At a backyard gathering, a group of Black women and girls lay out newspapers along a table in preparation for a crab feast. (This publication’s recognizable headline font sticks out among the other pages repurposed as mats.) As everyone digs in, the camera captures a discussion about the last lynching on Maryland soil in 1933 and the 1938 Crisfield crab pickers’ strike.
This scene in “The Labor/The Luxury,” the short-form documentary by West Baltimore-born multimedia cultural worker Nia Hampton, immersed me into the many ideas — the intersection of attachment theory and family connections around the dinner table, the politics of seafood production — stewing around the piece, eager to grub on all the ways it looks at crabs, what they mean on our plates, and what it takes for them to get there.
The visuals feel like home, familiar, inviting, and indicative of the ways the mastication of crabs can be a culturally specific balm. But the subject matter of the conversation strikes such a different register. They coexist in a whole that is illuminative and stimulating, setting the viewer on a course in several directions, wanting to pull more and more of the world into their mental orbit, as can happen when you have tough conversations over a pleasant meal with beloved friends and family members.
When I first started writing criticism at City Paper a decade ago, Hampton was one of the writers I deeply admired. She wrote about movies from a perspective that felt so assured, so effortless in its synthesis of what was up on that screen and what she saw in it through her eyes. She regularly made me want to revisit films I had already seen, just to try to see them again the way she had.
Watching her “The Labor/The Luxury,” which has been accepted in the Dakar Biennale later this year in Dakar, Senegal, I felt that familiar pang, a mixture of being jealous, impressed, and hungry for more. Hopefully you’ll indulge the “hunger” metaphor, since this is an unconventional exploration of the history of crab picking on the Eastern Shore and Black women’s role within the industry. At 14 minutes, the film is appetizer-sized but still meaty. In this short form, Hampton and her collaborators have offered up a piece of art that is satisfying to the mind on its own merits, but begs for future iteration and extrapolation.
In the time since I first knew of her, Hampton has exploded into different avenues across multiple media, always finding fascinating and nourishing new ways to mix the intimate with the historical, the interior and the larger whole. She’s done narrative comedy (“My Mother the Clown”), solo exhibitions (like “Drapetomania: The Strong Urge to Escape”), and programming work (founding the Black Femme Supremacy Film Fest), all meaningful tethers of one larger body of work.
I wanted to get a sense of what went into this project and where it might go next, so I got in touch. Both our schedules were hectic, and what follows are questions I sent her, followed by audio responses she sent back to me. Like the film itself, our conversation made me want to sit down with Hampton and a dozen or so crabs.
What made you choose this medium and this form for exploring this industry and its history?
Nia Hampton: I think, as an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and storyteller, I was really interested in how many ways I could tell the same story. Although what some folks might access first is a film, there’s also written text, there are sculptural pieces, and there’s painting that creates the full breadth of the work.
I don’t know. I think I’m always thinking about accessibility and what’s easy to digest. Video form is what people learn from right now, and I think I was most interested in teaching with this body of work. Teaching about what eating crabs here means to us from a variety of angles, from the interpersonal to the communal to the ecological.
In doing my own research, what I found is what you see, quite literally, from certain newspaper articles to certain audio recordings … I just really put it all together.
Can you expand a little on your personal connection, if any, to the subjects in the doc?
NH: Most of the people featured in the crab feast scene are folks I know in real life, whether they’re family members, community members, or cultural figures I look up to, like Hess Love, for instance.
This work started out a lot more personal than what you see. It started with me quite literally exploring my own relationship with my mother, her relationship with her mother, and my sister’s incoming motherhood.
But I was building this work in my MFA program, and I didn’t love the questions I was getting during critique. It made me aware of how vulnerable I was making myself at the center of the frame in that way. So, I widened the lens and made it more about a community and a culture. That felt easier to actually get done.
This piece feels so rich and layered for its compact runtime. Was there anything you left out that you’d wish to explore in a longer format? Are there any future aims for this?
NH: Bry Reed, the producer [and fellow Beat contributor] really wants this to be a feature. My original question was about the children of the Crisfield crab pickers’ strike members.
I initially saw a world where I got to go to Crisfield and got in touch with them and got to test my hypothesis. If we were able to make this into a feature, we would go to the Eastern Shore and ask more questions about what crab eating out there is like and about people’s relationship to the industry.
We would probably also get in touch with the immigrant community, who are now the primary pickers, and try to see what’s going on right now. Most of the footage is archival and a lot of what I was studying happened a long time ago, although the circumstances are still the same, if not worse.
So, yeah, I think if we were to get proper funding to do a feature there’s just so much more to expand on. Maybe one day we’ll get to do that.
For now, we will be screening at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on September 17. We will also be premiering the entire thesis show, “Holding Each Other Down,” at the Dakar Biennale this November or December, which I’m excited about because I’m a Pan-African artist.
I’ve always been making work about Black people looking at Black people, and I’m looking forward to sharing this story of what we do in Baltimore with folks in West Africa via Dakar.
I really still can’t get over that. That’s a literal dream come true for my practice and, really, who I am as a person.
“The Labor/The Luxury” can next be seen at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on September 17. For more info, go to thebmi.org/event/thennow-crabs.