As a 21st century black women, the importance of this research is to increase people’s understanding of the ordeals and tribulations we face in our everyday life and our struggles to succeed because of our gender and ethnicity. With the research I gather, I hope to report how the socio-political issues of black female performance artists have impacted the art world, with their work form the 60’s to today. As stated throughout history, the black female society has been put under siege over the culture they support, gender and merely the colour of their skin. From post and modern-day slavery to racism, the art of many illustrates a stepping stone to reach freedom and peace as a black human around the world. Black artists have been making major contributions to the British art scene for decades, with some black artist coming together and making their own exhibitions and creating their own work within gallery spaces. There are numerous black female artists out there, many often bring up the issues they face everyday within their work, from racism the sexism. Are black female artists more empowering their differences within their art over the last 38 years? What reaction has this enflamed?
Black women have felt as if they are not in total control of their lives, portraying the lives the white culture reduces us to, with many exclaiming that ‘we are caged by the chains of society’. Visualize not being in total control of your life and having someone else tell you what you can and can not do merely due to your race and gender. To sense being a prisoner in a world that does not want to set you free and allow you to advance to your full potential. Black women have to live in a world that does not see them or treat them as equals. They have to work far harder than anyone else, with society accepting black men more than women, merely to only break the surface. How is it that black women still remain at the bottom of the totem pole, and how can they make strides toward equality? Society has more acceptance of black men than they do black women.
When we think about history, we find that there are defining moments we can embrace in every era. Art happens to be one endeavor that consistently informs us about the history and culture of past societies. Whether it is a performance, literary or visual, art is significant. Amid the harsh repression of slavery, particularly black women managed–sometimes at their own risk–to preserve the culture of their ancestry and articulate both their struggles and hopes in their own words and images back when Black women artists had no one to represent their interest in the cultural industry and opportunities for artistes to promote themselves. An ever-changing number of black female artists and writers surfaced throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction eras before bursting into the mainstream 1920s. After playing a significant role in the civil rights movement and the women’s movement of the 1960s, the rich body of creative work produced by black women has found even wider audiences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. With the black community being condensed historically to our bodies- being bought, sold and exposed- can this former commodity be used as a medium and what does it mean? Live, embodied performance works through the challenging substance of blackness, searching the unconscious zones of culture and exposing them to the dramatic, emotional disturbance. What cannot be denied is the notion that black performance art is formed in black cultural oppression and historical ancestry. Performance became a new surge of feminist art in the 1960’s and 70’s with the new medium adapting greater freedom of experimentation minus the fear of similarity to the predominantly male art world. The political nature of the practice is used by artists to critique and comment on current socio-political issues.
Lorraine O’ Grady is an American artist and critic whose work incorporates abstract art and performance with photography and video installations. Approaching more visual arts in the late 1970s, O’Grady became an active voice within the alternative New York art world, articulating the urgency of the great political and social challenge of the time. In addition to directing feminist concerns, her work tackled cultural perspectives that had been understated during the feminist movements of the early 1970s. There are numerous contrasting views in which individuals see art and how they react to certain pieces can make or break an artist’s work, growing controversy and sometimes hate. O’Grady’s piece, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, or, Miss Black Middle Class, was introduced as a fictitious persona in 1970, created to declare that art has the power to change the world, and the pure anger O’ Grady felt towards racism and sexism. She wore a dress crafted of 180 white gloves covering her body, voicing the art world growing out of its boundaries. Through this piece, she expressed the conflicts of her own identity, whilst invading the predominantly ‘white male’ art openings. At the gallery, O’Grady immediately turned heads. She raised her whip—which she called “the whip-that-made-plantations-move,” referencing the slave drivers on Southern plantations—and continued to give herself 100 lashes. She shouted poems of protest—against the exclusion of black people from the mainstream art world, and against black artists who she believed were compromising their identities to make work that was compliant to white curators and audiences. The white gloves concealing her body signified the work growing out of this system. Another performance piece of O’ Grady’s creating a similar uproar was 1983’s ‘Art Is…’, differing in the environment but hypothetically creating the same product of an aspiring voice for the black community. The performance was structured for audience participation, creating a lively, inviting space formulating Lorraine’s idea that art can be whatever you want it to be. O’ Grady entered that year’s African-American Day Parade on a float with ‘ART IS’ displayed in big letters, with a gold picture frame running alongside. Dressed in her previous persona, ‘Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’, O’Grady and a group of 15 African-American and Latino performers, all dressed in white, sauntered around the float carrying empty gold picture frames. This was to captivate the mostly black audience to consider themselves as valid pieces of art, and to highlight the racism in the art world.
"The creation of a black feminist aesthetic must challenge dominant culture's discourse of the black body [as] grotesque and articulate a black liberation discourse on the black body [as] beautiful." 3 (Hobson, Janelle (2003)). European and European-American society has historically viewed Blackness as ugly. I believe it is up to those operating within Black feminist theory and analysis to reinvent a new positionality and Lorraine O’ Grady is just one amongst them.
Another inspiring artist known for her work addressing the intersectionalities of racism, feminism, and slavery is Howardena Pindell. The American born abstract artist, creates multiple works testing the extremities of texture, colour and structures, from figure drawing to later include video. Pindell grew up in the South which was still segregated and the most stressed issue nationwide was racism, leading to her to create the 1980s work ’Free, White and 21’. With a camera set up in her apartment, an expressionless monologue was recorded, stating the racist experiences she has accounted growing up in America. She discussed the obvious divide between black and white Americans, creating a façade of a white woman and herself. The video starts with a shot of the artist in a guise of a white woman in the 1950s or 60s (to whom the title refers). Overlooking Pindell's experiences, the character continues with statements like, "you really must be paranoid," and "you won't exist until we validate you." (Howardena Pindell, 1980). When Pindell is shown onscreen as herself, she first recalls the abusive racist position her mother endured, and then speaks about her own milestones- recalling elementary, high school, college and young adulthood- through the discriminative society that made her development such a struggle. One point, Pindell peels a translucent mask off used in the cosmetic industry to ‘beautify’ women. This did not change the artists look, particularly the colour of her skin. This re-emphasizes that they were changed by the white-dominated American society- into what they want to see or how they should look. After organinising a show at the A.I.R Gallery 1980, Pindell soon realized she was a great voice for young black women in the constant racist society and began a collective with Carolyn Martin called “Entitled: Black Women Artists”. In later years the collective has grown internationally, with Howardena Pindell writing/lecturing on racism and the art community today.
Artist Carrie Mae Weems said (2015),
“There have been wonderful changes for women artists in the past 40-some years, and I know these women now in a way that I didn’t when my career began. As a student I went to the library to find books on women photographers and found there were very few—among them, Julia Margaret Cameron, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham. That was what first stimulated me to do research trying to locate women artists. Since then, there has been considerable improvement. However, although women artists are now being exhibited more, their work is still not valued to the extent of the male artists’. We are still a psychological and cultural distance away from recognizing and valuing them.”
Weems creates socially engaged, conceptual work from photography, video, to installation pieces for three decades. Using her own and international narratives, she addresses; what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls (1995) “the complex web of gender, race, sexuality, class, family and community that catches us all”. ‘Performance Gesture’ is a photographic series (2004-07) in which Carrie Mae Weems dresses herself as a clown salesman of hopes and dreams, influenced by a legendary german character (Faust) whose name represents a compromise in exchange for limited success and power. This performance was in response to the current 2004 Replubican National Convention in New York, creating mass protests and arrests. This alter ego headed to the streets, offering herself a public critique. With many of Weems work, the audience only sees the performanve through a camera lens which gives a completely different response to the artists. Performance is present, created to be live and doctumenting such a piece eliminates the values of experience and the ultimatum the artist is expressing. With Weems presenting herself in the streets, where her audience varies, I believe this offers a insight of the mixed emotions toward the socio-political issues around feminism and racism.
A recently formed collective of young black artists are taking a stand to the South African art world. iQhiya is based in Cape Town aand Johannesbury, Soth Africa, with their work specializing in performance art, video, photography, sculpture and other mediums. The word ‘iQhiya’ is the word for a cloth that women wear on their heads to carry watter to and from their villages. For the collective, this name represents the ‘unshakeable power’ and infinite love they have for one an other and their hopes to spread the love around the world. The South African art world privileges white, male owned gallerie and black, male artists through collaborations. iQhiya was formed in June 2015 to magnify their voices and create a safe place in which female artists can present their work, supporting the network of women who do so. Sethembile (a member of iQhiya) exclaimed (2015) “the invisibility of a black female body goes as far as being in the public space and feeling invisible in society… is it because we are not dominant enough?”. That question may be one of the reasons I believe the women felt a unity like iQhiya was needed. iQhiya’s first performance, created in 2016 was ‘The Portrait’ which was an endurance piece, representing the role forced upon Black women with the strength and struugles they faced in society. They all stood upon glass coke bottles in crates, using their real pain to obtain the agony living within a system that diminishes them. A photograph series documented the performance and were shown as a part of the exhibition at Greatmore, with the live performance serving as a protest against the struggles and the silence of the audience in return. The photographs shows otherwise, with the women portraying the beautiful images of themselves expected by society, with the true pain, suffering and mistreatment being concealed. When being interviewed by the creative showcase, ‘Between 10 and 5’, iQhiya was asked what are the future plans for the collective was. They said “WORLD DOMINATION”.