In this chapter, Matt Richardson employs an ethnographic perspective to examine Sharon Bridgforth’s Thelove conjure/blues Text installation. He contends that the jazz aesthetic, an artistic practice that encourages layering of images, ideas, sound, and experiences, informs Bridgforth’s writing, performance, and revision practices. Richardson ultimately concludes that Bridgforth’s deployment of the jazz aesthetic in The love conjure/blues Text Installation enables Bridgforth to honor simultaneous truths, which pries open a space for reenvisioning black communal healing, nonnormative representations of black gender and sexuality, and the queer lives of black ancestors/elders.

This chapter contains Sandra L. Richards’s interview with Thelove conjure/blues Text Installation creator Sharon Bridgforth. In the first part of the interview, Bridgforth discusses how her penchant for writing together with her community organizing experiences led her to become involved in the early 1990s Austin, Texas, women’s theater scene. She then shares some of her own experiences creating shows, founding a theater company, and collaborating with women-of-color artists. After detailing her collaborative approach to her art-making process, Bridgforth expounds on how she drew on the theatrical jazz aesthetic to conceive The love conjure/blues Text Installation.