Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body Hood Museum.

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body

Hood Museum

Dartmouth College

April 1-August 10, 2008

The groundbreaking recent exhibition "Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body," curated by Barbara Thompson at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College (Fig. 1), featured more than one hundred sculptures, photographs, paintings, video, and installations, historical and contemporary, addressing gender and racial stereotypes. The exhibition, which included works by artists from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, surveyed the historical construction of stereotypes concerning the black female body, such as the erotic harem slave, the maternal mammy, and the hyper-sexualized black woman. In response, it featured contemporary artists from Africa and the Diaspora who confronted, challenged, and forcefully deconstructed the legacy of these negative and painful stereotypes.

Thompson divided the gallery space into three distinct but interrelated sections that the exhibition guide described as the "traditional African," the "Western colonial," and the "contemporary global." The traditional section, "Iconic Ideologies of Womanhood: African Cultural Perspectives" contained objects made by both men and women metaphorically referencing the female body. Carved wooden masks and figural sculptures, such as the Mende initiation mask (sowei) and a Baule female figure (blolo bla), evoked ideals of female beauty through the depiction of elaborate hairstyles and body markings. Carvers often represented a woman's facial features and body in a conventionalized manner to reference a woman's inner strength and character. The exhibition also included the work of female potters who created rounded vessels that suggested the form of a woman's fertile body and often added breast-like protrusions on the body of the vessel, such as those seen on the Nupe vessel from Nigeria (Fig. 2). In the section of the exhibition that most directly grows out of Thompson's dissertation research, a wide variety of ceramic vessels were represented from across the continent in which potters used raised nodules on the vessel's surface, such as seen on the Ga'anda ritual beer pot (lekleke), to suggest the permanent keloids that a young girl receives to mark different stages of the life cycle. This scarification publicly declared young girls' sexual maturity, taught them about social roles, and prepared them for the challenges they faced as adults and mothers.

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The second section of the exhibition, "Colonizing Black Women: The Western Imaginary," was provocatively located behind a V-shaped partition, blocking the section's contents from immediate view. This section primarily featured late nineteenth and early twentieth century picture postcards to convey how such popular imagery contributed to the Western invention of Africa. Images of nude or topless women positioned by photographers in sexually provocative odalisque poses dominated this section. Many of these images demand multiple and complex interpretations, such as the postcard of a Temne woman taken by the Lisk-Carew Brothers, who were not European but Creole men from Sierra Leone. They photographed this woman completely nude and placed their camera at a high angle to suggest her vulnerability and sexual availability. The original 1910 caption, "Timnie [Temne] Girl, Sierra Leone," was changed in the 1920s to read "Just you and me, Sierra Leone," and a loin cloth was added to the woman's lap, leading us to contemplate how photographic production and republishing both contributed to and profited from the negative stereotypes of African women. This image also forces us to confront the fact that even photographers with African heritage (not withstanding the special status of Creoles in Sierra Leone) were not immune to the marketability of the black nude female body, just as women throughout the world have been exploited and marketed by and within their own cultures. In the context of this exhibition, however, this fact complicates the concept of "colonizer" and "colonized."

This section also contained postcard images of African mothers and children and included one of the most disturbing images of the show: a voluptuous woman of African descent, breast-feeding a plump, light-complexioned child. The viewer was reminded of the "Black Mammy" figure of the American South and the fact that women of African descent in the Diaspora were often forced by poverty to leave their own children and raise those of other women. This section attempted to counter negative images of African women from the colonial era by featuring postcards made from studio photographs of women who appear to have commissioned their own photographs. The women sit or stand proudly, commanding their own self-representation, such as the postcard flora Ghana labeled "Gold Coast Girl" (c. 1910; Fig. 3). Christraud Geary, in the accompanying exhibition catalog, writes about the danger of including overtly racist and nude imagery of African women in a public forum, as it can unintentionally perpetuate painful stereotypes and encourage voyeurs (2008:158). While Thompson clearly felt this was a risk worth taking, notwithstanding her inclusion of both exploitative and empowering images, the images of nude and semi-nude African women in provocative and highly sexualized poses ultimately overshadowed those that revealed African agency. The use of a partition, presumably meant to warn the viewer of the disturbing imagery and nudity they would encounter behind it, functioned instead to increase the voyeuristic sensation of peering behind the veil into the forbidden harem.

The victimization of black women and the problem of absent mothers was also addressed in the final, as well as the most powerful and profound, section of the exhibition, "Meaning and Identity: Personal Journeys into Black Womanhood:' Thompson arranged this section so that some of its most visually striking works immediately confronted the viewer upon entering. Nigerian-born Sokari Douglas Camp's impressive metal sculpture Gelede from Top to Toe (1995), whose massive metal form with "missile-like" breasts that also resemble rolling pins, resounds with the message of female empowerment and the deconstruction of the high/low art dichotomy that has plagued the field of African art history, privileging sculpture and masks over the so-called low arts of textiles and ceramics--arts associated with women. The textile art and photographic installation of Senzeni Marasela, a black artist from South Africa, reconstructed memories of her absent mother, who worked as a domestic for a white family and suffered from episodic mental illness. In the piece Our Mother's Bosom from 2007 (Fig. 4), Marasela stuck metal pins into the bust of her mother's domestic uniform so that their sharp points stuck out--rendering her mother's breasts threatening rather than nurturing.

The sad story of Saartje Baartman, a Khoi-San woman brought to England and France from South Africa in the early nineteenth century occupied an important position in the exhibition. Baartman was publicly displayed, and humiliated, as the Hottentot Venus; her body became a scientific specimen, as she was exhibited in Europeas an example of the grotesque, inferior African woman. Numerous artists in this exhibition confronted the exploitative display and classification of Baartman and black women in general, which dominated the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of anthropometry. For example, Renee Cox's powerful black-and-white self-portrait photograph Hot-En-Tot (1994; Fig. 5) restages and takes back the exploitative history of Saartje Baartman: Cox, a Jamaican-born artist living in New York, photographed herself wearing prosthetic breasts and buttocks from a low angle to suggest her authoritative and commanding presence. Thompson placed another self-portrait photograph by Cox, Baby Back from 200l (Fig. 1), strategically at the entrance of this section to demonstrate how contemporary artists consciously recycle and critique the exploitative and erotic images of the black female body seen in the previous section. In this larger-than-life-sized work, Cox places herself in the role of the odalisque and photographs herself from the rear entirely nude--except for her red stiletto shoes and whip. In the exhibition, this image presumably was meant to represent a declaration of female empowerment; however, its meaning is perilously linked to and dependent on its maker since the same image taken by a male or Euro-American photographer would be interpreted as exploitative. Cox, who uses the self-portrait to express control over her own sexuality, also raises complex questions over whether she is engaging in empowerment or self-exploitation.

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Throughout this section of the exhibition, the aromatic smell of spices from Bernie Searle's 1999 installation Traces (from the Coulour Me series) wafted throughout the gallery. Her aesthetically beautiful installation included large photographs of her body and the imprint of her absent body covered with red, brown, and yellow spices to address the superficiality of racial classification and to confront her classification as "colored" by South Africa's apartheid government. In this same gallery hung the evocative photographs of the Moroccan born artist Lalla Essaydi, whose photographs Les Femme du Maroc #23a-c (2005; Fig. 6), superficially appear to replicate the voyeuristic Orientalist images of veiled women from the colonial era. In her work, however, women's veiled bodies are subversively covered with Arabic writing done with henna paste, thus combining the male-dominated art form of calligraphy with a female-controlled form of body adornment, henna, to suggest creative female transgression.

Searle and Essaydi's work serve as examples of the wide range of perspectives, geographic diversity, and political, economic, and social backgrounds of the artists featured in this final section of the exhibition. While some of the artists, such as Searle, confronted the superficiality of classifications based on race, overall the exhibition did not effectively deconstruct the complicated and often restricting nature of the labels "black" and "African," which were part of the exhibition's title. In the exhibition catalog, the artist Hassan Musa, for example, claims that being "black" or "African" are identities imposed by the "West" (Musa 2008:210). Perhaps these labels were too complex to address in the exhibition itself, whose agenda to deconstruct gender stereotypes was already profoundly ambitious. Since these terms were deconstructed in some of the catalog essays, the curator was certainly aware of the multifarious nature of the concepts "black" and "African."

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Feminist and female-centric approaches to the field of African art history are seriously lacking and this welcome exhibition fills a gaping void. However, the exhibition's effort to link the so-called traditional, the colonial, and the global contemporary was simultaneously its strength and its weakness. While I applaud Thompson's ambitious endeavor to contextualize contemporary works by linking them to historical and traditional cultural forms, more problematic for me was the fact that the exhibition seemed to suggest a cultural/chronological trajectory of gender harmony (traditional Africa), exploitation (colonial Africa), and confrontation and healing (contemporary global). The arc of this trajectory obscures the fact that African women's lives in a so-called traditional context, either pastor present, can be oppressive and constraining. The curator's full awareness of this is apparent in the exhibition catalog, where she acknowledges that societal restrictions often prohibit young women living in Africa flora pursuing careers as professional artists in a global forum, and they are often confined to socially acceptable forms of artistic production, such as textiles or pottery (Thompson 2008:19). Art exhibitions are by nature an admittedly limited forum in which to deconstruct complex issues and Thompson deserves credit for taking on many of these in her accompanying exhibition catalog. In sum, Thompson's exhibition was truly innovative, thought-provoking, gutsy, and inspiring. It should serve as a model for future exhibitions and hopefully it will provide the impetus for more curators and academics to consider the long neglected intersection of gender and the arts from Africa and its Diaspora.

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"Black Womanhood" traveled to the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, from September 10-December 10, 2008 and to the San Diego Museum of Art from January 31-April 26, 2009. The exhibition catalogue, Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, edited by Barbara Thompson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), is available for $50.00.

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References cited:

Geary, Christraud. 2008. "The Black Female Body, the Postcard, and the Archives." In Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Barbara Thompson, pp. 143-162. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Musa, Hassan. 2008. "Exchanges: Hassan Musa, Part 1." In Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Barbara Thompson, pp. 209-210. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Thompson, Barbara. 2008. "Introduction." In Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Barbara Thompson, pp. 15 23. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

CYNTHIA BECKER is assistant professor of African art history at Boston University. She is the author of the book Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity. [e-mail]