In Barbara Thompson’s chapter “Decolonizing Black Bodies: Personal Journeys in the Contemporary Voice” my attention was drawn to the work of South African artist Senzeni Marasela. Marasela uses a variety of media to explore her painful relationship with her mentally ill mother who was absent most of Marasela’s childhood. She also explores collective memory and colonial perceptions of the black female body in her series of embroidered scenes from the life of Sarah Baartman, a former South African slave who toured Europe as “The Hottentot Venus.” Sarah Baartman’s body was exoticised and fetishised as embodying the form of a black Venus. Her body became a site of Western attraction and repulsion and became a representation of racist western imaginations of the back female body. After she died, her body was dismembered by Napoleon’s physician and her gentiles and brain were put on display at the Musée de l’Homme until Nelson Mandela requested that her remains be returned to South Africa and respectfully buried in 2002. Thompson discusses the dismantling of the black Venus image and stereotype but doesn’t mention Marasela’s Baartman series (she talks about Marasela’s work in relation to motherhood) which is why I thought I’d highlight it here. This series both in subject and in medium connects the stereotype of the black Venus and the story of Sarah Baartman with the artist’s relationship with her mother. The images evoke the ideas of collective consciousness and collective memory by making these connections. She uses a technique traditionally labeled as “women’s work” and associated with female relationships and tradition. I think that because of needlework’s history and cultural associations it has the ability to transmit elements of the female experience in a much more intimate and personal way than other mediums are able to. Additionally, the associations of needlework being a skill passed down through generations of women makes visible the artist’s connection to her mother and to the subject of the series Sarah Baartman as well as to all women who came before her. In this series Marasela relates the dismembering and scrutiny of Baartman’s body to her own experience as a black woman in a Western urban environment.