Festival Promoters Erase Regina Taylor's Voice From Her Own Work

Regina Taylor will perform "Exhibit" on closing night of the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival. The announcement describes the cultural value while erasing the artist's voice from the description of that value.

This is the move that has become routine in festival coverage of Black theatre artists. Taylor is not a new name in American theatre—she has spent decades building a practice rooted in historical interrogation and witness.

Her play "The Rag Trade" examined labor and exploitation through the lives of garment workers. Her earlier work has consistently positioned her as someone thinking through systems of power, not performing within them.

Yet the festival announcement treats "Exhibit" as a cultural asset to be consumed rather than as a work carrying Taylor's specific artistic intention. The artist herself does not appear in the piece to articulate what the work explores or why this moment, in this city, demands an audience's attention. This matters because it inverts who gets to define meaning. When festival promoters supply the language of value without including the artist's own statement of purpose, they effectively position themselves as the interpreters and Taylor as the object to be interpreted.

The reader learns what Atlanta Black Theatre Festival curators think matters about Taylor's work—not what Taylor thinks should matter to them. A festival announcement that quotes Taylor on her artistic intentions reads as an invitation to encounter a specific argument, while one that describes her work in promotional language reads as a commodity listing. The first acknowledges an artist as an agent with something to say, the second aestheticizes her labor while ceding interpretive authority to institutional voice.

This happens in every field where institutional gatekeepers describe the work of people who do not get to describe it themselves. The hospital administrator issues a statement about physician burnout without quoting physicians. The university press release celebrates a researcher's breakthrough without including her articulation of what the findings mean. The institution becomes the authorized narrator of other people's labor and intention. Notice when you consume work through this filter.