ACT III: As Visible as Blood — Reading Group Session II
fig 1. Figure of Mother and Child (Phemba), Yombe artist.
Join us for our second reading group on Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book by Hortense Spillers — Curated by Troy Johnson hosted with support from Gallery Gachet.
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Reading Group — Session II
Wednesday , February 11 / 6–8 PM
Location: Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings
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Gallery Gachet continues Act 3: As Visible as Blood reading group in conversation with the Book Nook, curated by Curator-in-Residence Troy Johnson, as both a theoretical and conceptual extension of the exhibition.
“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God’s ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.”
Following our first session on Venus in Two Acts, which took place January 29th, 2026, this two-part reading group brings together key texts that expands the exhibition’s questions around Black womanhood, labour, intimacy, and becoming.
This session will be led by Troy Johnson, Curator-in-Residence, alongside a very special co-facilitator, extending our collective engagement with Spillers’ foundational text on captivity, kinship, gender, and the violent grammars through which Black life has been rendered legible, usable, and expendable.
Spillers’ essay remains urgent for how it names the ways slavery reconfigured gender itself, positioning Black women’s bodies within regimes of availability, inheritance, and desire, while undoing the assumed stability of “motherhood,” “family,” and the human.
