DESCENDANTS OF SIRE
BY BRIGHTWORK FELLOW CLARENCE HEYWARD

Photographs by: Sally Van Gorder

Descendants of Sire is Clarence Heyward’s visual album punctuating the journey to understand his identity as a Black American. SIRE is a double entendre implying both elevated social status and a beast of burden kept for breeding. With the portrait as the primary format, Heyward’s metamorphosis becomes evident in his quest to understand what W.E.B. Du Bois identifies as the Black American’s “double consciousness.” In his preeminent book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes this internal conflict, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings....” 

The exhibition opens with Heyward reflecting on watching the movie Mandingo with his step-father as a young child. The 1975 Blaxploitation blockbuster was about a slave-owner who forced the men he enslaved to become bare-knuckle fighters. This was the first lesson he inherited on what it meant to be Black. The first piece opens the exhibition with black-on-black tones surrounding Heyward’s torso like a wall. 

As DESCENDANTS OF SIRE progresses, Heyward confronts the trauma of his Black body being seen as less-than-human. He strives to connect his lost African heritage and inherited American identity through artifacts found in big box stores. During his creative process, Heyward noticed that elements of Black culture generate feelings of both fondness and discomfort within the community. He investigated the false narratives and untruths that attempted to shape icons of pride and self-determination into shame-filled taboos. 

Heyward’s entire life and identity were changed by marriage and fatherhood, shifting his focal point from himself to his family. His liberation comes in the form of a Black woman draped in the American flag. The progression of Heyward’s perspective in this exhibition -- from a young man to a husband and the father -- reclaims the narrative of Black identity and puts it in the hands of his daughter. Finally, Heyward reckons with the essential truth that Black identity cannot be found in objects or ideas, creeds, or even art. The origin of Blackness, and of all humanity, is the womb of a Black woman.

- Statement written by Courtney Napier