Honey Pot Performance + Siobhan McKissic (2025)
Image: (left) A portrait of Honey Pot Performance team members Meida Teresa McNeal and Kimeco Roberson standing side by side. Kimeco is smiling while wearing jeans and a emerald green top, and Meida is smiling with her hand on her hip while wearing brown trousers and an orange top. Photo by Tonal Simmons. (right) A portrait of archivist Siobhan McKissic, who stands with her hands behind her back while smiling at the camera. She wears a bright-colored top and jeans. Photo by Tonal Simmons.
ARCHIVE:
Honey Pot Performance
Honey Pot Performance is a creative collaborative chronicling Afro-feminist and Black diasporic subjectivities amidst the pressures of contemporary global life
Honey Pot Performance enlists modes of creative expressivity to examine the nuances of human relationships including the ways we negotiate identity, belonging and difference in our lives and cultural memberships. Dismantling the vestiges of oppressive social relationships is part of the work. Through critical performance, public humanities programming, and deep community engagement, we emphasize everyday ways of valuing the human.
Following in the footsteps of cultural workers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Beryl McBurnie, Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham, Honey Pot Performance forefronts African diasporic performance traditions. We draw upon a central notion found in performance studies, black feminist discourse and sociology: non-Western, everyday popular and/or folk forms of cultural performance are valuable sites of knowledge production and cultural capital for subjectivities that often exist outside of mainstream communities.
Artist/Archivist:
Siobhan McKissic
Siobhan McKissic (they/she) is an artist, independent archivist, and performer born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. Their library and archives work foregrounds the histories of Black people, the importance of non-textual resources in the research process, and considers how a shift away from Western-centric ideas of information literacy can create more engaging learning experiences for students, instructors, and the public. While at the University of Illinois, they were the Archivist at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library before becoming the Visiting Design & Materials Research Librarian, where they were the inaugural curator of the Ricker Materials Collection, a haptic library of architectural and design samples.
Their artwork focuses on sites of excavation related to the Black disabled body, nature, built structures, ancestral knowledge retrieval, and power. Through collage, McKissic considers their own mediated relationship with nature – a relationship complicated by their family’s history of sharecropping and journey north during the Great Migration. By weaving texturally similar images of nature, skin, technology, and architecture, their work reflects the corresponding attempts by the body and the environment to heal from human-made stressors.