Creating Their Own Image: A History of African-American Women Artists.

Creating Their Own Image A History of African-American Women Artists Aronson Galleries at the Parsons School of Design, New York City November 11, 2004-January 30, 2005

African Queen The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City January 26-March 27, 2005

Two recent exhibitions in New York City highlighted contemporary African American women artists and the exploration of black beauty respectively. At the Parsons School of Design's Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, art historian Lisa Farrington organized "Creating Their Own Image: A History of African-American Women Artists." At the Studio Museum in Harlem, the team of Rashida Bumbray, Ali Evans, Sandra D. Jackson, and Christine Y. Kim curated "African Queen."

Drawing from her textbook of the same title published by Oxford University Press in January 2005, Farrington selected twenty-four African American women artists working from the 1960s to the present day for "Creating Their Own Image." She organized the exhibition into four spaces and topical areas: "Feminism and Black Power," "Abstract Explorations," "'Post Black' Art and the New Millennium," and "Conceptualism: Art as Idea." In the first space, under the rubric of feminism and black power, the exhibition opened with the work of Alaiyo Bradshaw, Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, and Elizabeth Catlett. In the text panel, Farrington writes of these works that "During this period [the 1960s], women of color defied patriarchal demands that they curtail their professional ambitions and confine themselves to the domestic sphere, through masterful visual means, they contested society's insistence on their subservience and their silence and they redefined themselves and their gender." Farrington's argument was reinforced visibly with her selection of Amos's Tightrope (1995). The image depicts the artist dressed as Wonder Woman, walking a tightrope. In one hand she holds paintbrushes and in the other a painted t-shirt that depicts breasts. Paul Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women (1899) is silk-screened at each corner of the painting. The painting aptly sums up the confrontation of the black feminist artist with the academy, the appropriation and reconstitution of "masterworks" from the Western tradition, and the dissembling of aesthetic hierarchies.

In the gallery devoted to "Abstract Explorations," Farrington asserted that these artists "embraced abstraction" and subtly engaged politics in their respective mediums. The supposition that black women artists are always engaged in the political is an intriguing and problematic one. A case in point was the abstract works on paper of Howardena Pindell. The artist began as an abstract painter, moved to figuration, and recently returned to abstraction. Her numbered-dot pictures, Untitled #2 (1973) and Untitled #35 (2004), reveal an artist obsessed with detail and the overall structure and grid of the paper. Several questions remained unanswered in this gallery: How is the political enacted in these abstract images? Is the act of making art a political act for black women?

In the adjoining gallery, which focused on "'Post Black' Art and the New Millennium," Farrington included the widest range of materials: woven acrylic and cotton yarn, cd-rom, ceramic, lithograph, and painting. She also gathered together the works of seemingly disparate artists: Xenobia Bailey, Pamela Jennings, Camille Billops, Margo Humphrey, Deborah Grant, Gaff Shaw-Clemons, and Robin Holder. "This new wave of artists," she argued, "is believed to be closer to the mainstream than any who have gone before, in large part due to their espousal of alternative and technology-based media, and they have been christened 'post conceptual," 'post ethnic,' and 'post black.'" Belying the assertion of a "post black" moment in the twenty-first century, several of the works, including Humphrey's witty and satirical take on The Last Supper titled The Last Bar-B-Que (1988-89) and Billops's The Story of Mom (1981), engaged race in direct ways, undermining the notion that race has disappeared from view or is secondary to the artistic production of black women. Of the artists in this category, Deborah Grant appears to be most aligned with postmodernism in her fragmentation of knowledge and her play with language and symbols. Her kangaroo-shaped canvas in black, white, and red, 70/30 Split (2004), deploys language and race in random association to make meaning. Although Farrington included strong works in this section, the viewer is left wondering how to define the "post conceptual," "post ethnic," and "post black."

The last gallery, with a view to Fifth Avenue, was the most successful section of "Creating Their Own Image." In the self-contained space, Farrington displayed the powerful photographs of Renee Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Coreen Simpson, Adrian Piper, and Lorraine O'Grady, as well a cut-out by Kara Walker and sculptures by Chakaia Booker and Helen Evan Ramsaran. In this section, titled "Conceptualism: Art as Idea," Farrington argued that these artists took as the central focus of their works ideas and concepts rather than the object itself. All the photographs worked seamlessly together, from Carrie Mae Weems's Girl, Evidently the Man, no. 215 (1987) to Renee Cox's Bullets at Green River (2001). Tucked tightly into the front two corners of the gallery, Chakaia Booker's remarkable sculptures made of black rubber tires evoked beauty and violence in their petal-like forms.

An important aspect of "Creating Their Own Image" was the way the exhibition gathered together several generations of African American women artists. Although many of the artists have received critical recognition and acclaim, Farrington pointed out that no single academic study or textbook addresses them as a group. This raises an interesting point: Intellectually, the show feels like the textbook on which it is based, rather than being developed from curatorial vision or from the objects themselves. Overall, the exhibition suffered from the lack of tightly held-together space. The first three galleries function as an extended hallway to other parts of the building. In fact, the first "gallery" was a space located across from the elevator, making it difficult to access the art. Many works could have used more wall space and much of the sculpture felt crammed into corners. These installation problems aside, Farrington is to be commended for taking on the difficult task of showing such a wide range of artists linked through race.

In contrast to the display at the Aronson Galleries, the curatorial team at the Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH) presented with the exhibition "African Queen" a strong visual display in two spacious galleries. Although the curators included a large introductory text panel stating the concept for the show, they did not employ any other content labels. They highlighted thirty artists working in a range of media including video, sculpture, photography, painting, and mixed media. Artists ranged from Mickalene Thomas (mixed media) to Ike Ude (photography) to Shinique Smith (found objects). Several artists featured in "Creating Their Own Image" were also present in "African Queen," including Chakaia Booker, Renee Cox, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

In "African Queen," the curators selected art that centered on ideas related to black female beauty and the black body, proposing that the exhibition "exposes both real and imagined attitudes of a Black queen. It integrates many notions of the 'queen'--as royalty, as celebrity, as transgender, and as an attitude." All the images revealed the multifaceted nature of black female beauty. From Nadine Robinson's large wall hanging made of synthetic hair, Laquita (2004), to Chakaia Booker's tire-rubber sculpture, Repungent Repunzel (Let Down Your Hair) (1995), black hair was a theme that resonated throughout the exhibition. Barkley Hendricks's Byzantine-like icon Lawdy Mama (1979) revels in the straight-on beauty of the Afro-wearing black woman, as does Deana Lawson's cibrachrome photograph Diane (2004); both evoke the black woman as mother to all generations.

"African Queen" suggested that the grotesque body is part of the construct of beauty as well. In the works of Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, Tracey Rose, and Mark Bradford bodies are distorted, manipulated, and monstrous. Deborah Willis celebrates the alterative body of a black female body-builder: hard-muscled and tattooed, the woman's physical prowess is evident through the close-up of her contoured back and torso. The specter of transgender was also present in the show in the work of such artists James Van Der Zee and Lyle Ashton Harris. Van Der Zee's two photographs Beau of the Ball (1936) and Metropolitan Women's Club (1936) pictured two different drag queens from early in the twentieth century. In Miss America (1987-88), Harris questions standards of beauty that are based on the white female form. His photograph depicts an androgynous figure (perhaps the artist), eyes shut, wearing white pancake make-up and draped in the American flag. On the walls of the gallery, the viewer encounters defiance, modesty, desire, denial, acceptance, self possession, and beauty. Through visual media, the curators of "African Queen" ask the viewer to consider how language and images continue to shape and inform an understanding of beauty as it relates to the black woman.