It's Been Juneteenth All Year Long
  June 18, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, Tomorrow is Juneteenth, so our offices (and maybe yours) are closed. But we couldn’t shut down our laptops without leaving you with a little bit of relevant reading and listening. Today Rebecca Carroll walks us through a year that, in spite of it all, has been culturally Black as fuck. Afterward, if you feel like luxuriating a little longer, read six incredible women on what they believe is the true meaning of Juneteenth. And of course, it wouldn’t be a celebration without hearing from Opal Lee, the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” who spoke with Brittany Packnett Cunningham a few years back about her relentless work to make this holiday a reality. Our thoughts are with Ms. Opal this week as news recently broke that she will not be leading the annual Walk for Freedom in Fort Worth, Texas, due to health complications. Remembering it’s a we thing, Shannon Melero  The Black Cultural Abundance of JuneteenthThis year, for me, Juneteenth started on February 9.BY REBECCA CARROLL  STILL THINKING ABOUT HIM (VIA GETTY IMAGES) I’ve watched it four times. Every time it’s given me something different. But what it has given me overall—in its multi-layered, legacy-laden, undeniably art-centric symbolism—is the assurance that one thing Black folks are always gonna do is find our freedom reflected in each other. I’m talking about Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show at Super Bowl LIX. It became the most-watched halftime show in history, drawing in more than 133 million viewers, and it felt not only like a call to action—because “sometimes you gotta pop out and show”—but also the very best of what Juneteenth invokes for me. Black folks’ relationship with America is obviously fraught. The country was built on our backs. Slavery is as foundationally American as the Super Bowl. And Juneteenth is, ostensibly, about American freedom. But even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans were still widely not considered to be free civilians, and that is why we continue to seek that freedom out in and for each other. After tennis star Coco Gauff won the 2025 French Open earlier this month, she said, “Some people might feel some type of way about being patriotic, but I’m definitely patriotic and proud to be American. I’m proud to represent the Americans that look like me.” And that was also the beauty of Lamar’s show—he could have easily declined to perform at such a mainstream Americana spectacle. Instead, he used it as an opportunity to reconfigure the American flag through the formation of his all-Black backup dancers, who wore red, white, and blue. Recently, when a young Black woman asked me how I write for my specific audience of readers, I said, “The same way Kendrick Lamar just performed the Blackest-blackety-black halftime show performance at the Super Bowl, for his specific audience of viewers, Black folks.” Because we know how to find each other, and speak to the insides of one another. It’s in the tradition of call-and-response, of ancestral homage, dignity, and legacy. It’s in our DNA. And it is an aegis of Black cultural jubilation in a year of targeted demoralization—when Black historic landmarks, Black museums, Black books and course curricula, and DEI initiatives are being defunded, denigrated, and dismantled.  GAUFF WITH THE ROLAND GARROS TROPHY WHICH SHE LATER AND HILARIOUSLY REVEALED IS NOT THE TROPHY CHAMPIONS GET TO TAKE HOME. (VIA GETTY) In the months after Lamar made the call, those responses have kept coming. Next came Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror movie, “Sinners,” which both killed at the box office and earned glorious reviews. Like the Super Bowl show, “Sinners”—which follows twin bootlegging brothers who return to their Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint—is kaleidoscopic and heady, containing layers upon layers of historical references and truths. Amid recent indignities, Coogler managed to give us something rapturous, restorative, and unwavering in its tribute to Black freedom, Black love, and Black ingenuity. And then came Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour,” an all-stadium concert tour celebrating her Cowboy Carter album, which explores the Black roots of country music (another quintessentially American institution). Yes, Beyoncé is an extraordinarily talented and iconic artist. But what has stood out the most to me about the Cowboy Carter tour is not Beyoncé herself but the way her daughter Blue Ivy, with every bit of her badass, 13-year-old self, has showed out to perform with her mother onstage, giving a kind of “fuck-you”-fueled intensity well beyond her years. To me, Blue Ivy represents the collective power and tenacity of Blackness, and I imagine is exactly what the ancestors had in mind when they thought, We gonna call it Juneteenth, and then we gonna do whatever the hell we want to on this day forward from heretofore.  CAN WE GET A YEE-HAW? (VIA GETTY IMAGES) And then there was The Met Gala. While I have real criticisms about the event as the standard of what constitutes haute fashion, and about its curated exclusivity (read: whiteness), I couldn’t help but feel like this year’s theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” was another response to Lamar’s call. Inspired in part by Black scholar Monica L. Miller’s book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Style of Black Diasporic Identity, all our fave fancy Black folks walked that blue carpet wearing the fiercest looks, channeling the very essence of Black elegance, just like the one that Black folks have historically created for Juneteenth celebrations.  SO...ABOUT THAT ALBUM? (VIA GETTY IMAGES) After that, the ancestors came through…again: It was as if Annie, the Hoodoo healer from “Sinners,” gathered together a very particular recipe of roots and herbs to help conjure up some very large flames on a very specific plot of Southern land. It’s not nice to say, but when the largest surviving plantation mansion in the South burned to the ground on May 15, my first thought was, “Well, you shouldn’t have been enslaving people.” The demise of Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana—which, like many plantations, had become a popular wedding venue—was reportedly caused by an electrical fire. Whatever the case, for it to happen during this run of Black cultural ascension seemed like poetic justice, and needless to say, the Black memes were delicious. There are many more examples—Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Rashid Johnson, and Jack Whitton all having solo art shows this year; Audra McDonald being a classy boss bitch, and giving an utterly singular “Gypsy” performance at the Tonys; Rihanna continuing to populate so glamorously—but given where we are in this moment, it feels right to end with Doechii’s speech at the BET Awards last week. Because ultimately, Black freedom has always meant getting other people free, too. Doechii, who won the award for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist, chose to use her platform during the live broadcast to speak out against the ICE immigration raids happening in Los Angeles. “These are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order,” she said. “I feel it’s my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people: for Black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza.” Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021, is about Black freedom. But it’s also about the function of freedom itself.
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A Night of Black Creativity
  May 6, 2025 Hey there, Meteor readers, Hearty congratulations are in order for Meteor collective members Dawn Porter and Tanya Selvaratnam, both of whom are nominated for News and Documentary Emmys this year: Porter for The Sing Sing Chronicles and Documenting Police Use of Force; and Selvaratnam for Love to the Max. Watch if you haven’t! In today’s newsletter, we’re strolling down the blue carpet of last night’s Met Gala with Julianne Escobedo Shepherd—and taking a moment to celebrate midwives. Still thinking about this, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ON CARDI B AND HALLE BERRY. NO NOTES. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Fashion’s dandiest night: Whatever your feelings about the Met Gala, this year’s theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, was an important one. It was selected by Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton last year after he read the 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by Barnard professor Monica L. Miller, now chair of the college’s Africana Studies Department. Inspired by its deeply researched history of the way formerly enslaved Black people reclaimed the frippery they were forced to wear into their own distinct style, Bolton asked Miller to become the Costume Institute’s first guest curator in his ten-year tenure. The exhibit itself lasts for nearly half a year, long after the last bit of carpet is rolled up. Superfine looks at the lineage of Black style in “the Atlantic diaspora,” and cites Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” an essay from 1934. “The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expression,” Hurston wrote. “Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator.” In other words: Black fashion evolved as a form of resistance against the way white culture expects Black people to be, but it doesn’t matter whether the clothes please anyone but the wearer. Aesthetically speaking, this year contained the best fashion at the Gala in years, its “tailored for you” dress code encouraging attendees to show up and show out as themselves. Co-chair Teyana Taylor wore a long red cape embroidered with the words “Harlem Rose,” created by costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who in 2018 became the first Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Costume Design, for Black Panther. Rihanna donned a deconstructed suit—part jacket, part bustle, part waist-as-lapel—its regal pinstripes channeling the spirit of Ida B. Wells, assuredly strutting into her newspaper job at the New York Age in the 1890s.  DO WE THINK SHE'S HIDING R9 UNDER THAT HAT? (VIA GETTY IMAGES) While the glitter of the Met Gala may seem out of touch in these violent times, it feels significant that Black creativity was celebrated at such a major institutional event, in a moment when institutions are being all but purged of Black people and other people of color. We’ve already seen how the Trump administration’s blatantly white supremacist agenda has affected the Kennedy Center, all cabinet-level departments, and state universities; he has promised to next come for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, PBS, and other government-funded institutions that bring alive the history of Black and brown people. Those institutions have only just begun to help this country grapple with its historical atrocities; now, thanks to the administration’s war on what it derisively refers to as “DEI,” the small progress that’s been made is being literally erased. Don’t just talk about it, be about it, goes a common phrase in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The long national project of what that means politically is being cut off at the knees, thanks to these attacks on Black history in classrooms, libraries, government websites, and museums. So it’s huge that “fashion’s biggest night” at the country’s most renowned art institution was about Black history and Black people reveling in Black fashion as resistance. It was emphasized across every major publication, every tabloid and blog, and all over every social feed—Black fashion history everywhere. As Professor Miller put it to Lala Anthony in an interview on the carpet last night: “I’ve never had such a big classroom.” –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd AND:
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The Wonder of Amy Sherald
Ordinary Black life is extraordinary in the artist’s first major mid-career museum survey.
By Rebecca Carroll
Last month, The New Yorker featured a breathtaking portrait on its cover by celebrated Black American artist Amy Sherald. First painted in 2014 and titled “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” the portrait of a young Black woman wearing a bright red hat is the same piece Sherald later submitted in a competition at the National Portrait Gallery. She won the competition, which caught the attention of former First Lady Michelle Obama, who then personally chose Sherald to paint her portrait for the National Portrait Gallery—making the Georgia native the first Black woman artist to be selected for an official presidential portrait. The Obama painting changed the entire trajectory of Sherald’s career, and since then her figurative grayscale portraits have been shown in public and private collections around the world.
Now, Sherald is having her first major museum survey at The Whitney Museum of American Art, called American Sublime, a title borrowed from the poet Elizabeth Alexander’s book of the same name. I’ve known and admired Sherald for years, and I was thrilled to sit down with her to talk about her work in this truly transcendent exhibition.
Rebecca Carroll: The last time we saw each other in person was pre-Michelle Obama portrait, when we randomly ran into each other on the street in Brooklyn. And here we are today to discuss your first solo exhibition at The Whitney. How are you feeling?
Amy Sherald: I told a friend last week, “I don’t know, I just feel emotional.” And she’s like, “Well, you’re getting used to belonging to the world, and not just to yourself.” Hearing that made me want to cry, and I left her a voice text, and said, “Okay, I’m sitting here holding back tears because I am a thug and I do not like to cry. But that’s exactly what I feel like.”
It’s a lot! The show is also set against a backdrop of political turmoil in America, particularly in regards to race, and actually not dissimilar to what we were experiencing when we last saw each other. At that time, the height of Black Lives Matter, I had written a piece for the LA Times, saying “Even as we see images of what most of us already know, that police violence against Black people in America is occurring with vicious regularity, something remarkable is materializing in its wake. We are also bearing witness to a pronounced moment of Black cultural ascension.” How has your work been impacted by eras of Black cultural ascension versus centuries of Black oppression?
My work was essentially born out of the desire to free myself from a history of oppression, but also in celebration of these eras of enlightenment. What I want the viewer to experience, and I say this in the exhibition [statement], is “the wonder of what it is to be a Black person.” I’m no longer religious, but I speak about this in that language of flesh and spirit—because part of us always has to be activated [in fighting oppression].
Right, exactly. I know you consider yourself as much a storyteller as an artist. As Black storytellers, I feel like we never make anything without parts of each other within us—intergenerationally, ancestrally, futuristically. But when the work goes out into the world and starts to belong to non-Black people, I sometimes feel these waves of protectiveness about it. Do you ever feel that way about your work?
I want the work to belong in the world because it was the only way that I could figure out how to counter whiteness, and the way that everything is saturated with it, comes from it, and evolves around it. My response to that is to make something that’s just as universal, and that can be consumed in the same way, because then [white people] are going to be consuming it in the same way that I had to consume Barbie, and all of these other things.
A pointed example for me was when your portrait of Breonna Taylor was on the cover of Vanity Fair, and it felt so unjust to me that suddenly white people were allowed to look at her in this way that we had seen her all along. Did you feel any conflict about that specific piece?
I didn’t, because of how it started. It started with Ta-Nehisi [Coates], and I trusted him and his vision. Maybe if the call had come from somebody else, then yes, but because it was Ta-Nehisi, no.
To clarify for our readers, Coates was the guest editor for that particular issue of Vanity Fair, and so that makes a difference, for sure. Now that the portrait is part of this exhibition at The Whitney, what has been the broader response to it?
A lot of people, of all races, are moved to tears by it. After I first finished it, I was really just thinking about how I’ve made this portrait, we’ve photographed it, it’s been on the cover of Vanity Fair, and now it’s in my studio. Now what can it do? I started some conversations, and it ended up being acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And now there’s a Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarships for undergraduate students and law school students [at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky, where Taylor lived; the fellowships are funded by proceeds from the portrait’s sale]. So if a student is doing anything in regards to social justice, whether their major is political science or art, they have an opportunity to get this scholarship. And then if a student is in law school and wants to work expungement [when a criminal record is erased or made unavailable for public access] cases in Alabama, which pays nothing, then here’s $12,000 to get you through your summer.
Does the idea that Black artists do work for each other resonate with you?
I feel like we make what we make because we are who we are. My mom told me this story about myself, and it stuck with me because I think my work sits in the world in the same way. [When I was a child] sometimes when we had dinner, I would just randomly get up and walk around the table and touch everybody on their shoulder and say, “I love you.” I would go all the way around, and then come sit down and finish my dinner. I think these portraits are “I love yous” out in the world to affirm anybody who is willing to see past the exterior and go deeper into their experience of what it means to be a human.
I love that story. And what do you experience when you look at your work?
I feel like the work sits in The Whitney, and there are words on the wall that explain it, but that work is me—somebody who was once a people pleaser and had a problem saying no, someone who doesn't like conflict or confrontation. My personality made that work.
I would never have looked at your work and thought, “These pieces were made by someone who had a problem saying no.” Are there specific things in the pieces that signal that to you?
I guess that’s where the beauty comes from, because the work doesn’t yell at you. It speaks to you nicely. If you feel uncomfortable in the presence of a Black person, this work will make you think, “Okay, well, maybe I don’t need to grab my purse. I might feel safe in the elevator with this guy.” It speaks to people that way. I went to Catholic school from K through 12, and was always one of two or three Black kids, so I have a lot of patience. I learned a lot of, “Let me explain to you why you can't say that.” Versus my friends that went to all-Black high schools, where it’s just like [gestures taking her earrings off], “Let me tell you…”
But you feel differently now, right? You’re in a different place. How do you think that will affect your work moving forward?
I’m not sure how the work is going to evolve to match who I am now, which is somebody who’s stronger, who doesn't mind saying no, and will look at you while you feel uncomfortable with my answer. I am excited because everything that I’ve made in this show has been living in my head for 20 years.
Does it feel like a kind of excavation in that way?
It feels more like a birth than an excavation. When I think about Black American art history and just our legacy within the larger canon, I feel like we don’t or can’t function on the same timeline as everybody else. It still feels like the beginning of something, this moment of myself, Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, and Jack Whitten [all currently having museum shows]. It feels really great despite everything that’s happening. The art world is representing the world that we want to be—the real world right now.
What happens next for you?
I’m hoping that this show will make it into the National Portrait Gallery without having to make any compromises based on who’s sitting in an office at the White House. And I don’t mean, “Well, if I can’t have this painting of two men kissing and a trans person, then I’m not going to do the show.” I feel like that would be a mistake. I feel like it’s a mistake to step down from boards just because [Trump] wants to take over the Kennedy Center. Now more than ever, I feel like it’s important we be in those rooms and not shutting down the conversation. I think the bigger moment would be the work being in the Smithsonian Institution and people coming there to look at American history and Presidents, and then walking into my exhibition.
Whatever the fate of the work in this show, one of the things that really came through as I was walking through the exhibit, just like the way you used to walk around your family’s dinner table and tell everybody you love them—all of these people are taking care of each other, and I felt tapped on the shoulder and loved by every one of them.
Exactly as you should have felt.