‘I have to be the role model that I wish I had’: In ‘Mirror, Mirror,’ multidisciplinary artist Indë reclaims space for their identity

Indë Francis, an “artivist” known professionally as Indë, once felt isolated as a queer Black person growing up in western Massachusetts. Now, they’re reclaiming space for their identity with a new art installation that celebrates queer Black role models.

The multidisciplinary art installation “Mirror, Mirror” is at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton through Friday, Aug. 8.

Indë was born and raised in the Pioneer Valley, which they described as “an incredibly isolating experience” due to a lack of people who looked like them. Their dad is British Caribbean, which meant he wasn’t able to pass on knowledge of Black American culture in a way that Indë and their brothers needed, meaning that “even at home, there was a lack of a sense of cultural identity,” they said.

Indë went to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Berklee in Boston for their undergraduate degree, and decided to return to Northampton after they graduated in 2022.

“I was nervous to come back because I didn't feel a sense of belonging or community here,” they said. “But I decided that if I was going to come back, then I have to make that community for myself, and I have to be the role model that I wish I had.”

So much of “Mirror, Mirror” is about role models, in fact, from the artwork (which pays tribute to Black activists like Marlon Riggs and Malcolm X) to the debut of a music video for the song “Come On Home” from their new album – whose name fittingly, is “Role Model.” (It’ll premiere at the opening reception on Friday, July 25.)

One of the featured works is based on one of Indë’s favorite paintings, Gustav Klimt’s “The Three Ages of Woman.” In Klimt’s version are three nude figures: an old woman, whose hair obscures her face; a mother; and her child, held in her mother’s arms.

In Indë’s version, the three figures are Marsha P. Johnson, the celebrated Black LGBT activist and organizer affiliated with the Stonewall Uprising. The child represents her “motherhood” of other LGBTQ activists; the child is both the next generation of Black activists and Johnson herself. The old woman is a skeleton, representing Johnson’s untimely death at the age of 46.

“I was thinking about the way that we memorialize people and how sad it makes me, in this day and age, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement, how the imagery that we have of our martyrs is all, like, Instagram selfies, and how they deserve so much more than the same photo repainted, essentially, by people who want to pay tribute,” Indë said, “so I really wanted to have an impactful image that really did her story justice.”

The show takes its name, “Mirror, Mirror,” not only from Indë’s use of black mirrors as canvases, but also from the “Snow White” story – namely, the Evil Queen’s question, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”

Indë has a song called “Snow White,” which is about their experiences with gender envy and feeling devalued, especially about their voice. As a child, they had a “really beautiful soprano Snow White-esque voice,” which later changed; as an a cappella vocalist in high school and college, their role as a bass voice was often less central than others’.

“I was holding it down, but I wasn't being seen for the artist that I am and the vocalist that I am, because I was just going ‘doom-doom-doom-doom,’” they said. The song then, is about “wanting to be seen as desirable or valuable or magical, almost, as the white girl who sings and gathers the birds.”

In “Mirror, Mirror,” Indë will also be spotlighting a form of music notation they created called the “color harmony system,” which they said is “a way of translating colors into chords and chords into colors so that people can form a greater relationship between visual art and musical input.”

“I'm there to present the work and to educate about my topics of expertise,” they said. “But besides that, I'm just happy to have the visibility of being on Main Street and to catch people's eyes and to have a greater population of queer and Black and Brown folks coming through and seeing the work through the window and being like, ‘Whoa, I've never seen something like that in Northampton.’”

A.P.E. Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and Friday from 12 to 8 p.m. For more information, visit artbyinde.com/mirror.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].