Enter the Mystery

This essay and visual dossier outline a metaphysical approach to studying, experiencing, and interpreting the spiritual dimensions of black visual culture. Prompted by Howard Thurman's writing on spiritual principles and practices, the black esoteric tradition, and a lesser-known passage by Frantz Fanon, this project reclaims the “metaphysical” as a way of entering black visual culture's often mysterious and transcendent qualities. Claiming the metaphysical as a “living methodology,” it samples hip-hop and jazz album covers that dance between the exoteric (legible, surface) and esoteric (intuitive, unquantifiable) dimensions of black artmaking. An intergenerational archive that includes Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-tang (36 Chambers) alongside covers from Pharoah Sanders and Kamasi Washington, these images visualize complex ideas about bodies, the universe, and consciousness. Tracing these images’ vast influence across black creative life, this essay considers the formal resonances between the album covers and two works of contemporary black experimental filmmaking: Arthur Jafa's immersive projection film AGHDRA (2021) and Washington's film collaboration with the Ummah Chroma, As Told to G/D Thyself (2019).