Sadie Barnette (born 1984, US),
Eagle Creek I, Archival pigment print photograph with overlaid rhinestones, 104.1 × 83.2 × 4.4 cm, 2021
The project “The New Eagle Creek Saloon Was Here,”
reimagine Barnette’s father’s multi-racial
bar that was the first black-owned gay bar in San
Francisco. The project comes out of mining the archival materials from
the bar, and then creating work that celebrate and honor the characters,
artifacts, politics, and style of the saloon. Though the bar closed in
1993, the legacy of its spirit is embodied in its slogan: “A friendly
place, with a funky bass, for every race.”
Owanto Berger (born 1953, Gabon/France),
One Thousand Voices, sound work, 80 audio testimonies from 31 countries. Omnia, embroidery with wool yarn on cotton fabric, 40 × 260 cm, 2019
One Thousand Voices is an immersive sound installation
and embroidery which amplifies an ensemble of voices collected from
around the world. It is a collection of audio testimonies from Female
Genital Mutilation/Cutting survivors. Using various languages, some
speaking anonymously, most testifying openly, voices of survival and
resilience, creates one collective narrative. Omnia is produced in
collaboration with reformed-cutters from the Kolda region in South
Senegal and from Cross River State in Nigeria. Women who have abandoned
the knife to adopt the needle are changing their destiny as they weave
the words of liberation voiced by the heroines in One Thousand Voices.
Camille Billops (1933-2019, US),
Kaohsiung Series #9, Lithograph with hand coloring in crayon Image, 61 × 48.3 cm, 2012
Camille Billops (1933, Los Angeles, CA–2019 New York,
NY) was an influential artist and filmmaker whose staunch activism and
profound belief in the power of memory and representation made her a
pillar of the black New York-based artist community from the 1960s until
her death in 2019. Billops used her life experiences, family history,
and community to carve out a space for her voice to be heard. Her work
primarily touches upon themes of racism, gender dynamics, black culture,
and personal narrative.
Sonia Boyce (born 1962, UK),
Exquisite Tension, video, 4 minutes, photographic print,
70 × 99 cm, 2005
Sonia Boyce, OBE RA, is known for her highly
innovative and experimental approach to art-making, using performance
and audio-visual elements in her work. Boyce won the Golden Lion at the
Venice Biennale, 2022. Exquisite Tension, 2005, is a four minute video
and soundtrack of a black girl and a white boy whose hair is tightly
braided together by the artist stressing the common humanity of both.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983, Nigeria/US),
Cassava Garden, acrylic, transfers, colour pencil, charcoal and commemorative fabric on paper, 182.9 × 152.4 cm, 2015
Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s works draw on the tradition
of classical academic painting in order to represent family portraits
and domestic scenes from her home life in Nigeria and America. Drawing
on art historical, political and personal references, Crosby creates
densely layered figurative compositions that conjure the complexity of
contemporary experience.
Theresa Traore Dahlberg (born 1983, Sweden/Burkina Faso),
Copper and Glass X, mixed media, 90 × 70 cm, 2022.
Hakili – The hare bronze,
100 × 127 × 21 cm, 2022
Theresa Traore Dahlberg is a visual artist and
filmmaker who formulates and mediates engaging and complex narratives
through sculpture, photography, and film. Dahlberg pays attention to
production, working conditions, workers’ identities and personal
stories, creating art that reflects the complexity of class, women’s
roles, and post-colonialism. Traore Dahlberg draws from her own
experiences of being anchored in two political and social cultures,
Sweden and Burkina Faso.
Jeannette Ehlers (born 1973, Denmark/Trinidad),
WE’RE MAGIC. WE’RE REAL #3 (From sunset to sunrise), photography, 2021–2022.
BLACK IS A BEAUTIFUL WORD. I & I, video, photography, 2019
Five black female performers are conjoined by long
cornrows. They are presented in poetic still photos from the forest.
While the conjoined hair points to a shared existence, the piece refers
to spirituality – within the African diaspora as well as towards the
planet. The video installation consists of an archive photo, as well as a
video that shows a floating portrait of 8 black women, accompanied by a
poetic voice over. In the archive photo we encounter the woman Sarah.
Sarah is seen in a white ball gown sitting on a porch of a house on St.
Croix. The gaze is at the center and the work thus raises questions
about the beholder and the observed, about power and resistance as well
as about the Black female body and existence, across time and place.
Claudette Johnson (born 1959, UK),
Afterbirth, pastel on paper, 118 × 83 cm, 1990
Claudette Johnson is at the forefront of black
feminist art and explores the way in which black women have been
depicted in Western art. Claudette Johnson’s intimate studies lend the
portrayed figures a profound sense of character and presence. Addressing
both the black body and the subject’s interiority, two central concerns
for her practice, Johnson complicates and challenges historical
constructions and traditions of representation.
Rachel Jones (born 1991, UK),
say cheeeeese, Painting. Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas, 137.5 × 81 cm, 2022
Working in painting, installation, sound and
performance, Rachel Jones explores a sense of self as a visual, visceral
experience. In her paintings, she grapples with the challenges of
finding visual means to convey abstract, existential concepts. In
depicting the psychological truths of being and the emotions these
engender, abstraction becomes a way of expressing the intangible. The
figure is notably abstracted in her works, as Jones is interested in
‘using motifs and colour as a way to communicate ideas about the
interiority of Black bodies and their lived experience’.
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole (born 1988, Nigeria/UK),
Cloak, 33 photographs, photographic paper, rafia, wood. 5.4 m × 1.61 m, 2015
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole’s work utilises both lens and
non-lens based photography, and these manifest themselves in a variety
of outputs. Cloak, modelled upon the coronation robe of Queen Elizabeth
II of Great Britain, uses 31 photographs of sitters in the UK wearing
traditional Yorùbá attire. A cloak is an item of clothing used to
protect the wearer from natural elements such as wind and rain. In
popular culture and especially in fantasy literature the cloak is a
metaphor for protection or supernatural powers, hence it acts as a
fortress for the individual in possession of it.
Deana Lawson (born 1979, US),
Mama Goma,
pigment print, 88.9 × 111.8 cm, 2014
Deana Lawson works with photography to examine the
body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing
themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and spirituality.
Lawson’s oeuvre, developed over the last decade, is a collective
portrait, which investigates black aesthetics in the domestic, personal
and intimate spaces, and various settings of ritual or celebration.
Fatima Moallim (born 1992, Sweden),
ÅRSKURS 1–3, digital prints, objects, 42 × 42 cm, 2021
The foundation of Fatima Moallim’s work lies in drawing
where Moallim express the energy directly via her senses to the canvas
or paper through the tip of a pen. Årskurs 1-3 (Grade 1-3) consist of
three black-and-white portraits of the artist as a young girl. Moallim’s
work is based on old school photographs, and between the passe-partout
and the glass, carefully pressed small pieces of fabric, chewing gum
paper and even a candy necklace.
Zanele Muholi (born 1972, South Africa),
Bona, Charlottesville, wall paper, 120 × 90 cm, 2015
Muholi is a South African visual activist and
photographer. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is “to re-write a black
queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of
our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and
beyond.” Through this positive imagery, Muholi hopes to offset the
stigma and negativity attached to queer identity in African society.
Wangechi Mutu (born 1972, Kenya/US),
Heeler IX, sculpture. Red soil, paper pulp, wood glue, rocks, acrylic shoe, wood (Silver Oak), 70.5 x 11.4 x 33 cm, 2016
In
collages, films, sculptures and installations Wangechi Mutu reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. Exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of
the female body and the feminine, in her works Wangechi Mutu proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridised female figures. Heelers is a series of anthropomorphic shoe sculptures; tapping into the spiritual and supernatural, the ancient and
primordial, and the terrestrial and cosmological, Mutu’s objects and installations propose a revised narrative of matriarchy and power. Wangechi Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she works in New York and Nairobi.
Lorraine O’Grady (born 1934, US),
Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, 129.2 × 103.8 cm, 1991/2019
The fleet of warships descend from a cloudy sky,
pointing toward the ground—a textured human skinscape—to disappear into a
horizon line joined together by coarse black pubic hair and clouds.
Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers is a title that suggests that these
ships have been deployed by Lilith an ancient mythological enchantress
who, according to legend, acts in the night, stealing babies from their
mothers and engaging in maleficent sexual promiscuity. The photomontage
alludes to the systemic violence women have historically experienced and
the battleground that is a woman’s body.
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born (born 1972, US),
Returning, video work, 09:38 min
Okpokwasili explores the roles of African and African
American women by creating multidisciplinary performance pieces that
seek to shape the shared space inhabited by the audience and performer.
Returning is a video work made with Peter Born developed at Dancespace –
St. Mark’s Church, a platform exploring collective song and the body as
a site of resistance and transformation. Delving further into embodied
protest and song, Okpokwasili continues to explore slowness, walking,
taking the first step, getting lost, and returning.
Frida Orupabo (born 1986, Norway),
A Litany for Survival, wood, video, sound, 135 × 120 × 60 cm, 2021
Frida Orupabo’s work explores questions related to
race, family and kin relations, gender, sexuality, violence and
identity. Her work consists of wooden sculpture in the shape of a bed
with a woman lying on it and a dog beside her on the ground. Installed
next to it is a looped video of Polish cabaret singer Violetta Villas
performing the song “Free Again.” The title A Litany for Survival is the
title of a poem by black feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde. The
discrepancy between Violetta Villas asserting her position as an
independent woman, after a breakup, is set against the continued
struggle for freedom of Black people, let alone women, expressed in
Audre Lorde’s vision. The resting figure on the bed is also a reference
to writer Ayi Kwei Armah, who stresses the importance of sleep after
traumatic events to survive.
Ebony G. Patterson (born 1981, Jamaica/US),
for those in times of uncertainty...., glitter, wax, silk flowers, beads, fabric, tassels, gems and hand-cast plastic Heliconia plant, 2017
Known for her drawings, tapestries, videos, sculptures
and installations that involve surfaces layered with flowers, glitter,
lace and beads, Patterson’s works investigate forms of embellishment as
they relate to youth culture within disenfranchised communities. Her
neo-baroque works address violence, masculinity, “bling,” visibility and
invisibility within the post-colonial context of her native Jamaica and
within black youth culture globally.
Ingrid Pollard (born 1953, UK),
Untitled, Photographic emulsion on canvas, 66 × 53 × 4 cm, 2022
Pollard is one of the leading figures in contemporary
British art; nominated for Turner Prize 2022. She is renowned for using
portrait and landscape photography to question our relationship with the
natural world and to interrogate social constructs such as Britishness,
race, sexuality and identity. Working across a variety of techniques
from photography, printmaking, drawing and installation to artists’
books, video and audio, Pollard combines meticulous research and
experimental processes to make art that is at once deeply personal and
socially resonant.
Deborah Roberts (born 1960, US),
Little Debbie, Mixed media collage on paper, 39 × 38.3 cm, 2012
Deborah Roberts is a mixed media artist whose work
challenges the notion of ideal beauty. She makes bold, collaged
portraits of Black children that critique societal conventions regarding
beauty, the body, and race. The artist combines hand-painted details
with photographs, magazine clippings, and Internet images as she conveys
the complexities of identity and undermines the limitations with which
American culture sees Black youth. Roberts critically engages with
image-making in art history and pop-culture, and ultimately grapples
with whatever power and authority these images have over the female
figure.
Betye Saar (born 1962, US),
We Was Mostly ‘Bout Survival (Ironing), mixed media on vintage washboard, 61.0 × 32.0 × 2.5 cm, 1997
Betye Saar calls out racism and stereotypes through
text and imagery. She depicts a Black domestic worker wearing a
stereotypical servant uniform, complete with an apron. Surrounding the
image are phrases, the title at the top of the washboard and “Liberate
Aunt Jemima” at the center. Aunt Jemima is based on the stereotype of a
mammy but is a figure used by Saar to represent empowerment. This work
is a commentary on women’s roles, division of labor, and social class
based on race.
Ming Smith (born 1947, US),
Pan Pan, gelatin silver print, 50.8 × 60.96 cm, 2006.
Remembering’ Billie: For Billie Holiday, gelatin silver print, 40.64 × 50.8 cm.
UNTITLED (Self-portrait with camera), ew York, NY, vintage print, 50.8 × 40.6 cm, 1989
Ming Smith is known for her informal, in-action
portraits of black cultural figures, from Alvin Ailey to Nina Simone and
a wide range of jazz musicians. From early on, Smith work could be
characterised as producing complicated and elaborate images with an
ethereal quality. Her shooting style often results in out-of-focus
images, obscuring the finer details of figure and background. Through
this deliberate blur, Smith creates a semi-abstract effect, making her
works immediately recognisable but also giving them a unique, dream-like
quality.
Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953, US), Untitled (Playing harmonica), Gelatin Silver Prints, 71.2 × 70.5 cm, 1990–1999
Carrie Mae Weems is both image-maker and storyteller.
In her widely acclaimed Kitchen Table series, Weems shares an intimate
narrative of domestic rituals and relationships. It is a series in which
Weems plays the protagonist. She is a lover, a partner, a mother, a
friend, a woman. In each image, she is seen at her lamp-lit kitchen
table, often accompanied by a rotating cast of family and friends, and
sometimes alone. It is here, in the most gendered space of the home,
that we see Weems perform the moments of joy, doubt, desire, disorder,
loss and courage that define the human bonds we create throughout a
lifetime.
Alberta Whittle (born 1980, Barbados/UK), A Black footprint is a beautiful thing, video, 11 min 30 sec, 2021
Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator.
Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest
self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling
anti-blackness. In her work, Alberta Whittle looks at the shipworm as a
collaborator and decolonial agent that has actively intervened and
resisted, willingly or unwillingly, the advance of European imperialism
by unleashing its hunger on the woodwork of the ships that enabled the
colonialization of the Caribbean, where the Whittle’s family originates
from. The artist’s exploration of the shipworm began with her wondering
if it can feel pleasure. The work is a celebration of small organisms as
anti-colonialist agents. The shipworm becomes a sensual symbol of
bottom-up power.
Rachel Eulena Williams (born 1991, US), Out Till Break,
Installation/painting, acrylic on canvas and cotton rope, 150.1 × 115.8
cm, 2018. Patterns of distance together, Installation/painting,
acrylic, dye, canvas and rope on wood panels, 2147.3 × 132.1 cm, 2019
Rachel Eulena Williams works at the boundaries between
painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from
the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a
myriad of spatial contortions. Her evident interest in colour represents
a liberation from, and criticality of, Western art history’s othering
of colour, and categorizing it as unruly, foreign, and vulgar. Instead,
her interest in imagining unrestrained structures exceeds those
boundaries and is partially inspired by science fiction.
