XX: The Patternmaster Artist Spotlight | Closing Performances
Featured Artists: Akoiya Harris | Dance Artist & Garfield Hillson | Literary Artist
XX: The Patternmaster was created as an Afrofuturist Community Ritual and my community is very black and very queer. As such, I find it vital to provide space for black artists to showcase their work within the installation. Two artists, spotlit below, created work for the final First Thursday (May 7th). Join us as we close out the immersive experience and highlight black LGBTQIA+ artists. The below artists will be performing original work as part of the closing experience for the installation.
Photo By: Allina Yang | OTB 2025
I am based in Seattle’s historically Black Central District, a place my family has called home since migrating north in the 1960s. As a professional dancer, I have navigated as both a company and freelance artist. My work is a proud, loving, response to my environment as well as to my overlapping identities as a Black queer woman. Memory is malleable and history can often be erased unless documented by those who care for it. I create to ensure that we are remembered in the future. My art is for my future selves to know that we are dynamic people interwoven into the fabric of all things beautiful, not just a fluctuating percentage. I create so that I can join the lineage of Black artists, aunties, and makers that “carry it forward” through the body and voice. I collect oral histories as another way to document our lives. Often these oral histories are reinscribed through my body and put in conversation with movement. I have found that when dance meets the stories I gather, the body unearths sensations and connections that wouldn’t have been activated otherwise. The legacies I engage with can be personal or public; regardless of the proximity, preserving these histories through art becomes an act of resistance to erasure.
Originally from South Florida, Garfield Hillson is a Black-Queer poet and educator working in Seattle. He believes in the beauty of words and the power of story-sharing. He believes in trauma-informed social justice healing and that art and education are the building blocks to achieve this. Garfield imagines being Black and Queer is nothing if not a study in silence. So he writes to reclaim the language that was stolen from him, to empower others, and to push imaginations to craft a better NOW !! Garfield is a Seattle Poetry Slam Grand Slam Champion (2015); a Rain City Slam Grand Slam Champion (2017); and a five-time Seattle Poetry Slam National Team Member (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). Garfield has appeared in Rising Up: A Queer Social Justice Play (2017); and Dear White People—Resistance (2018).
