︎

IV. Black Geographies

Material in Motion
By Yasmina Price

No one could accuse Kevin Jerome Everson of trading in futurism or speculation. On the contrary, he insistently remains in the present.1  Translated into an aesthetics, the presentness as well the foundations of his imagemaking can be condensed into the basic elements of “material” and “movement.” Through them, Everson’s films perform a Black geographic knowledge attuned to the transformational dynamism of the spatial and the temporal conjoined.2  His moving image art is composed around the visceral and physical bearing of bodies, communities, and objects. Grounded in Black migration and working-class life in the Midwest and the American South, his film work has labor as a linchpin which yokes corporeal gestures to familial, regional, national, and transnational mobilities. The kineticism that courses through his body of work reveals an absorbing exploration of time, meticulously crafted through movements in space.

Everson’s films chart a spacious terrain where Parliament-Funkadelic’s George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, Lorraine Hansberry, General Motors, Malcolm X, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the artist’s immediate and extended family,  find common ground with car crushers, Niagara Falls, metal forging, and early cinema. Parliament-Funkadelic was a meaningful early inspiration. Despite their tie to Afro-futurism Everson in fact experienced the imaginative scope of the musical collective’s transcendent reformulation of time and space as an “Afro-present,”3  which he continues to refine and redefine.



[migration]

The presentness of Everson’s craft is nevertheless clearly historicized. At the root of both his personal family history and his artistic practice is the Great Migration. It acts as a conceptual railroad, laying down tracks through local and global labor, cultural identity, and placemaking—the search for home, refuge, and belonging in the wake of displacement. The movements of millions of Black people between the 1910s and 1970s brought Everson’s family to Mansfield, Ohio, from Columbus, Mississippi.4  Working from the cartography of the Southern diaspora’s relocation, he pursues the question of “how we became what we became.”5  Here the artist echoes cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s critical formulation of cultural identities as “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’.”6 Everson’s work elucidates their shared understanding of fluid processes over static essences and reroutes what Hall described as the othering of Black people within the dominant representational regime.

Family ties to the Great Migration were also formative for the multifaceted playwright and radical Lorraine Hansberry. A fellow antagonist to the collusions of cultural and political norms, Hansberry significantly influenced Everson; for instance, he notes being deeply affected by the 1961 film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun (1956). Both Everson and Hansberry deal in an aesthetic practice of Black Geography. Their work echoes the field’s understanding of how space and place are historically racialized7 into a textual, visual, oral and performative dialectic of containment and movement, oppression and rebellion.

Even though there were economic benefits for Black people moving from the South to the West and the North, they were strictly limited. Then, as now, the promise that something entirely better and different might lay on the other side of a boundary—be it a state frontier or access to elite institutions—was only ever betrayed. Everson’s references to Malcolm X’s quip, remapping the Mason-Dixon line as the Canadian border,8 indicates his own critical attention to the flux of Black working class material realities across geographic and spatial categories. A line marking an end to racialized exploitation and dispossession no more existed between the two North American settler states of Canada and the U.S. than it did across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia. Yet even as it entrenches a ruling power structure, the map is not firmly delineated. Rather, it too is tugged here and there to suit the needs of borders as fictions of power made into tools of domination. As chronicled through Everson’s filmic craft, for the peoples and communities subjected to the worst of colonial, imperial cartographies, movement has been at once a vector of compelled force and a pathway for small and large claims on self-mastery.



Everson’s Erie (2010) opens with a billboard encouraging relocation to the North for jobs. While it seems in every way “real,” the poster is stealthily fictitious, a persuasive prop made for the film, which even features an image of his uncle posing in front of a Volkswagen.9  It immediately introduces the discrepancy between what’s promotional bait versus an actual product of the American national myth. Circulating through communities around Lake Erie, the film concludes in Niagara Falls, straddling the border between the U.S. and Canada. Everson has spoken about Erie in relation to the Underground Railroad,10 connecting to a preceding arc of Black mobility and spatial revisioning. As the artist records Black working-class life in the Midwest, his formal cinematic intervention is an alternative placemaking, troubling the political boundaries across North America. Erie—which is unusually close to feature length compared to his majority short-form films—traces an abstracted narrative of migration through seven single-take vignettes. Cast in textured, black-and-white 16mm, the sequences cut between a young girl (Everson’s daughter) watching a candle burn; a conversation between the artist’s cousins about working for General Motors; a sword fight; a man trying to break into his own car; a mixed-rehearsal space of piano-playing, singing, and krumping; organizing surgical materials; and a cheerful, albeit damp, boat trip to see the waterfalls. Even in moments of stillness, the slight swerves, dips, and stutters of handheld camerawork script the liveliness of the subjects. By attending to the vitality and plentitude of daily Black life, the film acts as a counterclaim to fixed historical condemnation.


Even as the American Midwest is Everson’s focus, the racialized transnational capitalist system of labor sets the grounds for his films’ global reach. An example of the artist honing his formal abstractions, the triptych Eason (2016) was commissioned by Scribe Video Center as part of an anniversary series on the Great Migration. The title refers to the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which “performed an integral role in the politicization of thousands of black Southerners” during the first four decades of the Great Migration.11  The film focuses on James Walker Good Eason, a chapter leader and later defector based in Philadelphia,12 its three parts moving between bus drivers at a local SEPTA terminal, a coach speaking to the men’s Livingstone college basketball team in a locker room in Salisbury, North Carolina, while their women’s squad takes to the court, and a nebulous New Orleans nightscape located where Eason was assassinated.13 

Staying true to Everson’s hallmark allusiveness, Eason looks like a portrait of the everyday, even as it covertly references a militant, revolutionary history of Pan-Africanist movements and organizing. In broader strokes, using the Midwest as his practice ground frames the site of an expanded geography, as the region was “a generative global crossroads of twentieth-century Black transnational movements.”14 Crucially, the Black Midwest, when painted by Everson, is just like its Southern origins: not monolithic but reflecting dynamic heterogeneity.


The short Rhinoceros (2012), filmed in Florence, approaches the pluralistic past by scrambling the history of two rulers: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the sixteenth century Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, who was known as Il Moro (“the Moor”) because he is thought to have been of African descent.15  Everson fabricates a contemporary televised speech in which the Duke borrows Gaddafi’s words, forging a performative historical counterfeit that recalls the formal tactics in Erie. In the later Rhino (2017), the same premise was combined with testimonies from African migrants in Florence. Across Everson’s work, global migration and the U.S. Great Migration converge, rendering a Black Geography that surfaces their spatial and temporal congruities.

Film festivals have offered another circuit of movement. The 16th edition of MCFF in 2010 screened both Erie and Mati Diop’s short Atlantiques (2009), facilitating the convergence of kindred aesthetic renderings for Black people’s movements across geographies and histories of labor. Whether in dialogue with another artist or internal to his own works, the material underpinnings and mobile qualities of space are a central concern for Everson’s films. As he said in a 2014 exchange with scholar Michael B. Gillespie, “[w]hen I'm looking though the viewfinder of the camera, either film or digital […] I'm looking at Black folks and seeing a history of a relationship to a place.16



[labor]

Although self-referentiality often circulates within the ecosystem of Everson’s own oeuvre, the 2013 short Workers Leaving the Job Site nods to an early episode of cinematic history that welded new technology to labor: the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 Workers Leaving the Factory. In Everson’s retelling, filmed in Mississippi, a line of Black men in fluorescent yellow safety jackets clock out, emerging from the shadow of a doorway into the sunlight. As they disinfect their hands, a few workers engage with the camera, either impassive or with a smile and a wave. The reciprocal exchange pays tribute to the older film’s staged reality. It also establishes Everson’s ethical approach toward his subjects: they are consciously filmed in a way that challenges the representational regime in which Black people were first treated as only observable objects.

Making use of his usual iterative, formal abstraction, Everson claims a place for Black workers in a continuum of audiovisual documentation while simultaneously altering it. Even as the labor within the factory may be disappeared from public visibility, the laborers themselves come into the light. Like the precursor by the Lumière Brothers, Everson’s re-representation moves between the worlds of labor and leisure. By drawing Black working-class people into full view, Everson’s films evoke the conditions of the post-World War II industrial boom in the Midwest. When the Great Migration intersected with the gains of Civil Rights, both movements opened access to an unprecedented level of economic stability—through the unionized automobile industry, for example—even as it was still burdened by racialized discrimination and unyielding disparities.17  Without creating a romanticized paean, Everson hearkens to a history that his family was a part of, when labor conditions of decent wages and disposable income made leisure more available.18


A different set of yellow safety jackets ambulate tree-lined residential streets in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Sound That (2014) depicts Cleveland Water Department workers as they endeavor to locate leaks in the system. The clacking drills and gravelly shoveling, whining hum and buzz of metal rods, hiss of spray paint cans, loud spurt of open fire hydrants, and the knowing chatter of expertise—opaque to most viewers—creates a kind of musicality. On the one hand, the film facilitates an appreciation for a necessary and underrecognized labor, and on the other, it communicates its mystery to the uninitiated. While one of the workers says, “It’s like it’s right there, you can feel the water,” there is no telling what the any of them hear as they share in a sonic world that remains closed to the spectator. By no means hostile to his audiences, Everson is generally disinterested in prioritizing their ease, choosing to level the ground from his subjects’ knowledge—and let everyone else “catch up.”19  The viewer is served, but not spoon-fed. The material, mobile soundscape of Sound That is both audible and silent. Men bend down and lean one ear over acoustic leak detectors, listening sticks, and ground microphones. These tools supply a multisensorial quality to the film, channeling Everson’s emphasis on instruments of labor, whether his own or that of others.


Fe26 (2014) is a companion piece to Sound That, creating a loose reverse image between sanctioned city work and illicit labor, with one carried out in the bright, bustling day, the other in the hushed silence of bluish night. Un-synched sound (Everson’s preference) in the form of a voice-over delivers a political narrative that conjoins class and race, contextualizing an underground economy of stealing and scrapping. The speaker recounts the financial strain, parental responsibilities, and dire straits of finding employment after imprisonment that may lead to the stealth work of appropriating copper and other materials. Even this one man’s testimony is an effective vehicle to indict far larger structures of racialized economic dispossession, as the voice-over also describes the vicious trap of predatory lending that leads to the forfeiture of homes. The way the speaker sees it, he’s not stealing from anyone—he’s finding a way through a trap. As the camera scans a few neglected buildings, we hear someone say, “You can look at it and see nothing [or see] iron, copper…” That speaker could very well be describing Everson’s intuitive, creative talents: the insight of recognizing value where it is not often discernable—and the skill of bringing unseen things into light.

Everson’s plays with this idea of discernment at numerous levels. In one of the voice-over exchanges, the speaker advises, “You gotta know your shit.” Indeed, to make the risk economically worthwhile, or to avoid getting cheated, the scrapper needs to be well-versed in different types of metals, their quality and worth. Without verdict or judgement, Everson’s studies show the expertise that exists in all kinds of labor—whether you’re a copper thief or water department employee—as each of them has honed their craft. Rather than setting up illegal and legal work as diametrically opposed, Fe26 and Sound That erode conventional racialized and classed hierarchies of labor. Everson doesn’t distinguish between the genre of work; instead, he draws a line of appreciation around anything done with competence and intelligence. That may well be a family trait. In one segment of Erie, Everson’s cousins discuss longstanding prejudices against UAW workers as over-compensated for negligible capability—which their own professional lives disprove.


Fe26’s title identifies iron in its most elemental form, emphasizing the materiality central to Everson’s work. The artist himself forged both the manhole cover and the metal crowbars used by the scrappers.20  They are at once functional tools and props for performers, applying Everson’s formal syncretism of fiction and fact even to objects. With similar effect, the last shot shows an elderly man looking down into one of the open manholes, occupying the unsettled position of an observer who could be a witness for either the filming process or what appears to be a real act of theft. Earlier on, a little girl stands in for the same. Recasting two actors from Rita Larson’s Boy (2012)—Issac “I-Pleeza” Chester and Jonathan “Streets” Lee, who was the last to appear in that sequence of auditions—Fe26 models the delightful deception of a staged, scripted film thinly veiled as documentary.21  It recalls Everson’s earlier applications of artifice to found footage. The fabrication in Fe26 reveals itself most easily through a familiarity with Everson’s cinematic self-referentiality, resulting in a satisfying recognition that parallels the familiarity he creates between subjects and spectators. His moving image art is a work of interconnection, performing the regenerative functions of Black Geography in reintroducing and recreating exchanges across time, space, and labor.




[duration]

Everson’s films develop a relationship between their subjects and the audience. Long takes afford an opportunity for the audience to engage attentively in the act of viewing, just as the subjects focus attentively on their tasks. This durational architecture works to shift the spectator from a passive observational position to a more active, participatory engagement. Through his supple aesthetics of relational mapping and material motion, Everson is an engineer of time.

Temporal structures of restaging and repetition align in the one-take short The Pritchard (2011), which shows a man preoccupied with the Sisyphean task of pushing his car forward as it keeps rolling back (recalling the hazy anecdote from Charlie’s Proof). Mostly silent, the film has an unexpected coda, showing men shoveling coal as a narrative voice-over describes nocturnal labor on freight trains. As ever returning to an awareness of materiality, the ending connects to larger cycles of energy and manpower involved in making a car and making it move. Erie, too, manifests the artist’s interest in using a span of time as a formal conceit and ideology: its setup, a precise construction of equivalent-length shots, is a style of storytelling and a lesson in patience. The eleven-minute 16mm takes that comprise each sequence are not arbitrary: they correspond to the “length of the film (400ft in each) [which] determined the tempo.”22  The quality of the celluloid itself guides Everson’s technique and composition, highlighting how his tools are the material substance and bedrock of his aesthetics.

Movement and materiality govern the timescape of Everson’s automobile works, including the recurring genre of car crushing in Chevelle (2011), Century (2012), and Regal Unlimited (2015). Labor, geography, and family are alchemized, as “the specific make, and model of each car chosen as they were manufactured in part in Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio,”23  where varied family members, including Everson’s virtuosic mechanic father, worked in the automobile industry.24  In Chevelle, first a blue sedan, then a red wagon are flattened by a car crusher before being picked up by a truck. Functioning as a kind of alchemy, the destruction of the cars is situated by Everson’s training in the plastic arts to reframe an industrial process into an artistic one. At once sculptural and jaggedly durational, what was once recognizable evolves into an abstraction as the machine acts with accumulating force, leaving a compressed mangle of metal; “post-industrial sculpture,” he calls it.25  The cars are acted on both by being crushed and being filmed. Another form of recycling occurs in how one film emerges from prior templates. Century shows a hydraulic grapple descending on a brown vehicle, pummeling down with uneven rhythm, flipping and squashing it with a large concrete disk, eventually leaving only a skeletal carcass, while Regal Unlimited, made three years later, scales up the destruction. Unlike the single steady-take of the previous two, this film cuts between different shots of car cubes, ending in a neat stack. A dialogue emerges between these scrapyard chronicles and the illicit workers of Fe26 around the distinction between what is or isn’t useful—an endpoint of a commodity losing value.


The car-crushing films iterate Everson’s concern with how labor changes (any) body.26  His questions and explorations come from his personal and familial anchoring in Black working-class life. Everson noticed how his parents looked different over the weekend, “wearing” the week’s labor on their bodies, changes at once material and temporal.27  Although only machines populate Everson’s crushing triad, these machines call to mind the hands of those who make them and make the cars—incidentally, not unlike the sleights of hand in Three Quarters (2015), Blue Caps (2013), and Stone (2013). Everson’s films trace his family’s DNA. They bear the family’s footprints in the automobile industry, broadly recuperating the Black labor of industrial production: “They built it, drove it, and pumped gas in it.”28 Just as the car-crushing films collapse the time between the Great Migration and his cousin’s retirement from General Motors referenced in Erie, Everson’s body of work stretches through material cycles and across decades of deteriorating economic and social landscapes.

“The clock is labor,”29  says Everson. Everything material moves. Referencing Tonsler Park (2017), which observes a polling station, the artist has explained that the over-abundance of Black public sector workers is due to their exclusion from the private sector.30  Another kind of perimeter and geography. Everson’s forgeries, whether the counterfeit billboard in Erie or the ambivalent authenticity of Fe26, are demystifying. They expose that U.S. democracy is a fiction that has not only failed Black people but was made on the terms of Black immiseration and labor exploitation. It has taken other kinds of fabrications and inventions to survive it—and Everson, like his subjects, knows what time it is. 


Endnotes

1. Kevin Jerome Everson and Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, “Always in the Present Tense: Kevin Jerome Everson with Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 2014.
2. […] ‘space-time’ or ‘spatio-temporality’' provides observers with tools to understand the dynamics of social transformation and the power of places,” Clyde Woods, “Sittin on Top of the World,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, edited by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Between the Lines, 2007, 69.
3. Kevin Jerome Everson, “Weitzman Fall 2023 Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Kevin Jerome Everson,” October 5, 2023, ICA Philadelphia.
4. Kevin Jerome Everson, “Keys to the City: An Evening with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Q&A, Newlab at Michigan Central, Detroit MI, November 15, 2025.
5. Everson, “Keys to the City.”
6. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 225.
7. Katherine McKittrick, and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, eds. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Between the Lines, 2007, 8.
8. Everson, “Keys to the City.”
9. Ibid.
10. Everson, “Weitzman Lecture.”
11. Claudrena N. Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918–1942, Routledge, 2007, 3.
12. Michael Boyce Gillespie, “B.A.D. (Black Abstraction Dreaming): A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Black Camera, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, 165.
13. Ibid.
14. Erik S. McDuffie, The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom, Duke University Press, 2024, 2.
15. Mary Gallucci, “Mistaken Identities? Alessandro de’ Medici and the Question of ‘Race,’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15, no. 3, 2015, 40–81.
16. Michael B. Gillespie, “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton: A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Liquid Blackness, April 2014, 46.
17. Herbert R. Northrup, The Negro in the Automobile Industry (Industrial Research Unit, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania, 1968).
18. Everson, “Keys to the City.”
19. Everson, “Kevin Jerome Everson: Artist Statement,” Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 4, 2014, 799.
20. Aaron Cutler, “Searching Out the Next Vessel: An Interview with Kevin Jerome Everson (Web Exclusive),” Cineaste, fall 2013.
21. Everson, “Keys to the City.”
22. Everson, “Weitzman Lecture.”
23. Andrew Kreps Gallery press release for Century, April 13–May 13, 2017.
24. Everson, “Keys to the City.”
25. Gillespie, “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton: A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Liquid Blackness, April 2014, 46.
26. Everson, “Weitzman Lecture.”
27. Ibid.
28. Gillespie, “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton: A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Liquid Blackness, April 2014, 46.
29. Everson, “Weitzman Lecture.”
30. Ibid.



Fig. 1, Erie, Kevin Jerome Everson, 81 min, 16mm > digital, 2010, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 2, Parliament-Funkadelic, 1971 © Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.
Fig. 3–4, Erie, Kevin Jerome Everson, 81 min, 16mm > digital, 2010, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 5, Negro World, 1922, “Notice banning Rev. James W. H. Eason from the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” public domain.
Fig. 6, Rhinoceros, Kevin Jerome Everson, 7.5 min, VHS > digital, 2012, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 7, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, Louis Lumière, 0.45 min, 35mm, 1895 © Institute Lumière.
Fig. 8, Workers Leaving the Job Site, Kevin Jerome Everson, 6.5 min, 16mm > digital, 2013, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 9, Sound That, Kevin Jerome Everson, 12 min, 16mm > digital, 2014, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 10, Fe26, Kevin Jerome Everson, 7 min, 16mm > digital, 2014, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 11–12, Chevelle, Kevin Jerome Everson, 7.5 min, 35mm > digital, 2011, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 13, Century, Kevin Jerome Everson, 6.5 min, 16mm > digital, 2012, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.