In June 2019, the New Museum hosted a special in-gallery conversation between artist Diedrick Brackens and writer and activist Darnell L. Moore on the occasion of Brackens’s first New York solo exhibition, “darling divined.” The conversation centered on black queer experiences of visibility, identity, and intimacy, which inform both Brackens’s textile works and Moore’s memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America (2018). The body of work presented in “darling divined” is broadly inspired by the writing of Essex Hemphill, a poet and activist whose work openly addressed race, sexuality, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and other issues affecting the queer African-American community. Brackens and Moore discussed the impact of Hemphill’s work on their own creative processes and contextualized the significance of his legacy on art and social justice.