker T. argument.

MM: You know you really have to pause and think about how you want it. But yeah, it’s one thing that I’ve thought about. You can't walk inside of a philosophy.

TM: Tell me about your book, Black Navigation.

MM: It's an idea I've had since 2017. I wanted to create a book of field notes. I wanted to understand what my voice sounded like in the wilderness. What does a Black male voice sound like in wild spaces? Can I have a transformative moment, and what would that sound like? Because most of what we know – or the romantic parts that we know, a lot of the great quotes – they come from white males. So I set out to try and find my transformative moment and make my great quote. I don't know that I've done that yet.

I wanted a record of Black existence in wild spaces. Specifically a Black male’s voice. I was just curious about what my voice would sound like.

TM: Yeah, I love it. Did you figure it out, or is it a continual exploration?

MM: I'm still writing. I have a whole lot of notes for books, so I'm gonna try and do another book. I might do an album with it and all that kind of stuff. But when someone reads, “cold mountain streams on my Black nuts,” that's truly an experience Black men can have. Only a Black man knows what it's like to have cold nuts. So it’s got this kind of humor.

TM: Yeah. That's For Us, By Us humor. Where is your navigation pointing you these days?

MM: I'm still in the wild, still in the woods - a lot more fly fishing. I just did a documentary about my process, explorations and fly tying with a guy named Chad Brown from Love Is King - he’s the man when it comes to the outdoors and Black explorers.

So, yeah, I'm going to keep trying to be my best Matthew Henson. Keep trying to tell good stories. Keep trying to make it super Black, but super universal. And just tell these beautiful narratives from my perspective.

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