The fifth of a series of reading group podcasts on sculpture with Andrea Francke. In this episode we talk about the artist Barbara McCullough’s film, ‘Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes’ from 1981. The film takes the form of a series of interviews with Black American artists about their relationship to ritual. We focus on the sections with the sculptors David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar. We also look at an essay by gallerist Linda Goode-Bryant and art historian Marcy S. Philips called, ‘Contextures’ from 1978 that talks about the work of a related group of artists, including Hammons, Nengudi and Saar, who had shown at Goode-Bryant’s New York gallery, Just Above Midtown, in the mid 1970s.

You can get a link to the film and download PDFs of both texts at dekersaint.com/badvibesclub