By comparing “A Little Taste Outside of Love” (2007) by Mickalene Thomas (1971-Present) and “A Black Woman” (1775) by an unknown French painter this paper will demonstrate that although blacks were once degraded through the sexualization of their bodies in art, their nudity is now used to convey empowerment in contemporary art.
The formal elements to support this argument are the different posing of the exposed black female body in both pieces, whereas in Thomas’s piece the woman in laying with her back partially to the viewer and in “A Black Woman” the woman is covering herself with her arms crossing her chest, how the backgrounds differ in hue which has different effects on the emphasis of their bodies, whereas the Thomas’s piece has bright
In Kimberly Springer’s anthology, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, she has different articles in the book that are written by a variety of women. The articles in the book break down and discuss areas of history and time-periods that shaped the representation and current understanding of the black female body. Many ideals of how society preserves the black female body to be is based on historical context that the authors in Springers book further explain. The two articles that I am going to focus on are Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of “Hottentot” Women in Europe 1815-17 and Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction.
“Terminal Avenue” versus “We So Seldom Look on Love” Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue” was published in the anthology or collection of fictional short stories called “So Long Been Dreaming” in 2004. Bose “Terminal Avenue” is a futuristic dystopian short story about a young aboriginal man named Wil, who is torn between his aboriginal community whose traditions are being punished for by the police and or being punished by his family if he becomes a peace officer to survive the adjustment. Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look at Love” is a collection of fictional short stories and was published in 1992. (Broadview Press) “We So Seldom Look on Love” collections include a short story about a young woman that lives the life of necrophilia who grew up in a moderately normal childhood until the age of thirteen. Where one day she finds a forceful energy she gets from when life turns into death, and continues to experiment with dead animals and cadavers.
How does one embrace the message and soul of artwork when you can’t get passed the color of skin in the portraits? Two barrier breaking retrospective artists born with more than 2,899 miles between them have beat down the walls in the art world opening up endless opportunities for female artist today. Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson specialize in catching the viewer’s eye and penetrating their feelings towards issues of culture, politics, equality, and feminism. It is well established that these woman specialize in identifying problems in their artwork, both artists seem to struggle with not being able to avoid the ignorant eye of stereotyping because they use African American Models in their artwork. Carrie Mae Weems doesn’t see her artwork
Kara Walker’s piece titled Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b 'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart represents discrimination on basis of race that happened during the period of slavery. The medium Walker specializes in using paper in her artwork. This piece is currently exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Even though this artwork depicts slavery, discrimination is still an issue today in America, the country where people are supposedly free and equal. Even though slavery ended in the 19th century, we still see hints of racial discrimination for African Americans in our society. Walker uses color, image composition, and iconography to point out evidence of racial inequality that existed in the
There has been much debate over the Negro during the Harlem Renaissance. Two philosophers have created their own interpretations of the Negro during this Period. In Alain Locke’s essay, The New Negro, he distinguishes the difference of the “old” and “new” Negro, while in Langston Hughes essay, When the Negro Was in Vogue, looks at the circumstances of the “new” Negro from a more critical perspective.
Jackson, P. (1992). (in)Forming the Visual: (re)Presenting Women of African Descent. International Review of African American Art. 14 (3), 31-7.
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston breaks from the tradition of her time by rejecting the idea that the African American people should be ashamed or saddened by the color of their skin. She tells other African Americans that they should embrace their color and be proud of who they are. She writes, “[A socialite]…has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges,” and “I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (942-943). Whether she feels “colored” or not, she knows she is beautiful and of value. But Hurston writes about a time when she did not always know that she was considered colored.
Ever since Christopher Columbus arrived in America in 1492, white people have constantly oppressed and discriminated against minority races. In my original essay, I addressed how leaders of the Black Arts Movement believed that the establishment of a separate Black culture provided the best opportunity for change to occur. During the time period of the Black Arts Movement, many thought that two separate spirits divided American society—a Black spirit and a White spirit. In the minds of African-Americans, the White spirit unfairly dominated and controlled America, leaving the Black spirit with little impact or voice in society. According to Larry Neal, “Western aesthetic has run its course: it is impossible to construct anything meaningful within
Cox’s work is exactly the type of discussion that is needed to move the discourse on black women’s bodies from being regarded as part of a stereotype to being regarded as individuals with beautiful differences. This is not a ‘re-mirroring’ of the ‘un-mirrored,’ but rather a creation of a new image, void of previous misconceptions but filled with individuality. The stereotypes concerning black women’s bodies needs to be abolished, not reinvented like Hobson suggests in “Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture.”
"29 n The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers." Cultural theory and popular culture: A reader (1997): 310.
Prior to these encounters, Black women and black femininity were always hidden behind a veil. This veil is a metaphor connoting the invisibility of African American females. As Barbara Smith critiques, “at a time where women studies were about white women, black studies were about black men.” (quoted in Wallace-Sanders et.al, 1) There was no room for discussion about black women; they were pushed into the cracks of obscurity. In a period where the female nude was a trending pass time a...
Ninety percent of Americans marry by the time that they are fifty; however, forty to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce ("Marriage and Divorce"). Love and marriage are said to go hand in hand, so why does true love not persist? True, whole-hearted, and long-lasting love is as difficult to find as a black cat in a coal cellar. Loveless marriages are more common than ever, and the divorce rate reflects this. The forms of love seen between these many marriages is often fleeting. Raymond Carver explores these many forms of love, how they create happiness, sadness, and anything in between, and how they contrast from true love, through his characters in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". Four couples are presented: Mel and Terri, Nick and Laura, Ed and Terri, and, most importantly, an unnamed elderly couple; each couple exhibits a variation on the word love.
Shortly after Rachel was written in 1916, the New Negro Movement began to gain traction in the African American community. This broad cultural movement focused on promoting a public image of African Americans as industrious, urban, independent, and distinct from the subservient and illiterate “Old Negro” of the rural South. Unlike his predecessor, the New Negro was self-sufficient, intellectually sophisticated, creative, knowledgeable and proud of his racial heritage (Krasner, Beautiful Pageant 140). While these concepts had been promoted since the turn of the century, it was not until 1917-1918 that they began to crystalize as a concerted effort among African American intellectuals. These men actively supported the creation of black drama because they recognized that “At a time when African Americans had virtually no political recourse, their voice could best be heard through…a creative and humanistic effort to achieve the goal of civil rights by producing positive images of African Americans and promoting activism through art” (“New Negro Movement” 926). The New Negros therefore shared the same overall goal as black intellectuals such as DuBois, but believed that black artists should focus on presenting the reality and beauty of the “black human experience” instead of an idealized vision of what life should be. Ultimately, the transition from “political” art to that which held creativity in high esteem was complex and divisive. Fortunately, just as Dubois emerged as the primary advocate of the former Political Theatre, so too would Alain Locke help guide the New Negros to support the idea of Art Theatre.
The study of African American history has grown phenomenally over the last few decades and the debate over the relationship between slavery and racial prejudice has generated tremendous amounts of scholarship. There’s a renewed sense of interest in the academia with a new emphasis on studies and discussions pertaining to complicated relationships slavery as an institution has with racism. It is more so when the potential for recovering additional knowledge seems to be limitless. Even in the fields of cultural and literary studies, there is a huge emphasis upon uncovering aspects of the past that would lead one towards a better understanding of the genesis of certain institutionalized systems. A careful discussion of the history of slavery and racism in the new world in the early 17th Century would lead us towards a sensitive understanding of the kind of ‘playful’ relationship African Americans have with notions pertaining to location, dislocation and relocation. By taking up Toni Morrison’s ninth novel entitled A Mercy (2008), this paper firstly proposes to analyze this work as an African American’s artistic representation of primeval America in the 1680s before slavery was institutionalized. The next segment of the study intends to highlight a non-racial side of slavery by emphasizing upon Morrison’s take on the relationship between slavery and racism in the early heterogeneous society of colonial America. The concluding section tries to justify “how’ slavery gradually came to be cemented with degraded racial ideologies and exclusivist social constructs which ultimately, led to the equation of the term ‘blackness’ almost with ‘slaves’.
To conclude, the use of body for Feminist and Performance artists in the 1960s-1970s was significant in confronting the way women were viewed as artists in a male dominated art world. It was a vital element in raising consciousness and showing action towards the ideas of feminism. (Holt.J, 2009) Feminine nudity was a controversial problem, which female artists wanted to provoke in order to gain equality. The body became a form of expression to transform social stereotypes, and used as a primary medium, which reasserted aspects of a women’s figure that had been traditionally ignored or repressed by the male majority. (Holt.J, 2009) The body had just become one platform used by feminism and performance artists such as, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke to rebel and promote their ideas, in order to gain equal rights.