Trust Me

D’Angelo Lovell Williams has said Nah is a meditation on freedom. The image was partly inspired by reports of the May 1803 passage of enslaved Igbo people from what is now Nigeria to the United States. As the voyage neared its end off the coast of Georgia, a group of the Igbo rose in rebellion, drowning their captors and grounding the ship before committing mass suicide by submerging themselves in the marshy waters of St. Simons Island. In this self-portrait, the artist wears a diaphanous white gown that they had previously worn to a drag ball, asserting their freedom of self-expression. The work’s title refers to the historical example of resistance to enslavement, as well as Lovell Williams’s refusal of “anything or anyone that keeps Black and queer people from living full lives and succeeding.”