Curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden

"1968/1969 is the beginning I’ve chosen. Barbara’s marriage to her husband Clay has ended after a joint trip around the world, building a home together - she realized that that is not the life that she wanted. Barbara buys her own motorcycle, a 1972 BWM R75/5, and proceeds on a trip of her own across the country, into her identity as a lesbian. She goes toward her desires, her sexuality, and the development of her artistic practice. She decides to make herself. She studies herself. She writes herself. She never turns back."
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"In looking at Barbara’s work during this time, I feel the privilege of being able to re-assess, to arrange and re- position her work through and alongside my own subjectivity. Too often, lesbian identity has been treated as a nostalgic or archaic proposition. As a Black dyke, I refute this stasis. Lesbian identity has always been in flux, changing over time within itself. Barbara’s archive reveals a portrait of a lesbian constantly challenging herself in real time, constantly seeking a way to exist as her full self, unbridled, in a society which has tried to erase her and others many times over."
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"A letter from a lover reveals a note in the margins, perhaps an afterthought penned just before sending:

Write me that you love me dearly and that you always will.
Tell me there is a lesbian forever."