Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, aka Isis tha Saviour, can reference a book or a trove of research for nearly every story she tells. Equal parts historian, scholar, student, and multidisciplinary artist, she has made waves with her work that spans hip-hop in the Brooklyn Museum to groundbreaking discoveries surrounding Philadelphia public figures. Informed by her lived experience with the carceral state — from the criminal legal system to so-called treatment facilities — Baxter finds beauty in transmuting trauma through her practice. On a rainy Friday in Brooklyn, we sat down with Baxter as she explored histories of Black refusal, adultification bias, and systems of care in our society.
on her morning routine
I usually get up and take a shower. Do a little meditation and Qigong, which are a series of movements to clear up energy and open and balance chakras. It comes from traditional Chinese medicine. Then I'll eat some breakfast, usually fruit and some steel-cut oats. I'm in my 40s, so I gotta take care of my body. I usually do some admin stuff then go to class. I’ll work in my studio if I have time to do that. But every day is kind of different.
on being born an artist
From a very young age, I embraced imagining new worlds. My first memories are of me being creative. I used to live in a three-story house with two aunts and two cousins, and I would always get into their stuff. I got one of my cousin’s food stamps, glued them up, and created this crazy collage. It was also a survival mechanism while growing up in the 80s, which was a very tumultuous time for the Black community in inner-city Philadelphia. It was the hip-hop era, so I would write lyrics and poems at a very young age. Art was my way to escape and ultimately reimagine my conditions.
In the sixth grade, my art teacher entered one of my works into this citywide contest at John Wanamaker, now known as the Wanamaker Building across from City Hall in Philadelphia, which housed Macy’s. I won and my art was featured in a window display at the department store. I got a glimpse of my talent, but that was as far as it went, because less than two years later, I became a ward of the court, thrust into congregate care, residential treatment facilities, partial hospitalization, and group homes.
““I’m an artist. I don’t want to be a ‘Black artist.’ People have that debate, like why can’t I just be an artist? But we all show up with our unique experiences and social locations. For me, it’s always important to connect that experience when you’re trying to answer questions in the work about the world. I don’t think you can separate the two.””
on pathologizing spaces for Black children
I went to Carson Valley School — which destroyed a lot of children — at 13. It was after a confluence of events. I lost my primary caretaker — my grandmother’s aunt — and I was a victim of adultification bias in my family and at school. At one point, my math teacher even pulled some strings at the DA’s office and I ended up in court for “terroristic looks” in class. I was not getting the level of care that I needed and deserved, so I started acting out. (All the while my grades were great). Eventually, I was misdiagnosed with all of these different disorders. My mother had schizophrenia and, throughout my life, there was this pathologizing of my mother's mental illness onto me. (This came to a climax at 19 when my mother's doctor actually diagnosed me with schizophrenia).
Carson Valley was supposed to be a progressive school for an earlier demographic of poor, orphaned white girls. The idea was to raise them up and give them skills to be successful in life, specifically in the music and arts. They didn’t expect Black girls. But in 1967 — ironically four years after the Birmingham bombing that killed four little girls — they admitted four young Black girls. They had to be between the ages of six and eight because African American children are looked at as a threat. In the early 80s, there was an influx of Black children and an increase in the rate of white children being adopted. Immediately, they stopped giving the children automatic access to the outside neighborhoods and pathologized the school, turning it into a hospital. This correlates with the crack epidemic. By ‘86, it’s 80% Black, and all the promise of progressiveness stops.
I went to Penn State at 17. No mentorship just dropped off with a trash bag. How successful could I be? So eventually I dropped out and a few years later, in 2007, I was incarcerated. I got out in July 2008. I view being a ward of the court and entering the system at age 12 and Carson Valley at 13 as an earlier incarceration. I feel like unfreedom and social control have always been a part of my life, and it will probably never leave my practice. I can see carcerality in so many areas of society. Through my own due diligence and personal scholarship, I'm expanding on some of these concepts — or what I believe to be true about their reality — and connecting them with larger historical frameworks, like Black fugitivity or Black refusal. In my visual art practice, I’m drawing on Black radical traditions while learning the importance of abstraction, holding some things back. Not as a means of deception, but as a means of protection.
““My in-depth research and role as a historian comes out of the necessity of understanding my condition, right? On a collective and cultural level, being a part of Black and Indigenous communities, you have to know this history to frame what is going on now. Things don’t happen in isolation. For me, it’s definitely a means of survival: to understand, so we can avoid some of these things that don’t bring us forward.””
on coming back to visual art
When I graduated high school, I got accepted to Penn State. I really wanted to major in art, but they required a portfolio and I didn't have that. I dropped out, but I was still expressing myself through poetry and hip-hop. The winter of 2011 was when I got my first real tax return from a job, and I invested in music equipment and set up a home studio in my bedroom. Actually, the first part of Ain’t I A Woman is a song that I wrote in 2011 called “Anxiety” that I tweaked a little, and it became a part of that award-winning musical documentary.
From 2010 to 2017, a lot of my energy was into making music. I thought I was going to be a hip-hop artist. The turning point came with George Floyd. Philadelphia has a huge issue around gun violence. My mom's brother and my cousin were both killed by gun violence, and I wanted to create wearable protests around the issue. I wanted to use text on shirts and sweatshirts, and initially, I thought they would say “Stop Killing Black People.” But I wanted to raise the vibration, so I started a wearable campaign called “Start Loving Black People.” I revamped it for George Floyd. I made a triptych and series of murals that looked at the mental weight that comes along with racial violence. I also knew we were approaching a point where Black lives mattering was turning into Black lives marketing. But all of that was me getting back into a visual practice.
on uncovering histories of violence
In the Spring of 2021, I was working at Mural Arts as the office manager. At that time, there was an onslaught of press shedding light on Philadelphia's history of subjugating Black bodies, both in the medical and art world. The first announced that the University of Pennsylvania would be repatriating skulls of Black Philadelphians from the Morton Collection, which is a collection of more than 4000 skulls that were unethically amassed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morton, who was trying to prove scientific racism. The second announced that there was this open secret at the University’s museum that they had the bones of the victims from the MOVE bombing. In 1985, Philadelphia police and the political leadership decided it was a good idea to drop a bomb in the middle of West Philadelphia, in a residential, Black community, to target a Black liberation group called MOVE. More than 60 homes burned to the ground, 11 people were killed, five of them children. (As a kid, I remember they played the fire burning on the TV — because it was an act of terror, but also intimidation). After the bombing, they had sent some of the remains to UPenn’s museum so that the anthropologists could help identify some of the remains; but they just kept some and had been using them as a teaching device between UPenn and Princeton for decades.
At the time, I'm at my desk like, what the fuck is going on? This can’t get any worse. I guess I had a crisis of consciousness. Mural Arts is based in the Thomas Eakins House — Eakins is a well-known painter, he’s super venerated and embedded everywhere in Philly. These announcements really made me question my reality, so I googled “Thomas Eakins racist.” When I googled, I found a reference to the racism behind his photograph “an African American Girl nude, reclining on couch.” So I googled that and discovered Saidiya Hartman’s article “An Unnamed Girl, A Speculative History,” which was an excerpt from her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The article listed the owner of the photograph as the Pennslyvania Academy of Fine Arts, and I ultimately found the photo in their archives. In my research, I discovered that Thomas Eakins was a serial sexual predator, which was erased from historical memory.
““To quote from the psychological profile of me: ‘Mary should continue in her current residential and partial hospital program, which provides a full range of individual group and adjunctive therapies, in order to facilitate her transfer to a group home setting, which will be a less intensive level of care.’ That’s what colonialism is. It’s all under the guise of care. The people that historically and currently run these systems don’t know how to care.””
on reimagining trauma through art
I remember looking at the Thomas Eakins photographs for a few months and trying to figure out what I could do to respond that didn’t perpetuate the violence and that also supported my healing. Because I see myself in the girl, she is an extension of or proxy for my experience surviving childhood sexual abuse. So it was critical to reimagine those moments as safe and protected. The historian and scholar in me was like, how can I connect this with other points in history like Samuel Morton and academia trying to scientifically justify Black subjugation? So, I reimagined these sexually explicit portraits to attempt to reckon with archives of violence. I was able to distance myself from incarceration with this work somewhat, but the tentacles of carcerality are so vast that I got brought right back to adultification bias and hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black children. I can’t escape it, because it’s all interconnected.
on inspiration
I'm definitely inspired by my peers. I love Tameca Cole’s work. Russell Craig, Jesse Krimes, Jared Owens — all the folks I’ve come up with. Barbara Chase-Riboud. She is a phenomenal sculptor, but she also wrote the bestselling Sally Hemings novel. And she’s from Philly! My sister, CC Paschal, is also one of my favorite artists. I found her through 23andMe. She found our dad three months before I did. She works in audio narrative. She won a Peabody for an episode of a podcast she produced with Gimlet Media called Uncivil, about undocumented stories of African Americans who helped win the Civil War. We collaborated on Louder Than A Riot, a podcast episode from NPR about the rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration and their parallels.
And art-world-wise, definitely Mickalene Thomas, Xaviera Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Titus Kaphar, Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, Faith Ringgold. One of the things I love most about Faith Ringgold’s art and practice is that she’s making visible what often gets ignored, like instances of horrific racial violence that went largely under reported by mainstream media. For instance, her iconic painting “For The Women’s House”, made in collaboration with women incarcerated on Rikers Island. What is often obscured is her fight to get the painting out of Rikers, because it no longer served its original purpose. I made a documentary about this in collaboration with Faith and Aubin Pictures. That painting is worth like $12 million, maybe more since her passing. And the people, mainly incarcerated women, who were part of that knowledge production, who helped create that work, aren’t getting any of those life-changing resources. It belongs to the Department of Corrections. The women inside didn’t even get a chance to interact with the art for decades. Rikers sent me a similar contract, then stalled on the project for over a year. Thinking about it is a little triggering. I turned down a lot of opportunities to pursue the project. It felt like purgatory most days. In the end, it didn’t make sense to put myself and the participants through the same shit again. I’m not trying to enrich a system that consistently dehumanizes people. They just want to make violence look pretty. But I'm confident that everything happens for a reason and am glad that the participants were eventually able to work with a different artist to produce a meaningful work of art despite unlivable conditions.
I take inspiration from my community. A lot of my work is either autobiographical or biographical. I'm always pulling inspiration from the media. A couple of days ago, this guy in Chicago was shot 90 or so times within 41 seconds because of a seatbelt violation. And what’s going on in the country right now — nationalism, genocide. It’s so much.
““It’s the refusal to be conquered. Like, get the fuck out of here. Evil is so boring. I think Toni Morrison speaks to that, like that shit is getting tired. Good is so vast and beautiful. The beauty for me is in transmuting the trauma — taking something that was meant to destroy me and making it into something that actually serves me and can propel me forward. It gives me a deeper perspective. If these things didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have been motivated to learn why. And art for me has been a place to learn why. And it gives us distance to process and allows us to inevitably heal.””
on “care” and racial capitalism
I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of my own story. I'm looking at these root causes of incarceration and what healing and liberation could look like through art practice. I’m bringing my practice back to my childhood, digging into the way that Blackness and genius get criminalized and pathologized. And our trash care economies. What happened to me in school and prison was all about care. Care is the highest stage of capitalism. Look at slavery. What did white people really want? They wanted care, and they were willing to extract it by any means necessary. Prisons are about “rehabilitation.” There’s something insidious about care and the way it’s being monetized. Through my research, I’ve found that the levels of extraction that they're getting off our bodies now through these systems of “care” are way more than they ever got during enslavement.
A lot of my work right now is focused on critiquing first and second-wave feminism. In order to get white women — and no one else — the right to vote, Black women took care of their children. You see this, like in Manhattan and Brooklyn now you’ll see a Black lady pushing a white child in a stroller. But then there’s a simultaneous narrative that Black women don't care about their own kids, right? But you want us to be the primary caretaker for your kids.
on the art world’s colonialism
It’s Game of Thrones out here. I don’t have any desire to enter the market. I survive through grants, and that’s what prompted me to go back to school to teach. I've never sold a piece of art, ever, because I haven't reconciled the lineage that I come out of, where we were a commodity. Think about museums. Dr. Nicole Fleetwood talks about it in Marking Time a lot. Prisons and museums were erected at the same time, and they are in conversation with each other. One is the place you go to when you're not adhering to social norms; the other perpetuates social norms and what culture is acceptable. A museum is a place where we’ve put the conquered people's social, cultural, and spiritual treasures. And we’re still not giving them back! Museums are just a very violent space, entrenched in and an extension of colonialism.
on what she’s reading
You gotta find a study group because it’s thick, like 800 pages, but Black Reconstruction is a must-read to understand the economy and this crisis of workers and the extraction loop that we're in. How are we giving all of these billions for wars and we can’t even get universal healthcare? Also, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. And The Black Holocaust by Del Jones, that was definitely a game-changer. It covers all of these instances of racial violence from slavery through Jim Crow. You know, when there were mass lynchings where people showed up and had lunch. And Faith Ringgold’s American People.
on her beauty routine
I gotta have some good shea butter around. I love cocoa butter as well. I try to find and use only all-natural products. And they're usually by local and community retailers. Usually the places where I get my hair done, they'll have their friends' products so I'll grab some of those. I also like the Cococare cocoa butter stick and Kuza shea butter. I just use water on my face. I love Dr. Bronner's Castile soap. I usually get the unscented version. I don't really have to worry about hair too much. I just twist it because I have locs now. I tend to not wear makeup. I’ll only wear it if I'm going to a gala or somewhere fancy like an artist talk.
mary’s favorite spots in new york city
I like Aunts and Uncles, it’s vegetarian/vegan. It’s in Brooklyn. And Planta in Williamsburg, they’ve got one of the best veggie burgers ever — homemade, not that Beyond or whatever. I like the hair salon right around the corner, Locs of Nu.
I can often be found at a museum, a gallery, or a show. I just went to the Guggenheim to see Going Dark. It was fire. It was an exhibition about hyper surveillance, hyper-visibility, and how that affects Black people. One of my favorite pieces in the show was David Hammons’ In the Hood. He’s one of my favorite artists. He doesn’t go to his shows, he’s not interested in the market. He made this in ‘93, before Trayvon, using found objects. It defies time and space. It’s such a testament to his ability to translate found objects into potent images that jog our collective memory around notions of anti-Blackness and assumed criminality. The hoodie has continued to be this symbol of and justification for the hyper-surveillance of Black bodies, despite its deadly costs. He makes legible the insecurity of Black life and the desperate need to obscure Black bodies for the sake of their own survival. I love that piece.
I’m taking a class on Black Reconstruction at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. And I’m taking a course on sculpture at Hunter College. I’m learning how to cast with wax and plaster. I most recently made these handcuffs and I'm assembling them into the gender sign, looking at the ways that women themselves uphold, perpetuate, and internalize patriarchy and misogynoir.
images by clémence polès, interview by abigail glasgow, edited by meghan racklin