Through visual art and sound, Spirit in the Dark Body explores black queer spiritualities in their various forms in order to reflect that something beyond the physical– whether it be community, ritual, care, love, or something else– that moves in/with/through black queer bodies. “Dark body” symbolizes the mystery, refusals, obscurations, layers of fabulosity, liminality, and becoming of blackness, queerness, and spirituality. Where queer spirituality has at times been considered insignificant or even non-existent—immaterial—this presentation reclaims immateriality (the nonmaterial world) through the material bodies that hold it for collective liberation. This sensorium invites engagement with the people, the stories, the embodied experiences, the illegibilities, and the aliveness of black queer people– well-known and everyday, historical (namely, Marsha P. Johnson, James Baldwin, and Pauli Murray) and contemporary.
When black queer sacred stories are told, often, the focus is on trauma, rejection, disconnection, or even conformity. This presentation focuses instead on the power and persistence of black queer spirit. It does not argue for or against religion and theism, or present them as inherent goods– as the featured figures from the past and present engage spirituality in a variety of ways, including irreligion and atheism– but shows the ways that black queer people subvert what is deemed sacred to find connection toward the liberation of themselves and their communities. This presentation connects the present to the past through foregrounding black queer ancestors who have engaged the sacred in liberatory ways, while providing space to imagine even more liberatory black queer futures.
Participant Bios
El/yse Ambrose, PhD (they/them) is a scholar-artist whose research, art, and teaching lie at the intersections of blackness, sexuality, gender, and spiritualities/the religious/the sacred. Ambrose is most recently the recipient of the 2025 Black August Arts Residency (Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada). Their ongoing photo-sonic series is entitled “Spirit in the Dark Body: Black Queer Expressions of the Im/material” (2019- present) and opened at the L Street Fine Arts Gallery (San Diego, CA, AAR Conference). Ambrose’s work has also been shown in Queens and Rochester, NY; Florianópolis, Santa Caterina, Brasil; São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil; and San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles, CA. They serve as Associate Professor of Black Study and the Study of Religion at the University of California, Riverside. Ambrose is the author of A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (2024) and founder of the Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab (est. 2024). Ambrose is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana and resides in southern California.
Jessica Susan Oler is a visual artist, writer, and poet. She holds a Master of Fine Arts. She is currently earning her PhD in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her work is grounded in illness narrative and transgressive Black feminist thought. Oler utilizes photography, installation, photographic collage, painting, the moving image, and auto-ethnographic writing to grapple with the complexities of living with a chronic illness. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her mid-twenties. Her creative work “Impairments in Proprioception/Stillness in Motion” is published in Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, Special Issue: “Healing is an Act of Communion”: Critical Perspectives on Women’s Health, Wellness, and Disease Literary. In 2021 Oler was invited to Harvard School of Medicine to develop and present her patient narrative for The Healing Power of Stories: Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice. She has also worked with the National MS Society, Momentum Magazine, and has done collaborative projects with Elizabeth Jameson. In 2023 her creative work “Untitled Installation” and “Explorations in Bark” were featured in Dr. Maggie-Rose Condit-Summerson’s Dissertation: Glitching Reproductive Injustice.
Her work has been shown at California College of the Arts, Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts and History; Chautauqua, Rochester, and Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; Lawrenceville and Atlanta, Georgia; Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia.
Spirit in the Dark Body: Black Queer Expressions of the Im/material is organized by El/yse Ambrose as part of the 2026 Circa: Queer Histories Festival, presented by One Institute.
OXY ARTS is a vital public space bringing together the Occidental College community, the Northeast Los Angeles community, and local and regional artists in socially conscious dialogue and engagement. We seek to share, connect and hold space for ideas and curiosity.