The multivalent musician recently released her first album credited to ANOHNI and the Johnsons, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, earlier this year. In her role, she negotiates the influences on her personal and creative expression. Below, ANOHNI discusses her related interests.
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Millie Jackson
Image Credit: Photo David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive via Getty I first discovered Millie Jackson when I was 21. Jackson was known for being a singer who spoke her mind before it was considered socially acceptable. In the 1970s and ’80s, she pushed the envelope by talking to people in a way that both thrilled and delighted them. She is a kind of precursor to internet stars like Alexyss K Tylor, who has become known for the use of direct language in her music. But Jackson was also an incredibly soulful singer. I’ve learned so much from the way she deals with romantic tribulations in her music. When she’s singing, Jackson embodies a profound resilience and yet is so burdened with exhaustion.
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Thank God for Abortion
Image Credit: Photo Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty I’ve been trying to understand the shared space between transfemmes and femme women who have experienced a sense of otherness in their womanhood, those who have fought to create lives in opposition to a misogynist society. One example is Viva Ruíz, who started the group Thank God for Abortion nearly 10 years ago. She wasn’t afraid to call out the threat to fundamental reproductive rights. Like activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Ruíz has put her body on the line as one of the heroic people working on the front lines. Her work should not just be acknowledged but supported.
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Erika Yasuda
Image Credit: Courtesy Rebis Music Erika Yasuda was a photographer, actress, and part-time dominatrix in underground theater in Tokyo in the late 1970s, when she met intersex mathematician Yutaka—later Julia—Yasuda. Erika created a series of tableaus representing their relationship. She photographed Julia and underground actress Mako Midori, who served as a kind of stand-in for herself. The photos have this grainy timeless quality because of the way Erika printed her work. They are a representation of this world of feminine reverie where love prevails and is shared between two beings—a cisgender woman and an intersex person pushing toward feminine. Julia later published a book of the photos after Erika’s untimely passing, and distributed them among close friends. After Julia’s death, I inherited the photos as part of her estate. I recently exhibited them at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and I think that Erika’s work will be recognized as an important contribution to the photographic canon.
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Hibiscus
Image Credit: Photo Jack Mitchell via Getty The Cockettes, an avant-garde psychedelic theater group based in San Francisco in the early 1970s, was initially founded by New Yorker George E. Harris III, aka Hibiscus. He came out of the underground La MaMa theater family in the East Village, and brought with him an ecstatic, hallucinogenic, pan-gendered, bacchanalian—albeit flawed—vision of what America could be. A few members of the Cockettes later broke away to form another group called the Angels of Light, which served as a template for how I formed the Johnsons.
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Kazuo Ohno
Image Credit: Photo Jack Vartoogian via Getty Kazuo Ohno, along with Tatsumi Hijikata, was one of the originators of the dance/performance-art form butoh. I learned from watching and studying Ohno’s work, and consider him one of my teachers. I came across a poster of Ohno when I was studying abroad in France at 16. At that time, I desperately needed an artist who was modeling a visceral expression of hope. Ohno’s dances express this embodiment of an ecstatic knowledge and enlightenment that he found through making gestures.