Amongst the Rabble: Black Aesthetics and FourOneOne Dissolve An American Symbol
On Performance, Imperialism, & Solutions
On November 15, 2025, Judson Commons celebrated the 55th Anniversary of the People’s Flag Show, the historic 1970 exhibition at Judson Memorial Church. Organized by Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche, and Jon Hendricks, the People’s Flag Show challenged laws regarding “so-called” flag desecration. The event resulted in a police raid and arrests, establishing a landmark free speech case for artists. In recognition of this legacy, Judson Memorial Church invited artists to submit their own versions of flags to commemorate the 100 flags displayed in the 1970s. Judson hosted an exhibition of “flag-related works” from November 9 to November 15, 2025. Over 60 artists contributed work that creatively interrogated the American Flag’s status as a symbol of “Freedom and justice for all.”
The exhibition/performances that took place at Judson Memorial Church this fall ended with a penultimate finale, Rabble.1 Rabble was the last of a series of events commemorating the People’s Flag Show and Judson’s historical stand for free speech. Rabble emerged through a year-long conversation between curators Arien Wilkerson and Malcom-x Betts of Black Aesthetics and FourOneOne, respectively. Rabble showcased work by Artists Qiujiang Levi Lu and Kwami Winfield, Arien Wilkerson, DUNUMS, HXH (Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams), with Laura Sofía Pérez and Kayla Farrish, and Asphalt Savannahs.
Rabble used radical creativity to excavate ongoing legacies of American fascism and imperialism. They hoped to “push against accepted/complicit notions of performance as capitalism, class, systemic racism, and state violence intensify and continue to shape definitions of audience and opportunity within funding, philanthropic and curatorial systems.” Seeking to disrupt expectations of the audience as “cultural consumers” (think bell hooks’ “eating the other”), the curators took “Rabble,” and its myriad definitions, as the show’s organizing social principle.
When I entered, muted footage of People’s Flag Show (1970), looping like a mirage, was projected on the wall behind the stage. In Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A with Flags (1970), nude, white bodies are draped with American flags around their necks. They are rendered nearly sexless and androgynous because of their uniform thinness, moving in simultaneously adroit and misty choreography, at once modern and mundane, salutary and campy.
Wilkerson framed the show with “Don’t forget what we’re facing. We’ve always been living under fascism.”
Next, noise-technologists Lu and Winfield performed their “animalistic feedback ritual” facing one another, stage left, in front of the audience against the backdrop of Trio A with Flags playing on repeat. (Lu mostly stood, facing the audience. Winfield remained seated with his back to the audience.) Adults crowded around them like camp kids around a summer bonfire. Lu and Winfield rescrambled our senses by giving sonic language to Trio A with Flags – the bodies, adorned in a symbol that eludes reality. Paired with the noise coming from several of Lu’s wind instruments and Winfield’s fingers twiddling with buttons on the laptop, the nostalgic black and white imaging and static took on new meaning. Lu riffed both pained and painless, over Winfield’s noise, a duet dancing a seemingly formless sonic landscape; sonic static layered over the visual glitching of the old footage. A tear in the archive; in time and space. In a haze before, I could hear the bodies moving, nothing apolitical or nonconfrontational, from this side of time, about their somewhat monotone choreography. The lone, black male performer in the back of the dance near the stage was no longer a lingering itch in the back of my mind. Lu and Winfield silenced the white cis men speaking from their presumed position on the wall. Noise made reality clear – it was always noise. Lu and Winfield rearticulated, in simultaneously dulcet, subtly melancholy, furious, gurgling, resigned, unaccustomed terms, emotions I didn’t need words to understand.
If Wilkerson’s words were the umbrella framing the show, then Lu and Winfield set the stage. It’s not what you thought you knew about what’s real. Look at it again. Don’t even try to understand. Just feel it. Theirs was a call to see from the body and hear beyond time.
Black Aesthetics founder and curator, Arien Wilkerson’s, agit-prop dance and electronics set was next.2 Wilkerson’s performance evolved in front of a black screen and a 25-minute timer.3 To the left of stage left, Wilkerson spoke from behind a podium at a microphone draped in the American flag. In the first oral section of their seven-section set, they let us know they were giving a “performance lecture” with the intention to “demystify the idea of art.” They hoped to generate “solutions instead of words…” Each section consisted of an oral and movement/electronics section; the latter sections were the solutions. Clothes (prop) changes were Wilkerson’s quick “intermissions” between sections. The vocal aspects of the lecture, at the podium, marked the shift during each section. With their embodied solutions, Wilkerson, implicates, uses, and wields their body to note, cross out, extrapolate upon, and repair what the written language cannot encapsulate and the harm it has caused the “rabble” in the archive.4 Over the seven sections, one might read Wilkerson’s performance lecture, simultaneously through the white gaze – and all its cisheteronormative, ableist constraints – and the black trans gaze. By doing so, one might perceive both a dissolution of form under western constraints into the realm of informal, yet legible authenticity and/or an activation of the black trans body’s timeless capacity to repair and disrupt the archive, our sense of static reality, and authenticity through prosthesis and self-editing. This is exemplified in their shift in form and gesture, across Sections, from modern and contemporary dance to colloquial black dance. Wilkerson asks: What is the most articulable, legible, mode of black communication? What is black communication? What is black speech? Black speech, black speak is the language of black performativity; a body that disrupts, ruptures, breaks, restores at once – a proverbial circle; somehow, at one with nature, life, and source. Death and birth. Chaos and peace…archive.
DUNUMS Palestinian folk songs reimagined by Sijal Nasralla’s Durham, NC-based dream pop band Dunums were no less serious and sincere. Yet, their performances changed the felt experience of the space. Tucked under the upper balcony of the space, the dangling, twinkling lights, t-shirts, sweaters, and homey vibe of their set-up transformed the space into something like an underground garage show. This dissonance was important and provided some respite from the higher frequency pulse of Wilkerson’s piece, time to get chai and samosas, look around, rest, and engage.
Ambient, improv duo HXH (Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams), filmmaker Laura Sofía Pérez, and dancer/choreographer Kayla Farrish’s performance. Farrish’s words and choreography guided the piece as HXH worked in conversation with Farrish’s movements. The color red, and as an assemblage of objects (candles, cherries, leaves, carefully curated cloth that alluded to KKK masks) – many drawn quickly in my notebook – provided an eerie backdrop to Farrish’s dance which I described to myself as a “recollection.” In some ways, her character’s sense of “lostness” – “I’m seeking something…I’m looking for something…Unravel to become unruly…Am I as violent as the fear projected onto me?...Changing the pattern defies the system…” Farrish’s choreography willed her body to move while she simultaneously defied gravity. She began by supporting herself, and overtime she set her body free, donning the flag and then donning a nude sheet that she shared with an audience member who cried. Later Farrish sat holding hands with her and talking about the work.
I was speaking with Wilkerson for most of Savannahs’ decolonial noise-lyricism, but I have begun to delve into her work on Soundcloud. Having spent an important and transformative year in Philly, I’m hoping to write about her free-jazz genre, avant-jawn.
In language, spatial layout, and shifting “stages,” Rabble curated itself around a dissolution of traditional, colonial audience-performer affiliations. We see this not only in the bodies and identities of the artists and performers, but in genre. And different modes of embodiment do become genres. That reality is, in some ways, a part of the fabric of living under this illusory nation-state. By engaging genre through fragmentation, adjacency, obliteration, and dissolution, Rabble successfully engaged our conception of national consciousness – both political and seemingly apolitical – by reshaping memory and our felt sense of difference and legacies of colliding difference, through a kind of collage of dismemberment. The performances were containers that engaged the aesthetic ramifications of history using memory as a social glue and political subtext that haunts the genre of American life. In this sense, the elusive nature of distinction that is consistently imbued in our (un)conscious ongoing desires for clarity of word, movement, law, axiom, and mode in a broken world, between the parts and whole of us and the systems inside and outside of us, is reflected throughout Rabble in form, curation, and felt experience.
To varying degrees of extremity and mildness, a seriously diverse group of somewhat 20 - 65 years old of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities were a part of “disorderly crowd of people,” “group, class or body regarded with contempt,” or “common people lacking wealthy, power or social status,” gathered on “stage” and off to various degrees. Rabble indeed ignited a hope within me of a “better, safer community that values honesty and social daring.” They showed us the challenges that exist through a genealogy of rupture and repair. And they archived the circular nature of American history – expansion, retaliation, and back again. Rabble pushes us to ask: But what endures? Who are we the people, outside of our struggle and sacrifice, or our fight against illusion? Perhaps, it doesn’t matter. (Of course, to me, it does.)
In the meantime, Rabble offers at least a solution or an addendum to the conundrum—one that, I am certain, is enough for now: the art, the act of making it, writing about it, talking about it, the food, the people, and the conversation under conditions that are sustainable, livable, lovable, and humane.
Read and fact-checked by Arien Wilkerson before publication.
The “Judson Three” – Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche, and John Hendricks – curated the original 1970 performance. Police raided the exhibition, arrested the artists on charges of flag desecration, and fined each $100. The New York Civil Liberties Union later overturned the ruling. People’s Flag show was, ironically, inspired by the 1967 conviction of Stephen Radich, a New York gallery owner. Radich’s case was pending at the time of the 1970 show. Radich was convicted for presenting Marc Morrel’s sculptures, which incorporated American flags into his work that critiqued US involvement in the Vietnam War. He was convicted of violating a state law against the desecration of the American flag. It went through the courts. A federal judge finally overturned the case in 1974.
Agitprop referred to the Soviet Department of Agitation and Propaganda. Agitprop was a tool to explain and disseminate Communist ideologies and policies. These performances were accessible, spontaneous, and mobile. They often included montages, songs, acrobatics, and dance. Wilkerson’s agit-prop and electronic performance lecture is for “the rabble." Their synthesis of media—other movements and protests, articles of clothing, sounds and noise from their life, music they enjoy—is meant to arouse, awaken, and disassemble the audience.
They performed beyond their time limit. Almost bittersweet and melancholic, this unconscious evidence of their humanity and need for rest and water amid the requirements necessary to make their black trans body, boundless and timeless performativity, somewhat legible.
Wilkerson mentions two major events in Trangender history: On September 25, 1970, led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, LGBTQ+ activists with the Gay Liberation Front staged a five-day sit-in at New York University’s Weinstein Hall to protest their cancellation of a fundraising gay dance. New York City Police Department’s Tactical Patrol Force forcibly ended their sit-in. This violence precipitated Johnson and Rivera’s historic founding of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) to support homeless transgender youth. They passionately mention the stabbing of a transgender Arab teenager that occurred outside an LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv in July 2019.# In response to the hate crime, the queer Palestinian community organized the first-ever protest against anti-LGBTQIA+ violence in Haifa shortly after the incident in 2019.