1. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to speak of a spectrum of visible and invisible color.
2. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to reveal the limitations of a black and white binary.
3. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to recognize the complexities of identity.
4. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to speak of luminosity.
5. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to see light through rain.
6. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to speak of refraction.
7. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to speak of waves and wakes.
8. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to say black is beautiful.
9. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to know black joy.
10. To say that blackness is a rainbow is to see blackness in the sun.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary textile theory. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth.

Her current project The School of the Dead, is a program for the decolonization of death and grief through the radical inquiry of aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead. Exhibitions include Southern Exposure, Bellevue Arts Museum, Exit Art, Ampersand International Arts, and the Oakland Museum of California. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum and has been featured in the Journal of Cloth and Culture, In The Make: Studio Visits with Artists, and the recent publication Fray: Textile Art and Politics by Julia Bryan Wilson. She leads workshops and lectures nationally.