POCtober Sketchbook
Featuring essays on Shoegaze Origins and the Sista Grrrl Riots
The POCtober Sketchbook is a collection of illustrations by Raeghan Buchanan and Southside Frank that collates and displays the best of their @poctoberart entries. POCtober Art is a digital instagallery that was established 2018 by Buchanan, in the tradition of one-a-day October drawing challenges, and it focuses on the discovery and celebration of Black/POC punk, rock, and funk bands through art.
In addition to 56 pages of black & white illustrations, POCtober Sketchbook features “Sista Grrrl Punks: All Your Riot Belongs to Us,” a 6,000 word essay by Buchanan on the Sista Grrrls and the Sista Grrrl Riots. She explores the lives of this collective of New York musicians - Tamar-Kali, Honeychild Coleman, Simi Stone, and Maya Sokora, and the shows they threw in the late 90s/early oughts, their individual histories and their unconditional support for one another while navigating the New York music scenes and the social climate of the times. The sketchbook also features a short article by Southside Frank: "A Throwback of Significance,” about Black shoegaze, and also grunge icon Tina Bell.
6x8.25, staple bound, 100 lb color cover, matte laminated
80 lb satin paper featuring 56 pages of Black/White illustrations
Excerpts from the “Sista Grrrl Riots” essay
“During the set, a mohawked Maya finally shrieks, looking like a myth between Nina Hagen and Ororo Monroe, metal gilded and power chorded while Honeychild suddenly bounces onto the stage in a ripped black shirt, coils crowned by scarlet flowers and bound into foot high screaming red feathers, everything awash in crimson stage lighting. There is the constant refrain: “Outside of society!” while Maya strides over to cavort with her drummer. She doubles back, crowds over onto her knees on the floor, slamming her guitar over and over on the ground in between. She rises back up to give her Epiphone SG the Pete Townshend treatment, deciding in that split second to destroy a gift from a toxic past ghost. She subsequently goes out, gesturing and mouthing WHAT at the crowd, exiting stage left, goodbye. At the time no one knew it was the last hurrah. I mean, maybe it isn’t.”
“It was a reaction to being excluded because people didn’t consider us punk or radical or feminist enough - or whatever excuse they had to deem us invisible.”
- Honeychild Coleman
“The steady white flight that radiated from places where Black people were perceived to be gaining increasing freedoms was partly a response to the Civil Rights movement and the 1954 Brown v Board decision ruling school segregation unconstitutional. But mechanisms like the housing crisis solutions in Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s 1949 Housing Act had consistently baked in segregregation through policy and law. When the Federal Housing Administration subsidized the building of suburbs, they set requirements in their Underwriting Manual that suggested using large obstructions like highways to blockade the new residential subdivisions off from the cities. Additionally, the FHA invented a mythology of falling property values to prohibit sales to Black families. In support of these measures, local governments neglected inner city services and infrastructure, leaving residents facing mounting conditions of disrepair. In one glaring example, fires gutted over half of the buildings of areas in South Bronx, Harlem, and Bed-Stuy after the government shut down many essential fire department services in the 1970s.”
“I’m trying to be up in this pit going off, I felt like there were a lot of guys on the scene, that the only way that they notice a girl or know who she is, is if they’ve fucked her, or one of thier friends used to fuck her, or they want to fuck her and so…I was hella aggressive; I was very representative of that New York hardcore aggro vibe…I was definitely ‘l wish a motherfucker would,’ I was very that. Because I didn’t want to be sexualized in the scene.”
- Tamar-Kali2
