{"id":5056,"date":"2019-03-26T03:02:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T03:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=5056"},"modified":"2019-03-26T03:04:46","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T03:04:46","slug":"black-female-artists-embody-visibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=5056","title":{"rendered":"Black Female Artists Embody Visibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Female Artists Embody Visibility<\/span><\/h1>\n
Shantay Robinson<\/span><\/pre>\n
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Throughout history, black female bodies have been a source of capital for hegemonic powers in the form of servitude through labor or sex. During slavery, in the United States, black women\u2019s bodies were used to create a labor force for which they received no benefits. Their children could have been stripped away and sold off at any time. Black women were stripped of their humanity, performing the role of mules in a white dominated society. Not only was the enslaved black woman forced to work and produce as much as men, they were raped as a form of punishment and procreation. If resistant, black women were victims to further abuse. Even post-emancipation, while working as paid domestics, black women\u2019s resistance to the advancement of white males (fathers and sons) would be a risk to their livelihoods. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
One of the most heinous violent acts against a black woman might be the dismemberment of Sara Baartman. In Europe, during the 19<\/span>th<\/span> century, Sara Baartman was the source of spectacle for her shapely figure. She was brought from her village near Cape Town South Africa with the promise of becoming a rich woman. She became known as the Hottentot Venus and was put on display where viewers ogled at her derriere. Baartman was contracted to perform but she could neither read or write. From 1812 to 1814, she performed as a show girl working six to ten hours and saw little of the money she was promised. In 1815, she died from complications with a recurrent flu. After her death, her body parts were preserved and put on display to showcase the inferiority of Africans. Her remains were not removed from the Musee de l\u2019Homme in Paris until 1974, and they were not returned to South Africa until 2002, eight years after then-president Nelson Mandela suggested they be returned home. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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Saartjie \u201cSara\u201d Baartman \u201cThe Hottentot Venus\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n
Not only has the black female body been physically shamed, her image has been attacked as well. Black women are typically known for one of the three stereotypes that continue to perpetuate society even today: Jezebels, Mammies, or Angry Black Woman\/Sapphires. Black women are more than the stereotypes that depict them, but they have been deprived of that humanity. \u00a0None of these images are attractive. The Jezebel is a hypersexual woman that would steal away with white women\u2019s men. The Mammy thinks of everyone before herself, she is the matriarch who takes care of families and is often seen as the domestic in white households, and she is not very feminine. Sapphire is considered unintelligent and domineering. These stereotypes have been depicted in American media since its inception and have yet to be eradicated. These images are perpetuated in our culture through the images of black women in television and film. But in recent years the diversity of black female characters in television and film has increased in an attempt to defy the stereotypes. To counter negative perceptions of their bodies, is a contemporary movement spurred by a host of women including visual artists attempting to reconfigure black women\u2019s understanding of themselves. Black women are taking control of their own image, and they are refusing to allow racism and sexism to deem them invisible or hypervisible. \u00a0When <\/span>visible<\/span><\/i>, they sanction the images they propagate. The dominant culture renders black women invisible for their race and hyper visualize them, as deviant, for their sex. Systemic racism and sexism erase the inherent humanity of the black female body. <\/span><\/p>\n
For the black woman, invisibility exists on two fronts. According to Kellie Jones\u2019 1990 <\/span>ArtForum <\/span><\/i>essay \u201cIn Their Own Image,\u201d black signals male and female signals white woman; this binary logic renders the black woman invisible. While black men have some similarity to the dominant culture, as they are men, black women bear the load of double negative black and women. In \u201cBlack\/Female\/Body Hypervisibility and Invisibility: A Black Feminist Augmentation of Feminist Leisure Research,\u201d the authors state that at the same time, black women are invisible to the dominant culture, black women\u2019s bodies are hypervisible: seen as hypersexual and deviant. The stereotypical images of black women that make them invisible or hypervisible are being combated by the work of two black female visual artists, Lorna Simpson and Wangechi Mutu, who develop alternatives to counter the narratives that have been the black woman\u2019s story for centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n
“when the control of black female image is in the hands of the other, they are subject to being treated with disrespect.”<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Simpson and Mutu position the black female body in Western art cultural spaces, giving agency to black women. In the work of both Simpson and Mutu, their identities as black women cannot and should not be distinct from the art they create. They disrupt traditionally homogenous and patriarchal spaces with their presence to access the sightlines of the world at large. These female artists are stepping out of the margins into the center of discourse to make black women and their identities visible. Black women artists have the capacity to reach a large number of people to share with them ideas about embodiment that would be more difficult as written treatise. With the efficiency of an artwork, viewers are forced into discourse with artists that would take considerably longer to espouse in another way.<\/span><\/p>\n
Lorna Simpson is a conceptual artist who has been in the forefront of contemporary Western art for the past 30 years. She was the first African American woman to participate in the Venice Biennale in 1990. In his article, \u201cBye, Bye Black Girl: Lorna Simpson\u2019s Figurative Retreat\u201d Huey Copeland cited a <\/span>New York Newsday <\/span><\/i>article written by Amei Wallach in 1990, she describes the year as a time when \u201coutsiders,\u201d based on skin color, languages, national origins and sexual preference, were gaining attention from the art establishment possibly based on guilt. \u00a0Inserting black women into historically white spaces meant that she was being subversive to the very establishment that oppresses her. Simpson\u2019s and other\u2019s work at the time was seen as an end to white patriarchy. While this might be an overstatement or oversimplification, at the time, it was radical to allow, especially, black female artists into the mainstream art world. <\/span><\/p>\n
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Guarded Conditions (1989) Lorna Simpson<\/p><\/div>\n
Guarded Conditions<\/span><\/i> (1989) is a series of panels where the subject, a black woman, is depicted six times in the same position with her back turned to the photographer. The words \u201cSex Attacks\u201d and \u201cSkin Attacks\u201d are placed below the repeated images, mirroring the repetition. Nika Elder explains that art curators and critics deem the work as challenging traditional portraiture because the face of the subject is not visible. <\/span>Guarded Conditions<\/span><\/i> embodies the black female experience \u2013 one where she is invisible and present at the same time. The invisibility of the woman in this work of art is evidenced by her back being turned to the viewer so her face is not seen. The woman in the <\/span>Guarded Conditions<\/span><\/i> is dressed in a plain white shift dress that does not connote a particular time and hides the shape of her body. The only identifying qualities we see of the woman are her skin color and her sex. She is not regarded as an individual with particular characteristics, but simply a black woman. <\/span><\/p>\n
The text included in the artwork describes the kind of violence that has been inflicted on the black female body for centuries, and its repetition alludes to the fact that it has been happening repeatedly throughout time. The multiplicity and pose of the figure in the artwork illustrate how the multitude of black women respond to the repeated violence she has been subjected to. Her posture is straight, arms folded behind her, back turned. She has survived. She is here. By Simpson posing the subject in this way, she is showing us the black woman\u2019s irrepressible yet restrained stance on the racist and sexist violence. <\/span><\/p>\n
The absence of the face, the timelessness of the dress, the folding of the arms and the words repeated below the images, allow for a number of women to identify and <\/span>see<\/span><\/i> themselves in the artwork. The quintessence of the artworks and anonymity of the subject allow black women to recognize themselves in the work. Simpson created this image to permit black women to come to terms with their struggles and it was made for others to witness. <\/span><\/p>\n
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan born multi-media artist who created a series of collages called the <\/span>Ark Collection <\/span><\/i>(2006) with images sourced from African American hard-core pornographic magazines in a mash-up with postcards of rural traditionally adorned African women. Mutu\u2019s goal is to aestheticize the vulgar pornographization of the black female form that is already prolific in our culture. Mutu and others feel the black porn industry is an affront to the image of black women who have had to continuously fight for respectability in the face of the Jezebel stereotype. Mutu\u2019s collages erase those body parts of the pornographic images that are most vulgar by inserting the sober images of African villagers in their place.<\/span><\/p>\n
In exhibition, the collages are presented behind glass as if restricting their existence. The title, <\/span>Ark Collection,<\/span><\/i> comes from the collages being presented two-by-two as if saving them from an immanent flood of criticism of the black female body. While the sexualized images affirm the trope of the hypersexualized black woman, the images of the half-nude village women are what society is okay with when imaging the black female body respectably. \u00a0While Mutu\u2019s work expresses very dichotomous images, of sex workers and African village women, there doesn\u2019t seem to be enough space in her work to consider the material circumstances of either group of women. Either way black women are more than the dichotomies offered up through the sourced visual imagery she uses in her collages. <\/span><\/p>\n
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The Ark Collection (2006) Wangechi Mutu<\/p><\/div>\n
In her work as an internationally acclaimed visual artist, she is countering the narratives that have plagued black women of the African Diaspora for centuries, and she\u2019s developing a new narrative, one where the black female body is not violated or looked on as incongruous. She subverts the very notion of their hypersexuality with the concept of asexuality thereby creating ambiguity regarding sexuality. Granting ambiguity to the black feminine allows black women to create their own standards.<\/span><\/p>\n
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Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976 (1976) Jean-Paul Goude<\/p><\/div>\n
In reference to French photographer, Jean-Paul Goude\u2019s collection of photographs <\/span>Jungle Fever<\/span><\/i> of black female derrieres, critic Janell Hobson in the article \u201cThe \u2018Batty\u2019 Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body,\u201d calls them \u201ccomical representations, mimicking similar \u2018humor\u2019 in depictions of the Hottentot Venus\u201d and that it \u201crenders black female sexuality as too deviant, too bizarre, to take seriously.\u201d \u00a0Hobson goes on to say that, \u201cWith the focus on their infamous behinds, black women’s bodies are typically ridiculed, not adulated. Because of this, it is worth noting that black male bodies are less stigmatized by the label of \u2018deviant sexuality.\u2019\u201d Goude\u2019s work is a prime example that when the control of black female image is in the hands of the other, they are subject to being treated with disrespect. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Simpson and Mutu are creating a counter narrative to the centuries of negative stereotypes black women have endured and the world has gotten used to. With a shift in the perception of the black female body will likely come the respect and the care black women, like any other human, deserves. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
The contemporary moment is still fraught with stigmas and stereotypes, but as public figures, Simpson and Mutu use their platform to dispel stigmas and stereotypes and insert other narratives. As more black women begin to reclaim responsibility for defining themselves and continue dictating their own images, they will not feel as if it is anyone else\u2019s responsibility to define who they are. The stereotypes and stigmas attached to them can be eradicated with enough effort put forth in creating alternative narratives of the black female experience. And as Patricia Hill Collins, notes it is the black female intellectual\u2019s responsibility to usher in those alternatives. Simpson and Mutu offer black women some choices.<\/span><\/p>\n
A version of this article was presented at Northeast Modern Languages Association\u2019s 2019 Conference.<\/i><\/p>\n
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Shantay Robinson, BAIA resident scholar has participated in\u00a0Burnaway<\/i>\u2019s\u00a0Art Writers Mentorship Program, Duke University\u2019s\u00a0The New New South\u00a0<\/i>Editorial Fellowship, and CUE Art Foundation\u2019s Art Critic Mentoring Program. She has written for\u00a0Burnaway, ArtsATL, ARTS.BLACK, AFROPUNK, Number, Inc.\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Washington City Paper<\/i>. While \u00a0receiving an MFA in Writing from Savannah College of Art and Design, she served as a docent at the High Museum of Art. She is currently working on a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University.<\/p>\n
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