{"id":6058,"date":"2019-10-23T11:35:55","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T11:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=6058"},"modified":"2019-10-23T11:45:08","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T11:45:08","slug":"decolonizing-performance-art-phylicia-ghee-uses-ritual-performance-to-heal-the-generational-trauma-of-black-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=6058","title":{"rendered":"Decolonizing Performance Art: Phylicia Ghee Uses Ritual Performance to Heal the Generational Trauma of Black Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decolonizing Performance Art: Phylicia Ghee Uses Ritual Performance to Heal the Generational Trauma of Black Women<\/span><\/h4>\n
Angela N. Carroll\u00a0<\/span><\/pre>\n
Performance art is difficult to encapsulate; it is a hyper-malleable and perpetually shape-shifting genre. In the 1960s, artist Allan Kaprow called his experiments in performance art, \u201chappenings\u201d. From the 1970s to the present, Marina Abramovic has used performance art to interrogate her relationship to the body and the mind, and situate the temporality of performance works in contrast with the fixed and repetitive archetypes of theatre. \u201cPerformance is real.\u201d She shared during an interview with The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010, \u201c\u2026the blood, the knife, and the performance is real.” Both Kaprow and Abramovic as well as other prominent artists including Carolee Schneemann, Joseph Beuys, and Vito Acconci have dominated academic dialogs, art historical canons and definitions about what performance art is and the bodies it serves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Simultaneously, from the 1970s to the present artists like Coco Fusco, Maren Hassinger, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Dred Scott, James Luna, Senga Nengudi, Maria Marmolejo, Carrie Mae Weems, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons, among countless others, have used performance art to unpack the violence of colonialism, imagine the possibilities of liberation, womanism, feminism, or to stage revisionist histories. Their performances, a diverse collection of culturally and geographically specific staging\u2019s, have laid the foundation for a new generation of brave performance artists to continue the work of decolonizing performance art.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n