Playing Nature and Culture: Black Women Make Themselves

exhibition brochure essay, "Soothsayers: She Who Speaks the Truth," Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, January - March, 1999

Ó 1998 Carla Williams. All Rights Reserved

During a recent conversation about Renée Cox's new photo series, no one was quite sure how to say the name. "It's pronounced 'Rage,' right?" someone asks, certain of their interpretation. More than one observer has ignored the accent mark in the name of Cox's black superheroine, Rajé, choosing through phonetics to associate the series with an underlying current of anger and frustration, albeit laced with humor and pride. Indeed, the contexts in which Cox places herself as Rajé suggest nothing less than a restructuring of power over the self as well as over representation. Describing the origins of this "self-proclaimed granddaughter of Nubia [as]…'the African sister of Wonder Woman [who]…came out on the cover of a couple of the comic books during the 1960s [and 70s] and we haven't heard from her since,'" Cox derives the subversive power of this series from an over-the-top, Technicolor, pop-culture sensibility that is easily titillated and difficult to challenge, though she succeeds in doing both.

Dressed in thigh-high, patent leather spike-heeled boots and a one-shoulder, one-piece body suit in slashing swaths of African nationalist flag colors, Rajé rears back her fist to punch a cowering white man in a suit; or she sits contemplatively atop the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of voluntary immigration to the United States; or she leads a black man and woman forth out of the "days of servitude" advertising history of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben into a late '90s vision of model-perfection and black people at ease in their sexuality and the display of their skin. The images veritably shout from the walls-Cox's heroine manifests collective latent fantasies of retribution and the rewriting of history through repositioning power in the black female body and making that power active rather than metaphoric.

"It's only when the viewer knows the photographer's name, sex, intention, and other contextual information that he or she can begin to grasp the photograph's meaning," explains Pat Ward Williams, who combines family photographs, media images, and life experience with sardonic wit and humor. In the installation Beware of the Dog, Williams fuses the personal with the political, creating a work that is both knowingly funny and vaguely sinister, exposing a cowardly Lothario but with an underlying implication of aggression and domestic violence. Williams examines the breakup of a relationship using an actual answering machine breakup message left by her ex, thus certifying his vernacular "dog" status as a man of whom to be wary, one who was not forthright enough to confront her in person. The barbed wire, flexed muscle and wrapped, raised fist of the man suggest the jarring disruption of the failed relationship, yet they also reference the fragile, brutal relationship between black men, power, and restraint in America, and the black woman's positioning, either by choice or circumstance, literally just outside the frame.

Day of the Dead/Little Angels addresses a different abuse of power and its tragic ramifications. The piece concerns the children killed when Philadelphia police bombed the home of members of the MOVE organization in 1985, killing six adults and five children. Williams' multiple frames of images and text within the construct of a charred, paned windowframe is both compartmentalizing and unifying, highlighting evocations of each child as a vibrant, playful entity contrasted with the cool, detached graphics of autopsy diagrams and sketch maps of the site where the massacre occurred. It is a public tragedy made personal by Williams' desire to put a human face and emotions to news headlines. Like Jenny Holzer's Truism "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise," Day of the Dead/Little Angels exposes the adversary but also holds him accountable. Williams' outrage and sympathy are palpable as she gives voice to the silenced.

Coreen Simpson's altered, collaged portraits of women function as comments on vanity and the construction of beauty. In one work, a young woman with luxurious, thick twists of hair is grotesquely transformed by a horse's face superimposed upon her own, her glamorous, seductive pose subverted by the jarring juxtaposition. Simpson, with a background in fashion photography, thus forces the viewer to reevaluate his or her system of beliefs surrounding issues of representation as well as the veracity of the photographic image. Rather than create a seamless melding of images, Simpson elects to show the seams, as it were, revealing her working process and emphasizing the deliberateness of the construction. In another work, the woman is transformed into an icon of worship, ostensibly ideal yet upon close inspection the parts begin to fracture from the whole, like a shattered mirroring revealing facets of likeness that are otherwise undetectable.

On the other end of the visual spectrum, Barbara Kigozi's unmanipulated, quiet, introspective portraits of herself and other black women are equally empowering as they give visibility to their often-overlooked, marginalized subjects. A portrait of a close-cropped woman bent over grasping her ankles, her body formed into a harp, is a deceptively simple composition. Poised between folding up and sprinting off, her body is a contradiction of angles and energy, movement and restraint. The poignant added testimonies given by the subjects reveal overwhelmingly negative self-perceptions and contribute an element of incongruity against which the spare, elegantly beautiful photographs struggle yet ultimately triumph.

The women's testimonies call to mind recent studies asserting that black teenaged girls have a largely positive self-image, unlike their white counterparts ¹, and leave the viewer to ponder the psychic as well as physical transformation from girl to woman. By lacing the images together with the declarative text, Kigozi provides a necessary mechanism of response and criticism to be effected between the subject and her representation. Furthermore, by allowing the last three statements on the wall to be fantastically positive-"I AM BEAUTIFUL," "SOMEDAYS I FEEL RIPE, LUSH, AND PERFECTLY ME," and "INVISIBLE NO MORE," Kigozi punctuates the grouping with strength and self-affirmation and subverts a painfully honest litany of negation.

Finally, Eve Sandler's installation concerns, in her words, the universal and spiritual themes of "birth, death, life, healing [and] the depths of the sea." The first part of the installation Mami Wata Crossing evokes the piercing pathos of the Middle Passage. Like the Southern landscape that can be so lushly, sensually beautiful while simultaneously harsh and deadly, the aquatic realm that Sandler has created for the viewer to pass through is an uneasily gorgeous landscape of memory, sight, and sound. Brilliant blue fish swim hypnotically in suspended vessels, visually enveloping the viewer while the aural accompaniment of creaking, moaning wood reveal a more ominous undercurrent of slavery and captivity during the long, often fatal voyage from Africa to the Americas.

Sandler's great, great, great grandmother was an African woman who survived the transatlantic passage. Using photographs of that anonymous woman's son, Sandler's great, great grandfather Luke Wade, and his wife, Ludy, who were themselves slaves in Halifax County, North Carolina, Sandler draws parallels between their immediate relationship with this horror and her own subsequent working through of her family's history. The video of the artist's Baptism, in which the water poured over her head is "suggestive of weeping," unites the past with the present through the symbolism of the fluid, fleeting medium. Taken together, the works of these five very different black women artists are like the completion of one collective, historic continuum, a spectrum of representation that runs the gamut from a whisper to a scream.

1. See Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997, for these discussions.