The black female body, after generations of exposure in the arts, continues to hold significant cultural currency. The added dimension of brown skin elevates that body to cultural capital, sparking both admiration and controversy.
Nude with Raised Arms
Exhibition: Black Womanhood
An insightful exhibition, "Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body," offered a compelling exploration of this subject. The exhibition employed strident visual impact to appraise “the historical roots of a charged icon in contemporary art” that is the black female body. Judging from objects in the exhibition, the new millennium has already inspired an impressive outpouring of angst and anger concerning the subject. And perhaps this is appropriate for a subject so deeply rooted in trauma. The exhibition's category areas focused on Ideals of Beauty, Fertility and Sexuality, Maternity and Motherhood, and Identities and Social Roles.
The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College offered a stunning introduction to the galleries from its entrance balcony. There, Allison Saar’s 2006 Cache-a life-sized, tin-clad nude figure in a fetal position held in place by a giant ball of wire-was draped across the floor beneath Baby Back, Renée Cox’s oversized blackout C-print self-portrait as a dominatrix odalisque from 2001. The two works engaged in a shrill dialogue that teetered between tongue-in-cheek humor and slap-in-the-face confrontation.
Navigating the galleries required not only an intellectual eye but an inquisitive ear as well. Dressed Like Queens, a confrontational 2003 video by Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hunter projected on hand-dyed fabric, while enclosed in a door-less room, washed the entire space with deep voices articulating words or emitting guttural sounds. The results were at once a timely soundtrack to certain works and an irritating intrusion when standing before other challenging objects. The attempt to obstruct this audio intrusion must have been the reason that visitors were requested to wear earphones while watching taped interviews with several of the artists in the show.
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Why are there so few female artists?
The Artist's Perspective
The Cuban conceptual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons-represented by three potent, large-scale Polaroid photographs of her own body-proclaims, “I trust artists.” Whether or not all artists are trustworthy, it is indisputable that the exhibition’s subject matter is vital to the oeuvre of some of the most talented contemporary workers in the visual arts.
The Nude in Black Art
It should come as no surprise that an exhibition focused on the female body is dominated by the nude. Black women’s breasts alone have been catalysts for myriad conflicting notions about wanton sexuality and nature’s abundance found in the cradle of humanity-Africa. A good amount of these nudes appear courtesy of the artists themselves. Take away the nude and seminude and the galleries would have been nearly empty.
One exception was Our Mother’s Bosom (2007) by Senzeni Marasela. The piece uses an embroidered child’s dress and a simple woman’s frock riddled at the bodice with hundreds of straight pins to get to the crux of how references to black breasts are often efforts to subjugate and usurp women’s maternal capacities. Also left in place would have been two small figure studies by the pioneering Malian portraitist and street photographer Malick Sibidé who is quoted as saying that “movement, not nudity, is crucial to understanding the poetics of African women’s bodies.” And a good amount of movement was implied. Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, and Hassan Musa each position the body in dynamic stasis.
Traditional African Art vs. Contemporary Works
Although engaging, the dialogue between early twentieth-century ephemera and ritual African objects in one gallery juxtaposed with more recent “high” art productions installed separately did not enable a particularly informed encounter with black womanhood as a subject. The most respectful renderings of the black female body were within what is frequently deemed “traditional” African art. Scholars of African art continue to grapple with the nomenclature for the objects they study; antique, classical, and traditional among other adjectives all have their advocates and detractors.
Regardless, the welcomed clarity of African reverence for the female body as the ultimate life-giving force celebrated in exquisite forms was unfortunately installed in a separate gallery where its relationship with more complicated and confrontational contemporary works became less evident. The acknowledgement of female beauty and power long recognized in African art was set up as a precursor to, and perhaps inspiration for, the Western-influenced art in the next rooms. Clearly, the gallery organization was not ideal for the curator’s vision, in comparison with the catalogue.
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The Catalogue: A Deeper Dive
Rich with new writing by respected authors, the catalogue opens with an extensive overview of African cultural positions on the black female body, continues with essays concerning “colonizing black women” in Western popular culture, and ends with four investigations into modern and contemporary responses to this material. Deborah Willis, Carla Williams (co-authors of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders write about African American women placing emphasis on valuable visual records that are often unavailable because they are held in personal archives. The other contributors are Ifi Amadiume, Ayo Abietou Coly, Christraud Geary, and Enid Schildkrout, all of whom are known for their analytical and historical work on colonial Africa.
The “personal journeys” Barbara Thompson explores in her closing essay unifies the issues discussed in the catalogue by exposing “artists’ techniques and tactics in confronting and decolonizing the dichotomous relationship between European cultural imagination and stereotypes of the black female body”.
Deconstructing Stereotypes
The work in the exhibition does more than reflect the ways in which visual artists have grappled with European constructions of black stereotypes. The dichotomy that surfaces seems to be between stereotypes of womanhood in the entire African Diaspora and the impact of those stereotypes on black female truths.
Twenty years ago, Barbara Kruger coined her now-infamous slogan, “your body is a battleground,” in a campaign to increase awareness of how women’s bodies are marketed as commodities.
Black Nude Art
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