Nicole Miller’s New Film Compares African American Resilience to the Bodily Fortitude of Astronauts
By Zoé Samudzi
“A rat done bit my sister Nell with whitey on the moon,” poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron begins his disdainful 1970 spoken word track about the moon landing. “The man just upped my rent last night cause whitey’s on the moon,” he continues, contrasting the resources and enthusiasm invested into space travel against the plight of still grossly underdeveloped black America. Scott-Heron’s focus on inequality precluded any opportunity for him to be dazzled by our species’ potential in outer space. But some Afrofuturist mythoi have imagined space as a retreat from earthly troubles and hostilities. Nicole Miller’s new film To the Stars (2019) evokes this aesthetic tradition. The artist places the black child—a figure that is never privileged with innocence in its youth—at the epicenter of her considerations of hope, futurity, and the cosmos.
Miller told me over the phone that her goal in creating this work was to speak to more museumgoers like the young people in the film, which was commissioned for SFMOMA’s Stage and Screen program that offers opportunities for school groups to visit special exhibitions in the museum. She said that creating the film offered her and her audience an insight into the challenges currently facing youth in San Francisco, the audience of that program. Her focus on the interiority of young people in To the Stars echoes her 2016 video Athens, California, which likewise edits personal interviews to create a narrative about representation. In her new film, students of color describe tremendous anxieties around racism, self-doubt, the police, and household economics to the camera. Resilience does not come up in To the Stars simply as a way to speculate on what the human body can handle in extreme conditions; it is also a lived necessity for these children. The ability to withstand space travel is juxtaposed with black children’s far less romanticized capacity to endure racism: the former demonstrates our species’ evolutionary advantage, while the latter is a grim reminder of how black people have endured white supremacy for centuries and that black children are not spared. Miller’s is a treatment of resilience that is aspirational and cautionary in equal measure.