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I. Borderless Blackness

An Introduction
By Yasmina Price

Regimes of dominance. Manufactured exclusion. Strategies of control. That is how activist and writer Harsha Walia understands borders, as “entangled in the terrors of territorial expansion, Indigenous genocide, anti-Black enslavement, and racialized expulsion.”1 The North American border between Windsor and Detroit is no different. At once fissure and fusion of the stolen lands of Turtle Island, it is an illegitimate juncture between the illegitimate settler states of Canada and the United States, signifying centuries of domination and rebellion, enslavement and escape.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s artistic and cinematic practice are countervailing explorations of space, place and people. As historicized studies of the present, his films travel across intergenerational family stories, the auto industry, sitcoms, migration, beauty pageants, unionized and unsanctioned labor, gossip, non-event activities, auditions and rehearsals, media artefacts, moonshining, and climbing telephone poles. Figures as varied as the painter Caravaggio, filmmaker Lav Diaz, comedian Richard Pryor, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, photographer Garry Winogrand, and musical collective Parliament-Funkadelic are all amongst his influences.

Everson’s belief that “everything has complexity” is effectively translated into the formal qualities of his work.2  Favoring 16mm, Super 8, and, at times, 35mm, he also makes efficient use of digital cameras, in addition to drawing on a pluralistic training in street photography, sculpture, painting, and printmaking. While Everson maintains an insistent fidelity to his subjects’ craft, intelligence, and labor, he has none for the pretense of documentary transparency and noninterference. His films are mediations meant to be known that way, as they recreate and restage at the frayed seam between the real and the fictive. Nimble, alert, and carefully constructed, Everson’s imagemaking has kept the same focus he identified in 2014: “to make handsome images of working-class Midwestern black folk.”3


“Clocking Time: A Dossier on Kevin Jerome Everson” is the first of two portfolios about more than 50 of Everson’s films that have screened at Media City Film Festival [MCFF], a significant sample from a filmography of 300 and counting. His prolific output makes material the time and ethos of his habitually industrious method, its volume and tempo resulting from the culture of labor that raised him in Mansfield, Ohio.4 The regional specificity that is so central to his practice has been the foundation for an enduring and fruitful collaboration with Media City Film Festival, an art organization based in Windsor-Detroit that is—meaningfully for the matter of Everson’s practice—the only cross-border film festival in the world. Over the course of nearly twenty years of screenings, commissions, visits, exhibitions, and retrospectives, there has not been a single edition of the festival without a new work by Everson. Whether in person or through his films, the artist is at MCFF every year. Like clockwork.

Beyond Everson’s films being consistently shown and celebrated by MCFF, they share a geography of production and a community of subjects. For example, Chevelle (2011) was shot by Everson in Ontario,5  while Erie (2010) chronicles Black migration from the perspective of communities around the international waterway of Lake Erie. MCFF has a legacy of commissioning and facilitating projects around the frontier of Windsor and Detroit—including those with Everson, such as Grand Finale (2015) and It Seems to Hang On (2015). As “the busiest and most economically significant” international border in North America, its crossing is an intertwined history.


Since the 1950s, Windsor and Detroit have experienced atmospheric pollution and its damaging effects on public health.6 In fact, the gateway from the U.S. contributes to poorer health quality in the Canadian city compared to national Canadian averages.7 Between 1959 and 1976, the cities were linked by the annual Detroit–Windsor International Freedom Festival, marking a partnership contextualized by Cold War imperial militarism.8 Another alliance was enacted by the Emancipation Celebration, which began earlier, running between 1935 and 1966 to mark the abolition of slavery in Canada in 1834.9  Yoking Detroit and Windsor via their Black communities’ liberation struggle likewise pairs their respective histories of worker militancy and union struggle.10

Everson has been known to riff on an acidic Malcolm X quip that the Mason–Dixon line is the Canadian border.11  Only furthered by his subsequent anti-imperial and anti-colonial internationalism, Malcolm X’s observation voiced a challenge to not only the dominant ordering of space but everything that came with it. This publication of “Clocking Time: A Dossier on Kevin Jerome Everson” coincides with the celebration of the United States’ 250th founding anniversary. Planned by governing institutions and ruling elites, its commemoration reiterates what for many has been a falsely conceived project of freedom, selling the fruits of progress but delivering the same rotten roots. As Everson himself has pointed out, “Any time there's a movement of Black people moving forward, there’s an institution that brings us back.”12  Arguably, the very premise of linear ameliorative advancement was never worth anyone’s time.

Obliquely, rather than directly, Everson’s films reconstruct space-time by rearranging the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, political, imaginary, and material. What he has referred to as “potential for creation” is continually produced within an active frame of movement.13  Everson’s durational witnessing, processual abstraction, and situational reenactment are counter-records, marking what the collective efforts of Black working-class organizing and individuals like Malcolm X have proven time and again: neither master clock, nor master map, nor their material equivalents, have ever gone undisputed.



Read next: “Fabrications: Telling Stories and Practicing Tricks” inside “Clocking Time: A Dossier on Kevin Jerome Everson”


Back to “Clocking Time: A Dossier on Kevin Jerome Everson” table of contents


Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anticolonial cinema, and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her work pays particular attention to the materiality of image-making and the politics of memory. She has programmed at Anthology Film Archives, Maysles Documentary Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes, museum catalogues, and journals, such as The Nation, Film Quarterly, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, World Records Journal and Criterion’s Current. She holds a Ph.D. in Black Studies and Film & Media Studies from Yale University. 



Endnotes

1. Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books, 2021, 15.
2. Kevin Jerome Everson, “Weitzman Fall 2023 Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Kevin Jerome Everson,” October 5, 2023, ICA Philadelphia.
3. Everson, “Kevin Jerome Everson: Artist Statement,” Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 4, 2014, 799.
4. Everson, “Keys to the City: An Evening with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Q&A, Newlab at Michigan Central, Detroit MI, November 15, 2025.
5. Michael B. Gillespie, “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton: A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Liquid Blackness, April 2014, 47.
6. Morris Katz, “Atmospheric Pollution and Public Health,” Canadian Journal of Public Health / Revue Canadienne de Sante’e Publique 47, no. 9, 1956, 395–400.
7. Eric Lavigne, Paul J. Villeneuve, and Sabit Cakmak, “Air Pollution and Emergency Department Visits for Asthma in Windsor, Canada,” Canadian Journal of Public Health / Revue Canadienne de Santé Publique 103, no. 1 (2012), 4.
8. Julie Longo, “Consuming Freedom: The International Freedom Festival as Transnational Tourism Strategy on the Windsor-Detroit Border, 1959-1976,” Michigan Historical Review 34, no. 2, 2008, 118–37.
9. “Windsor Emancipation Celebration Programs,” Univerisity of Windsor website.
10. Don Wells, “The Impact of the Postwar Compromise on Canadian Unionism: The Formation of an Auto Worker Local in the 1950s,” Labour / Le Travail 36, 1995, 147–73.
11. Everson, “Keys to the City.”
12. Everson, “Weitzman Lecture.”
13. Ibid.


Fig. 1, “Detroit River with Ambassador Bridge,” photographer unknown, 1929 © The Detroit News Archives.
Fig. 2, Chevelle, Kevin Jerome Everson, 7.5 min, 35mm > digital, 2011, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 3–4, “Emancipation Celebration Program,” ed. Walter Perry, 1949 (1952, 1957), collection of Windsor Emancipation Celebration Programs, University of Windsor Leddy Library.
Fig. 5, Kevin Jerome Everson on the set of It Seems to Hang On, 2014, courtesy and © Oona Mosna.

“Clocking Time” dossier cover image: Chevelle, Kevin Jerome Everson, 7.5 min, 35mm > digital, 2011, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.