Diamond Stingily

Dad is Byron

2017

Dad is Bryon, 2017. Photo credit: Sonic Rebellion at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), 2017

Dad is Byron is an audio work produced in collaboration between artist Diamond Stingily and her father, the house musician Byron Stingily. Viewers are invited to pick up a wall-mounted telephone that has been retrofitted to play a recording of a conversation between Stingily and her father. Although initially the artist planned to focus on her father’s recollections of the violence during his childhood in Chicago in the 1960s and how music helped him cope, the conversation has a natural and intimate meandering. Prompted by his daughter’s questions, Byron Stingily ruminates on his life remembering old friends that have passed, his love for music, his relationship to certain musicians, and even breaking into song occasionally as they both chuckle. Combined with his intimate knowledge and experience of music, the work is a warm, earnest and deeply personal portrait of a man, a musician, a father, and his relationship with his daughter.

Diamond Stingily works in a wide variety of media, from spoken word, video and audio to sculpture and installation. Exploring themes of class, race and gender, her work is infused with the deeply personal, often incorporating motifs from her own childhood and references to her family. Poetry is also an important part of Stingily’s output. She began writing as an 8 year old in a diary gifted to her by her grandmother, a habit which she currently sustains in tandem and sometimes interwoven with her work as a visual artist. She also hosts an online radio broadcast, The Diamond Stingily Show, where she engages with other writers and plays recordings of them reading their work. From benign symbols of her childhood to pieces that evoke aspects of normalized violence experienced by her or her family members—like flood lights and cameras as surveillance methods deployed in certain racialized ghettos—her art and words are a meditation on belonging, family, community, and most importantly, speak of the African diaspora through her perspective as a black woman.

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Diamond Stingily Dad is Byron

Diamond Stingily

Dad is Byron