![]() I first encountered her work on a recent visit to the New Museum, where her work currently appears in the show “RAGGA NYC: All the Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another.” Christopher Udemezue, also known as Neon Christina, formed the artist collective Ragga NYC in 2015. The artist Renée Stout has made work inspired by hoodoo for more than three decades. Rootworkers, who use roots, herbs, and other organic materials to conjure spirits, have occupied a paradoxical place in black culture for centuries, as Zora Neale Hurston observed in her 1935 book “ Mules and Men,” an ethnography conducted in Florida and New Orleans, in which she accumulated a raucously vivid litany of reports revealing how hoodoo practitioners were publicly disdained for the regression they seemed to represent and privately revered for their power. These women were likely practitioners of hoodoo, sometimes called rootwork, a set of black folk traditions developed by enslaved West African people in America, which combined elements of vodou and Yoruba with Christianity. ![]() Stout’s “The Rootworker’s Table” explores the paradoxical place that women who practice divination have long held in black culture. ![]()
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