In 2008, artist Lola Flash was wrongfully arrested—in her words, “for walking while Black.” After that, her life spun out of control. Her teaching license was suspended, leaving Flash unemployed for six months. Forced to deplete her financial reserves, she went into debt for the first time in her life. Twelve years later, Flash is still paying for groceries purchased on her credit card.
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“I saw the slippery slope happen personally,” said Flash. As a Black, genderfluid, lesbian artist, she understands the necessity of code switching for survival. Fortunately, a friend’s father represented her pro bono, and the judge dismissed the case and expunged it from her record as though the nightmare never took place.
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“African Americans have been wrongly arrested for as long as I can remember,” Flash said. Now 61, Flash has been on the front lines of activism since the 1980s, when she came to prominence as a member of ACT UP, appearing in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster campaign. Around that time, she also developed her signature cross-color photography style to challenge stereotypes about race, gender, and sexuality in a life-or-death fight against the U.S. government during the AIDS epidemic.
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Thirty years later, Flash is ready for battle once again with “syzygy, the vision,” an ongoing self-portrait series where the artist transforms herself into a representation of every Black person subjected to the horrors of racism, sexism, and homophobia. The series takes its name from an astronomical term for where the sun, earth, moon, and/or planets align to create an eclipse. Flash adopts this straight-line configuration to contemplate the pasts, presents, and futures of Black people across time and space.
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