NOT REMEMBRANCE - PROJECTION

Each March, women are asked to remember. To turn toward the past with reverence. To measure distance in declarations, in firsts hard won and futures deferred. History gathers around us like ceremony — heavy with names, dates, and the quiet expectation that we will stand inside remembrance as evidence of progress.

But Black womanhood has never lived comfortably within a single timeline.

It moves differently. It folds. It circles. It anticipates.

For much of my life, I have been surrounded by Black women who seem to exist slightly ahead of the moment they occupy — building spaces before they are recognized as necessary, imagining possibilities before language arrives to describe them. To witness this is to understand that time, for Black women, is rarely a straight path from past to present to future. It is layered terrain where ancestral memory breathes alongside speculative imagination, where survival strategies coexist with visionary world-building.

To live as a Black woman is often to exist in multiple states of existence at once: carrying what was, negotiating what is, and quietly constructing what will be.

Remembrance, then, is only part of the story.

For generations, Black women have served as cultural archivists — sustaining families, movements, neighborhoods, and creative traditions that formal institutions often failed to recognize or protect. Through oral histories, spiritual practices, handmade objects, and everyday rituals, they ensured fragile worlds did not disappear. Their labor created continuity. Their memory made survival imaginable.

Yet framing Black womanhood primarily through endurance can narrow what feels possible.

"Projection is not escapism. It is a disciplined orientation toward possibility — the courage to inhabit identities and environments that do not yet have stable language. It creates space for contradiction and interior life, for pleasure that does not require justification, for rest understood as a resource rather than a reward deferred. It allows Black women to move beyond the burden of constant representation toward more expansive modes of self-definition."

When survival becomes the dominant narrative, imagination is disciplined. The future is positioned as something to earn rather than something to design. Recognition arrives late, if at all, often after struggle has been softened into inspiration. History becomes both inheritance and expectation, shaping how Black women’s work is seen, funded, and allowed to flourish.

Across artistic and cultural landscapes, however, a shift is unfolding — quiet, but unmistakable.

Black women are refusing the role of perpetual witness. They are moving beyond preservation toward authorship, establishing institutions before permission is granted and experimenting with form in ways that resist easy categorization. They are creating environments where new relationships to time, space, and identity can emerge. Their work unsettles linear ideas of progress, suggesting that transformation often occurs through return, repetition, and reconfiguration.

This is projection as practice.

Wangechi Mutu, The Seated IV from The NewOnes, will free Us,

Projection is not escapism. It is a disciplined orientation toward possibility — the courage to inhabit identities and environments that do not yet have stable language. It creates space for contradiction and interior life, for pleasure that does not require justification, for rest understood as a resource rather than a reward deferred. It allows Black women to move beyond the burden of constant representation toward more expansive modes of self-definition.

In nonlinear time, the future is not distant. It is concurrent.

I see it in artists constructing immersive worlds where memory dissolves into code. In curators transforming transitory rooms into sites of collective imagination. In writers bending centuries into a single narrative breath, refusing the permanence of trauma. These gestures are not simply responses to history; they are rehearsals for realities still forming — blueprints sketched in motion.

To witness this moment is to recognize that Black women are already living ahead of the present.

We are navigating technological transformation, environmental uncertainty, shifting economies, and evolving social movements while drawing from ancestral knowledge that has long prepared us for instability. Our relationship to time offers fluency in change. We understand survival has always required imagination — that dreaming is not indulgence but infrastructure.

This understanding reshapes how collective observances might function. Rather than treating the past as a completed chapter to commemorate annually, we can recognize it as an active force shaping ongoing creation. The question shifts from what Black women have done to what they are preparing us all to become.

If the future of Black womanhood is already under construction, audiences, institutions, and communities must decide whether they will simply observe or actively participate in sustaining it. Supporting visionary work requires more than celebration. It demands investment, protection, and a willingness to encounter unfamiliar ideas. It calls for trust in timelines that do not conform to traditional measures of success.

"We understand survival has always required imagination — that dreaming is not indulgence but infrastructure."

Ultimately, nonlinear time offers a profound reframing.

Black women are not moving toward a future that will finally acknowledge our value. We are shaping temporal realities in which value is self-defined and collectively affirmed. We are transforming remembrance into momentum, turning inherited knowledge into speculative possibility. History becomes material — something to bend, reimagine, remake.

The question is no longer whether Black women will enter the future.

It is whether we are prepared to recognize that we are already there.

Vivian Phillips, Founder + Board President,