Creative Practice/Critical Inquiry
xhadley@g.harvard.edu
I am Xavier Emmanuel Hadley (he/him). I am a singer/songwriter, guitarist, scholar, producer, photographer, and poet whose work investigates the influence of place and culture on the formation and performance of identity and habitus. While my first instrument was the piano, music has been in my life for as long as I can remember. I have witnessed the various ways in which those around me have used music to pace their daily routines, celebrate life, as well as process trauma. In 2014 I began to self-produce and record music from a bedroom studio set-up, eventually leading to the production of four albums under the alias “Xavley,”. Since I began releasing my music in 2016, I have received over 840,000 streams between Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud. In addition to being performed across New York and the state of Colorado, my music has received awards and critical recognition from popular platforms like the TED conference series and Lyrical Lemonade among others. I have also received awards and recognition from the Alpine Fellowship, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, and Colorado State University.
During my undergraduate years at Colorado State University (CSU), I pursued degrees in Poetry and Ethnic Studies to realize myself as a songwriter. I studied closely with Professors Camille T. Dungy and Dan Beachy-Quick, the first educators to validate my interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Following my time at CSU, I spent the years educating with Colorado non-profit organizations like Big City Mountaineers, Creative Strategies for Change (CSC), Sacred Voices, and Young Americans Aspiring for Social and Political Activism (YAASPA). These organizations gave me the opportunity to lead classes and workshops on the relationship between the outdoors, poetry, music, visual art, and identity.
At New York University I worked on my master’s thesis, “When the Music Comes”, to document Black New York-based sound artists with home studios. Derived from an understanding of a society’s archives and their absences as the spaces which shape local and national memory and birth their cultures, the goal of this project is to outline a relationship between their work, their history, and the spaces they inhabit. The foundations of this research began with my undergraduate senior Ethnic Studies thesis. Aimed to document the concepts presented within Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” as utilized by artists of marginalized identities within hegemonic systems, I engaged a relational research method to conduct a series of interviews, photodocumentary sessions, and autoethnographic writings to explore how social and economic structures influence an artist’s personal artistic expression. “When the Music Comes” is both an (auto)ethnographic body of work as well as a preliminary research project that can contribute to multiple fields such as “Studio Studies”, “Affect Theory”, “Sound Studies”, “Science and Technology Studies”, and “Housing Studies” at the intersection of race and aesthetics. As such, the overarching theme of the work is not the home studio itself, but what the home studio allows us to see, as it is situated at the intersection of the home, the archives, and the studio where culture is created, rehearsed, and performed. In addition to my thesis, my time at NYU also afforded me the opportunity to work as a graduate researcher with Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
Photo Credit: Isaiah Ali