An Evening with Queen White (2017) is a mixed-media installation by Martine Syms (1988, Los Angeles, CA) that includes, 99 Subtle Maneuvers (2018), a new large-scale wallpaper work designed specifically for moCa, and a four-channel video displayed across three monitors and a projection screen. In this installation, Syms casts actress Fay Victor in the role of Queen White, a protagonist modeled after Syms’ great-aunt, godmother, and the famed Motown Records etiquette coach and director of ‘personal development’ Maxine Powell (1915-2013). For multiple generations of Motown, many African American, Powell was a guiding force, shaping the personas and styles of countless performers. Filmed in a single long take, using a centrally located 360-degree camera rig, Fay moves freely throughout a set modeled after a 1960s Motown recording studio. She is continuously captured by the camera, making the four-channel video an environmental experience.

An Evening with Queen White exemplifies Syms’s use of the monologue as a medium for exploring how voice, gesture, and persona are learned and performed. As the script complicates the artist’s own biography, it highlights how strategies of “performing oneself” as an African-American woman in America are transmitted and crystallized across generations through both familial teaching and societal conditioning. Similarly, 99 Subtle Maneuvers (2018) includes a list of written personal instructions interrupted by large archival photographs of the artist and her family, and new photographs printed over found movie posters, emphasizing the dialogue between personal and collective negotiations of identity.