Black Feminist Book Club — Ordinary Notes
Date/Time
Location
Mass MoCA (1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247, North Adams MA)
Gwendolyn VanSant, founder and executive director of Multicultural BRIDGE, will guide a community conversation on Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
The Black Feminist Book Club brings together community members to read and discuss, inspired by Black feminist texts. Gwendolyn VanSant hosts this next iteration of the book club in Mass MoCA’s Research & Development Store.
The group will explore the selected text together, view special exhibitions and community spaces related to the books, and be introduced to organizations that continue the work of historical Black feminists.
The Mass MoCA iteration of the Black Feminist Book Club is hosted by Multicultural BRIDGE and Gwendolyn VanSant. It is recommended to read the texts before for discussion, but you are welcome to join and listen in.
Books can no longer be shipped in advance. RSVPs are full but drop-ins are encouraged.
Black Feminist Book Club — upcoming dates:
Thursday, April 10, 2025, Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe
Saturday, July 19, 2025, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, “Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility” (Saidiya Hartman).
According to Mass MoCA, “a singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake.”
In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.
The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page.
She practices an aesthetic of “beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.
(According to the Guggenheim fellowship), Christina Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) and, most recently, Ordinary Notes (2023).
Ordinary Notes won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the LA Times Current Interest Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography. Her work has appeared in many artist catalogues and in Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, The Funambulist, Artforum and Art in America.
In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction. Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto, where she lives.