CREATION STORY
Written by Joyce Chen; Photographed by Jessica Smith
Speaking with Midnite Abioto is like reconnecting with an old friend, one who gets you thinking about reincarnation, and the passage of time, and how life itself is an art form, a nonlinear trajectory toward becoming.
“I truly believe in the spirit realm,” she tells me less than two minutes into our chat, “and I don’t believe that this life is our first life. I feel like we build on ourselves, our consciousness, throughout time, as we learn and develop.” She leans forward as she intimates: “I feel like I’m on a quest for myself. I haven’t arrived yet. The joy is truly in getting there.”
Ask Midnite about her artistic practice, and she will share with you a long litany of identities. None, of course, can fully encapsulate the who and the what of her being and doing, which is kind of the point. Now entering her mid-sixties, Midnite’s primary practice is actually one that sutures all of these identities together to create a new form entirely. She is, I decide by the end of our conversation, an alchemist.
Born in the ‘60s in Greenville, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta (“one of the towns in Mississippi where Black people could go during that era and build a world”), Midnite calls her childhood a “fairy tale for a Black person growing up in Mississippi.” She grew up surrounded by teachers, preachers, dentists, and lawyers. Her parents were educators who encouraged her curiosity and drive. “At an early age, I communicated that I wanted to change the world,” she says.
Her first step toward that goal involved an unexpected decision. Inspired by a lawyer at her church whom she admired, she went to law school, knowingly stepping into “a difficult pathway for a very imaginative young woman” given the law’s reputation as “one of the oldest, embedded, racist establishments.”
Ultimately, Midnite spent over thirty years in human rights law while also raising five daughters. She recalls once having to go to bankruptcy court in the next town over and not being able to secure a babysitter. Without hesitation, she and her then-husband packed the babies into their van and drove to court, where she handled the case while he waited outside with the children. Afterward, she promptly hopped into the backseat to nurse her babies the entire drive home. “[My parents] gave me this resilience, this gift,” she says. “We do what we have to do, and it makes us resilient people for the next challenge, which will come.”
In 2010, Midnite found herself laying down new roots on the West Coast. By then, she had separated from her husband, and some of her daughters had graduated from college. She was ready to leave the South for a different reality, which brought her first to California (“very expensive, and there was an earthquake”), and then to Oregon (“the nature was just astonishing”). She was drawn to the “fantastical realm” of the Pacific Northwest, and after a few years moving between New Orleans and Portland, she decided that her relationship to the region’s lush plant world had “mushroomed and grown.” She’s lived in Portland ever since.
Midnite’s childhood had blessed her with a potent imagination, and she used her creativity to turn the rigidity of legal practice into a superpower. “What I bring to the art is an analytical mind that was sharpened in those years,” she says. “Throughout all those years that I was practicing, I was also building the ideology of the legal oracle.”
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The legal oracle, she explains, is about approaching disagreements from a spiritual perspective, looking at the ways that a legal decision could impact a person’s life holistically, and then helping them to understand big changes in their life as just another part of their spiritual evolution.
In 2019, Midnite took a break from legal practice, during which time one of her daughters bought her a storytelling class. Midnite found that writing helped her get out of the funk she’d been feeling, and gave her perspective about all the possibilities still on her horizon. “I’m not just a lawyer,” she says. “I wasn’t born with a license on my back by an external body. My life is so much more than that.” Midnite says she channeled her parents’ resilience by nurturing her interests and talents in other arenas. She alchemized the obstacle into an opportunity.
She’d done it before. When she and her five daughters first moved to Portland in 2010, for instance, she’d turned an interest in veganism, sparked by a professor from law school, into a raw food restaurant called The Green Lady. The popular whole foods spot has since closed, but Midnite is currently planning a metaphysical dinner series that will revolve around the meaning of each dish. She’s also created “Holy Mojo,” a spiritual, interactive theater piece; O’Zeal Inspirational Spa, a spiritual healing space; and Legal Oracle, a publishing company dedicated to amplifying stories and writings that center BIPOC perspectives. Most recently, Midnite and her five daughters, who collectively make up Studio Abioto, are looking to open their own gallery to showcase archival pieces that uplift the valuation of Black art. In short, Midnite is embracing the gradual unfurling of her life’s purpose.
“The thread that runs through my life is change, and change in all sorts of different ways. When I was practicing law, I never would have seen myself in the Pacific Northwest,” she says. “But change has allowed me to meet myself anew, and I think that is what is critical to maintaining a life.”
Growing up, Midnite was a big reader—the result, she says, of being an only child—and she credits books for her ability to dream, and dream big. To have the confidence to try other pathways when the one she’s on becomes inaccessible. “Books have been my constant friend,” she tells me, her entire face lighting up. “My parents filled the home with books. If I needed motivation, inspiration, or a new way of looking at life, I would go to a bookstore or a library. Books have been my angels.” And this genuine appetite for learning hasn’t just informed Midnite’s own life trajectory. It’s begun to seep into the groundwater of her daughters’ creative foundations as well.
Studio Abioto, the revolutionary, multidisciplinary artists collective that Midnite founded along with her daughters—Kalimah, Ni, Yawa, Medina, and Intisar—is arguably the ultimate manifestation of her childhood ambition. Collectively, the six women have their hands in just about every artistic practice: writing, photography, music, film, herbal and culinary arts, dance, illustration, and more. At heart, they are all storytellers, inspired by their environments and one another. “Our art informs each other, but my daughters are truly on their own planetary directives,” Midnite says. “But we are dancing together.”
When I ask Midnite about the idea of legacy, and what she hopes to pass along to her daughters in this next life, she straightens up and a pregnant silence fills the space between us. This is a question she’s thought about a lot. “What I want to really leave for them,” she says, “is that they are the architects of their own lives. And that they are magical, and that they can create, always. Always.”
