Essex Hemphill and the Washington, DC That Was

Essex Hemphill visited London for the first time in 1986. At that time, the poet was already a fixture in the Washington, DC gay community. The comparatively sleepy US capital was part of an archipelago of cities along the American East Coast where gay men could connect at underground clubs and bookstores, debate in impromptu row-house salons or cruise at parks such as Meridian Hill, not far from DC’s Dupont Circle. Hemphill was there for it all; performing around town and working with other young artists.

Still, London was a revelation. Hemphill wrote to his friend, the activist Joseph Beam, of that other capital’s bustling cosmopolitanism, its scale and of how it helped him to learn about his role and identity: ‘I belong to the world and not any one movement.’ While there, he sat for a series of evocative portraits in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Brixton studio, and would go on to record a verse for British film-maker Isaac Julien’s 1989 documentary-drama Looking for Langston (the two having met earlier that year at a conference in Los Angeles). While Hemphill had intentions of staying in London for a year, maybe two, he returned prematurely, keeping the dialogue with Julien open from afar. In 1988, he recorded for Julien from Washington DC, along with collaborator Wayson R. Jones. In 1996, a year after Hemphill’s death in Philadelphia from AIDS-related complications, Julien reworked the out-takes from these sessions. In the resultant short film, Portrait in Blue: Essex Hemphill – on display now at The Phillips Collection’s trenchant exhibition ‘Essex Hemphill: Take Care of Your Blessings’ – Hemphill reads extracts from his own and Langston Hughes’s poetry, his voice like a radio play, his between-cuts banter full of mirth.

To see Portrait in Blue is to catch a glimpse of why Hemphill was such an effective connector of people. In those pre-internet days, all life – but especially a countercultural life – had to be lived in the real world. Networks were built by people meeting in the flesh, or ferrying chapbooks, vinyl or videotapes from place to place. For instance, an actual cassette of Looking for Langston was first delivered to Hemphill by none other than the filmmaker Marlon Riggs (to whose 1989 film, Tongues Untied, Hemphill also contributed). Similarly, Hemphill appears frequently in photographer Lyle Ashton Harris’s series of candid colour snapshots forming the ‘Ektachrome Archive’ (2017–18). In one such image, dating from 1991, he reclines mid-conversation, clad all in white and haloed in pink, a cigarette held between loosely curled fingers. The impact of Hemphill’s writing is manifested in the recent volume of selected poems, Love is a Dangerous Word (2025) – as discussed in Danez Smith’s beautiful column in the pages of frieze’s May 2025 issue. Meanwhile, Harris’s photographs document a Black queer creative intelligentsia that thrived in the wake of, and in spite of, the HIV epidemic; in no small measure because the people in his photographs travelled, corresponded and gave their energy to conferences and performances. They built a scene.

The show at The Phillips Collection recrates elements of that scene. One of Glenn Ligon’s glimmering reworkings of pictures from the 1995 Million Man March hangs near several moody Harris c-type prints in red (The Watering Hole III, IV, VII, 1996); Julien is there, but so are less-lionised figures such as Joyce Wellman – with her whorls of oil stick in black and blue – and Sharon Farmer, whose 1980s-era photographs of Black life in DC were paired with Hemphill’s poetry in the 1988 project ‘Dear Muthafuckin Dreams’ (performed at New York’s Franklin Furnace, among other venues). One of Farmer’s images shows scores of hands outstretched in the air at the Takoma Park Festival (1982–89), dedicated to lesbian artists and musicians; another captures a silhouetted figure walking along a balustrade, the faceted prow of the Washington Monument looming improbably in the distance.

Taken together, these works map points – circuits of contact – in which Hemphill was a vital current. They also hark back to a lost time when DC (then known as ‘Chocolate City’) was more working class; when people could afford to take creative risks and had the will and space to do so. The city was an important locus in the club cultures of the late twentieth century, and also contributed home-grown genres – like the boisterous offshoot of funk called ‘go-go’ and a politically raw form of hardcore punk galvanized by Dischord Records in the 1980s. While bureaucrats toiled downtown, distinct but allied subcultures, organized around church basements and seedy upstairs dives, shared the billing at the legendary d.c. space at 7th and E streets – around the corner from the National Mall, and now the site of a Starbucks.

In many ways, this is a now-familiar churn; of wealth finding its way into new pockets of elegant, old bricks-and-mortar. That cycle accelerated in earnest during the Clinton years. Back then, Dupont was still a gay mecca, bad little kiddies danced at warehouses on the banks of the Potomac, and a middle-class family could still afford a row house. But not for long. New stadia, new condos, new gut-renovation projects have ceaselessly transformed the city over the past 25 years. That’s not to say that there is no longer great art or great music in Washington DC, just that one has to pay much more to see it. Small non-profits, such as Hamiltonian Artists, persist, as do excellent one-off exhibitions at the Smithsonian; but ‘culture’ here is largely the province of bigger venues, with a bearing toward touristic spectacle (as in the brutalist Hirshhorn Museum, or the majestic grounds of Glenstone) or polite preservationism.

One piece from ‘Take Care of Your Blessings’ expresses it neatly: Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Brass Rail (After Essex) (2017). This wall-mounted fragment of tubular staircase railing, angled like a Dan Flavin or Constantin Brâncuși, suggests an upward passage. For McClodden, Brass Rail is a small monument to the (in Hemphill’s estimation) ‘raunchy Black gay club’ of the same name, which served as a DC haven from 1967 to 1996. It is poignant that the rail is now installed in the old Duncan Phillips mansion off embassy row in Dupont: an early bastion of modernism in a tony precinct, the collection, too, could have drifted into dusty complacency. Instead, in this exhibition, embers of an earlier spirit still burn. And just a floor below are the many painted panels of Jacob Lawrence’s depiction of millions of Black Americans migrating from South to North from just a generation prior.

The country changes, the city changes, museums change, but a hopeful impulse remains. As the exhibition’s curator Camille Brown wrote to me: ‘Essex is not new to any of the younger artists included, each has created multiple works inspired or drawn from his writings. The ideas Hemphill explored around love, sex, loss, politics, grief and death are always relevant and have been deeply generative for artists across disciplines.’ A missive from the past then – it was never easy.

‘Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings’ is on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, until 31 August

_{Main image: Lyle Ashton Harris, Essex Hemphill, LA Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 1992, chromogenic print, 2025. Courtesy: © Lyle Ashton Harris}