Navigating the Black and Blues with Namir Fearce
Namir Fearce. Photo by Azhae’la Hanson
By Azhae’la Hanson, Reporter
Namir Fearce, also known as Blu Bone, is a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, and cultural conjurer, born and raised in North Minneapolis. As the 2025 recipient of the Jerome Fellowship for Visual Arts, Fearce is preparing for their upcoming retrospective at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which will take place next January.
But Fearce says this isn’t just a show, it’s a reckoning, a ritual, a homecoming.
Fearce is crafting an imaginative future for Black and Indigenous folk by resurrecting sacred memory, transforming trauma, and turning inherited sorrow into sacred ceremony by using their voice, vision, and ancestral memory to carve a new mythology for the Black experience, one that rides the back of the blues rather than being swallowed by it.
To speak with Fearce is not simply to conduct an interview. It is to sit at the feet of a griot, to follow the slow bend of a river carrying pain and possibility. It is to encounter a creator whose practice is stitched together from red beans and dominoes, VHS tapes and alligator dreams, Mississippi mud and Northside snow. With each piece, be it sculpted, sung, or summoned, they offer us not only their truth, but ours.
What follows is a conversation not about art as decoration, but art as devotion. A conjuring. A remembering. A survival spell cast in Blues and Blacks.
This interview is edited lightly for brevity and clarity
Q: What is your muse?
A: The center of my practice is Black children, Black childhood, and the future of our story as Black people. I feel that it is imperative for us to write our own story and project ourselves into the future for the sake of our children. I believe that many of us have been greatly disturbed by the current conditions of our world, and I take it on as a justice and a responsibility to provide examples of what it means to be alive, Black, feeling, and deeply imaginative. By contributing a bit of my story and imagination, someone, something, can be free.
Q: How does the name “Blu Bone” relate to creating that future? Is it a reflection on the past? Is it a name that means something for what's coming?
A: I came up with the phrase Blu Bone after pondering about the usage of the word “redbone” in our culture. And of course, I thought about what would be the inverse of a redbone, and this vision of a human so Black that they were blue came to my mind. I began to use this as a way of talking about this original, primordial essence that lives in us as Black people. I titled my first experimental theater piece by this name, my last year of high school, and I was rapping, and I decided to soon take it on as my own name as an artist.
Over time, the name Blu Bone revealed more of its meaning
I come from people from Mississippi, the birthplace of the Blues as we know it, and me taking on the name Blue was no accident. I've always dealt with the blues, but I was never meant to succumb to the blues. I'm meant to be one who makes a story in life from the blues of life, because the blues is all around us. It's above us in the sky and blue like the water below. The same thing that will make you laugh will make you cry, so you have to be in touch with the blues. It's really my belief that the blues is older than Black, and our blues is what connects us to Africa, to the world, to everything.
Q: Is the blues a metaphor? What for?
A: I think the blues is, yes, sometimes the trauma, the weight of our story, and the pain that we've endured, but it is also our laughter. It is also our hooting and hollering. It is also crowded in the living room after eating a bowl of red beans, and we are a little sleepy and listless, it is also Domino's slamming against the table in spades. The blues is everything. The blues is the reminder that it is all redeemable. We live on a Blue Earth. So the blues is everything you know. It is the knowledge that you can't have one without the other, that there is no you, if there's no me, there's no up if there's no down, it's no happy if there is no sadness.
Q: What was the process of discovering the blues?
A: I was raised to know the power of my name and the authority of my being. So this has been my foundation. I was also raised to remember my family's story. Often hearing about Mississippi from my elders, my grandmother Florine, my auntie Bug, (and) hearing of their stories in Mississippi.
All of it just stressed to me how important it was to remember so that remembering who we are and contributing to who we are is the foundation and legacy that I feel like I inherited and the blues, and remembering the blues was just another progression for me and my bloodline. So yeah, that's how that my consciousness really was born, was really at home, and I'm grateful for that. I think that that is imperative for Black children to have, you know, and why it's important we educate and love our own very fiercely so that they can have a strong foundation from which to construct their own identity.
Fearce was recently named a McKnight Media Artist Fellow. Photo by Azahe’la Hanson
Q: Are you spiritual? Do you feel like your artistry is also kind of a spiritual journey?
A: Yes, art is Spirit. For me, I've struggled often with the word artists, although I think by many definitions I would be, but I connect my artistry to my folk, to my people. I don't believe it is true that I am doing anything that has not been done or felt before. I feel that I am carrying on a vibration of a memory that is much older and much younger than me. You know, I'm doing my part, and it's always spiritual, just as much as it's always physical. Conjuring is what I'm doing: calling things into the room, remembering, exalting, honoring and creating ceremonies is what I'm really doing in my work. The mediums, the means and resources to make these dreams and memories tangible come second.
Q: Was that idea of conjuring and calling on in your most recent piece: Sweet Chariot?
A: Yes. The title of that piece is a reference to a negro spiritual: the enslaved sing of a chariot to carry them home, to their promised home. I have grappled a lot with our history and even with my personal family lineage, people coming from Mississippi all the way up to Minneapolis in search of home, coming from a family of people who have largely rented who don't own land and wealth in these ways we've been taught to believe are meaningful. And grappling with the history that we have often had to conjure a spiritual home for ourselves in lieu of the lack of a physical one.
In my piece Sweet Chariot, a Black baby with cotton plaits rides atop the back of a 13-foot alligator with bullet teeth. There was a practice during the antebellum period of using Black enslaved infants as alligator bait. And this is a history that, of course, terrorized me as a Black child.
These are the kind of images and practices that continue to live in the psyche of Black children, and I feel that it is necessary for us to subvert, decompose, and reckon with the disturbing ideas and legacies of this world. So by putting a Black child on top of the alligators back and using this Gator as a chariot for the baby, I wanted to reintegrate our original connection with the alligator or crocodile as a divine guide of cunningness and adaptability and wisdom that we had in Africa as indigenous people, and to try to facilitate some healing there.
Q: What world are you trying to build for people to see?
A: I make work that all exists in an ecosystem and world together. I'm building a world where we can exist as indigenous, funky, fly, deep, feeling, rapturous beings. Where we are deeply connected to our land, our water and our air, where our technology is not used against us, but for the sustainability of the least amongst us. A world where it's cool and encouraged to care and a world where we all can break bread as man, break bread across species, a world of expanding compassion and empathy.
Q: Does it keep you up at night? The ways you can ‘conjure’ all of this?
A: It does, and sometimes I do get overwhelmed, just because I am very ambitious, and I get that from my mama, for sure, a bit of a busybody. I think we as humans do way too much busy work, especially in our minds, and that's why I really say more than it is like any physically tangible accomplishment or public, outward facing work that I look forward to doing, it's really the inner work and cultivating that inner peace and quiet that I really am en route to.
Q: How do you process the blues?
A: Me really remembering and understanding the medicine of the blues was a lifesaver for me. Understanding that this weight that I felt that sometimes reared its head as depression or a deep sadness that I felt even as a very young child, was not by mistake, the knowledge that I was feeling things that happened way before I ever came onto Earth, that I'm feeling things that will happen long after I'm gone, and that is a lot to hold, but also knowing that I have the ability to craft stories, sing songs, create visions that allow me to not be succumbed by my blues, but to ride it. It can be my vehicle. It can get me from point A to point B. It doesn't have to be something that I get lost in, drown in, perish, and it can actually be a way that I flourish. So that has really been the lifesaver is knowing that like, yeah, I will always be dealing with bad blues, but I have tools to ride it and not drown.
Q: Do you see yourself in your Sweet Chariot sculpture?
A: Yes, we are all that Black baby. Although they may toss us in the water as bait, it is my dream that we all come out on top of that gator's back, that we are not consumed and eaten up by our conditions, but that we can subvert, rise above and ride out our conditions. And I think that's exactly what we have done as people and how we have survived, you know, and our survival has been a miracle. It has truly been something that has been fought for, imagined and conjured up. And freedom takes maintenance, you know, and it takes that continuously. So we'll always have to continue to fight for it. We will always have to continue to imagine and dream, and we will always have to conjure and swindle it.
When feeling the blues of when you were a kid, of feeling that way to the past or present in the future. Do you recall a specific moment? Maybe a vision it could be, you know, a memory of where that was most overwhelming to you?
I was hysterical as a young child about death and that fear of my own mortality has stayed with me into my adulthood.
Sometimes we feel things and we have worries that are not even just our own. I come from a family of a lot of premature deaths, of people dying before their time and dying young. And these are the kinds of curses, the things that give us the blues you know, and me knowing now in this moment, that I have the power to imagine and live into a long and healthy life for myself and that that's a possibility, is where I am now, you know, but that only came from little, Namir, Little Blue, having to really deal with his blues. I had to deal with the sadness of the matter a long time before I could imagine anything else.
Q: Your story feels reminiscent of a sort of mythology: you know you're young and you fear death, and so you become a conjurer of life. You become a creator.
This fear of death being the compulsion to create is a very poignant observation, and that's a very potent truth of like, why is it that we create? Why do we make the song? Why do we tell our story? Why do we make stories? Why do we make art? Why do we love? you know, can it be simply wrapped up in the fear of death?
Q: How do you balance the blues?
A: Ideally, I could be in a world where I felt like I didn't have to go so hard, or, you know, I could just eat fruit and chill and, you know, be a bit more content. But the conditions are damning for so many of us, and it calls for us to stand as witness and to fight to remain present, to remain alive. I'm fighting, quite literally, just to survive, and me being given the tools and the resources to survive, I feel it is my duty to to thrive, to reach for the stars, to imagine, for those who may maybe can't, to ask questions for those who can't, to provoke the dreams of people. And I'm also realizing that thriving looks like my internal wellness and being creative, just as creative and devoted to my interior as the work of my hands in public-facing work.
Q: Speaking of public-facing work, is there something readers can look forward to in your future work at MCAD?
A: I really want to approach this fellowship with a presentation of sorts like my research and my work of my archive, and really digging in my own archive to create new works, or to represent new works in ways that they have not been seen before, or things that have never been seen. And I think that I want this to work, to feel deeply personal in its registration.
I have done a lot of VHS filmmaking over the years, and most of that footage never sees the light of day. Hours and hours of footage that I had, and I think it would be really cool to present. Even some of just like the VHS that I've gotten over the years, you know. But there's nothing definite yet, you know, I feel like I won't really, really have my direction until probably around fall time this year.
Q: What legacy do you hope to leave behind?
A: I feel that I'm living in the legacy, you know, I'm active. I'm thinking about work. And the thing about the work is there's always more to do. I'm starting to think about, what other work is it that I don't see maybe in front of me? What work is there left to do that other people can't see? I feel like I've had a great opportunity to do some really amazing stuff on this earth, and because I care about my people, I know I will continue to do that as long as I have the time, God says the same. But what I really want to do before I leave planet Earth is to do that inner work and integrate the different pieces of my soul so that I can live in light and live in light.