Sentences
Thompson: In the introductory essay to the exhibition Black Womanhood: Images Icons, and the Ideologies of the African Body, Barbara Thompson examines the ways in which black female images have been distorted in dominant culture and in turn how black artists have in her words “confronted” and “decolonized” these images.
Response
Barbara Thompson’s introduction to the Black Womanhood exhibition at Dartmouth College’s Hood Musuem exposed many important details about the representation and (mis) representation of black bodies, specifically black women’s bodies. I found the first section about colonial fixations of the black body that were a dichotomy of repulsion and attraction. In this section, Thompson describes the work of Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan artist, currently living in New York whose work is centered on the black female form. Interestingly, Mutu uses collage with a variety of different materials to create what Thompson calls “female superheroes.” When looking closely at Mutu’s piece Double Fuse on the first page of the article there is a woman that looks seductive, yet robotic and almost alien, which recalls the “othering” and simultaneous sexualizing of black women in the history of western visual culture. Mutu, however, presents a different take on these generalizations, making an all-powerful female figure, with dualities that create her identity, rather than detract from it. While Thompson does not explicitly reference Saartjie Baartman, the South African woman brought to Western Europe to literally be put on display in the early 19th century. Baartman became know as Hottentot Venus or Black Venus referenced in the title of this section of the article. Many contemporary black women artists in particular have called upon the history of exploitation and legacy of Saartjie Baartman, whose genitals and brain were preserved and yet again put on display in Paris. These artists such as Renée Cox and Renée Green, present a critique of the systems that enslaved black female bodies in the 19th century through the present day. The difference between these artists is there method of production. Green does not use bodies to represent the legacy of Baartman but rather a stage for viewer to climb on and read observations of her body as well of the body of Josephine Baker on display in her 1990 piece Seen. Cox, however becomes Baartman in Hot en Tot, where she photographs herself with prosthetic breasts and butt to expose the ways in which black women’s bodies are typified as exotic, yet not all black women fit this mold. Each of these pieces makes me wonder why black women’s bodies are still marginalized and generalized, and how art may help to alleviate these fallacies.