THE CLOTHES

A celebration of Afro-American culture

New Negroes embraces language, signs and signification as the most critical tools in the functionality of a people. They are the weapons that write redacted and untrue histories, the tools that allow us to interpret as we conceptualize—between their many forms, they are friend and foe.

Negro is about unbreakable pride, it is pro-Black and anti status, it is a celebration of Black history and culture. It’s like. I'm lit, my people lit, been lit, stay lit; they can't subvert our identity or ideas. In America or elsewhere. Dig and not by proxy.

Each piece is hand printed or created by Giani Jones, founder and owner of New Negroes clothing and design. Masks are worn during printing and packaging.

photo credit Mattie Hanson

THE CREATOR

My family name is Jones. My New Orleans heritage carries generations. My family name is Knowles. My Bahamian heritage is Afro-indigenous. I am known and unknown; this is where I center my practice. A practice largely based around identities, how they intersect within self, my community, and the societies that encompass my community. My work subordinates medium to concept. I am interested in interfacing the concepts of time, morality and duty. My inspiration emerges primarily in anticipation of gift giving; I create objects with the purpose of meeting peoples’ needs or making a personalized offering. My creative output utilizes the things that are left behind when a loved one dies, or the trash created from other projects to explore ‘realness’, ‘thereness,’ absence, death, sentimentality and nostalgia. I feel activated by a desire to build something new from “trash,” or rather the abstract of what is waste, predetermined by what the collective decides is worthy of keeping.

I am interested in what it means to follow a subject as an artist—what it means to imbue subjects and subject matter with the subjective direction that my artistic eye inherently follows. Should I, as a subject, follow a nihilistic stance, showing extreme skepticism, and maintain that nothing in the world really exists beyond how I, as subject, interpret its ‘realness’ and ‘thereness’ by what meaning of it I can grasp through language? A syllogism—language is a construct created to describe what is ‘there,’ and ‘there’ only exists if it can be put into language. Ergo things yet to be defined with language cannot exist. Right? If what is ‘there’ cannot be described, how can it exist except for in the unknown abstract? If construct is born of subjectivity and cemented in the agreement and indoctrination of a collective, can its meaning ultimately be ‘there’ outside of the abstract in its natural state? Can constructs and systems create anything that is truly, actually, factually, ‘there?’ ‘There’ and ‘real’ in the reality we attempt to define as possible and singular?

I want to encourage a recognition of the mental and emotional potential we possess to understand life in between binaries. I think all people feel something beyond simply what is and what is not. We are built into ‘isms’—a collection of distinct points on a linear and nonlinear timeline—following the distinctive practice and participation in systems and philosophy, vis-à-vis political ideology or artistic movement in an attempt to achieve or understand ‘thereness.’ Through my art, I study the liminal spaces between is and isn’t, love and fear. I strive to create an experiential feeling of the journey to ‘thereness.’ This process I find ancestral and palimpsestic in nature. It brings me closer to the fold.

My name is Giani Anoush Marisa Knowles Jones. I survived Hurricane Katrina. I went to New York University. I make a lot of different things. I fancy myself highly adaptable and I believe art is function. Call me a post-structuralist, proto-internet by-product.

zelle GianiMarisaJones | venmo @Giani-Jones-1 | cash app $GianiMarisaJones

WHY NEW NEGROES

Popularized by Alain LeRoy Locke during the Harlem Renaissance, the term New Negro implies a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation.

"Negro" was a first step, in terms of vernacular nomenclature, in describing people of African descent in the United States with civility. Creating the trajectory toward labels such as colored, Black, and African-American, "Negro" reflects a progression in our respective liberties and the acknowledgment of the existence of our consciousness beyond being someone's nigger. Using "New" as the adjective, I want to call to mind that developing consciousness—that feeling that we are on the path toward equality and obtaining those rights to which our diaspora has always been entitled.

The struggle is intersectional and perpetual. New Negroes is a way to remember and commemorate our first steps and be inspired to continue, even when our people are being killed and disproportionally imprisoned. Though progress is moving slowly, almost cyclically, New Negroes is a reminder to keep that first sense of hope within the everyday life of blackness toward structural reform. 2999 is a far off date for Negro America, but Blackness endures.