Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia

  • Xaviera Simmons
Xaviera Simmons, Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia (detail), 2021. Courtesy the artist.
Xaviera Simmons, Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia, 2021. Installation view at Desert X, Palm Springs, California. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Lance Gerber.
Xaviera Simmons, Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia, 2021. Installation view at Desert X, Palm Springs, California. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Lance Gerber.

Cruiser motorcycles; an unattributed family portrait (ca. 1850); Marsha P. Johnson; dirt bikes; Ambrose Andrews’ The Children of Nathan Starr (1835); Malcolm X; bunches of palm fronds; James Baldwin; baskets from varied African basket-weaving traditions; Ida B. Wells. 

Xaviera Simmons’ image series Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia forms a patchwork of Black resistance and resurgence. With images that signify white antebellum wealth (parlour rooms, fancy dress, and expansive vistas) set alongside polemical, factual, and wry statements reflecting on slavery, settler colonialism, reparations, and systemic racism, Simmons’ work traces the centuries-old unpayable debts that underpin American life.

Like the handheld mirrors raised aloft in The Children of Nathan Starr1, Simmons’ work refracts the many dynamics of race, gender, class, and power that suffuse cultural contexts throughout North America. Installed on monumental billboards in Cahuilla Territory, Palm Springs, California for Desert X 2021, Because You Know […] sites racial and colonial reckoning in the car-centric desert landscapes of the southwest. In a region deeply shaped by automobility, tourism, nuclear testing, militarism, water scarcity, tribal sovereignty, and the securitization of the US-Mexico border, Simmons’ images call attention to interrelated and intergenerational politics. They stop traffic: the steady flow of American capitalism becomes intractable amid all-caps demands for representation and repair.


Xaviera Simmons’ (New York, 1974) work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture, and installation. She defines her studio practice—rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, and present and future histories specifically shifting notions surrounding landscape—as cyclical rather than linear. She is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes; she may dedicate part of a year to photography, another part to performance, and other parts to installation, video, and sound works, keeping her practice in constant and consistent rotation, shift, and engagement.

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