Krista Franklin: Under the Knife

Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment, Krista Franklin’s Under the Knife is an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist’s selves.

Franklin plays fast and loose with fact at the crossroads of the history of her maternal line and her own in a ruptured conversation about inheritance and the generational traumas that blossom in the body. Under the Knife hiccups, cross-fades and stops midsentence as Franklin cuts through the illusion of memory, the pathologies of history, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Offing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, and Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, among others. She is a frequent collaborator with fellow artists, most notably contributing her writing to performances, prints, audio recordings and film voiceovers for the projects of Cauleen Smith; the text of Ayanah Moor’s hand-painted signs for the performance “Untitled (OFFERINGS)”; and poetry for Erin Christovale and Amir George’s catalog Black Radical Imagination (Dominica). Her work is often linked with the cultural movements Afrofuturism and AfroSurrealism, and she was mentioned in Chicago Magazine’s “The Next Generation of Chicago Afrofuturism.”

Her work has been exhibited at Rootwork Gallery, The Obama Foundation Summit, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and featured on 20th Century Fox’s Empire. She is a Cave Canem fellow who holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago, and currently teaches Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Designed by Matt Austin, April Sheridan, Aay Preston-Myint, and Hannah Batsel. Letterpress printing by April Sheridan. Edition of 500.

Images courtesy of Candor Arts.