Abstraction, Embodiment, and Memory

To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves. For some of us this will not be easy. So long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look… And we – I speak only for black women here – have barely begun to articulate our life experience. -- Lorraine O’Grady1

Black women artists in the United States have produced aesthetically compelling, socially resonant, and visionary articulations of their lived experience despite the harsh conditions imposed upon people of African descent since their forced arrival in the Americas more than four hundred years ago. As performance artist Lorraine O’Grady’s words suggest, these artists have had to contend with distorted and demeaning misrepresentations of Black women that pervade popular culture and obscure the mirroring of their “true selves.”2 As well, their work has too often been disregarded by art museums, galleries, universities, and other cultural and educational institutions. In 1993, art historian and educator Freida High Tesfagiorgis wrote that, despite the marginalization of Black women artists, “their largely dismissed voices and unexhibited works evince a pervasive presence that intimates the longevity and complexity of their lives, works, and interventions within their diverse contexts.” Thus, she continued, “A discourse that would prioritize the lives and concerns of Black women artists is urgently needed.”3 The response to this call, most notably by Black women scholars and curators whose investigations of the interplay between race, gender, and the visual have revolutionized the field of art history and visual culture, has resulted in the increased visibility of Black women artists that is reflected in the collection of John and Susan Horseman.

This digital exhibition advances the Horseman Foundation’s goal of expanding the canon of American art and ensuring that works of art by modern and contemporary Black women artists from the Horseman Collection, and critical writing about these artists and their work, are available to a broad audience. Through multiple approaches to visual expression in a range of mediums, these artists engage in various ways with modern and contemporary artistic currents and with the lineages of African and African diasporic artistic traditions and Black modernism. Their work encompasses themes that include the Black female body as an embodied, subjective presence; abstraction as visual language and materials as signifiers of meaning; Black women’s historical and contemporary lived experience; reframing historical and art historical narratives; and visions for a more just and inclusive future.

In a 1981 interview, sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) told dancer Glory Van Scott, “We can learn from Black women. They have had to struggle for centuries. I feel that we have so much more to express and that we should demand to be heard and demand to be seen because we know and feel and can express so much, contribute so much aesthetically….”4 Among the foremost American artists of the twentieth century, Catlett is part of a lineage of Black women artists whose art constitutes an act of visual self-naming and claims space for Black women’s presence in visual culture. This centuries-long artistic lineage was rooted in the few forms of self-expression that were possible for Black women who toiled under the constraints of enslavement and servitude, as well as the brilliant accomplishments of Black women who had opportunities to study and travel, such as neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) and Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), whose sculptural manifestations of Pan-African ideals were critical to Black thought and Black culture in the United States and transnationally at the turn of the twentieth century and who is recognized as a foremother of the Harlem Renaissance.

Black women artists were central to the expression of “race pride” that characterized the Harlem Renaissance, the outpouring of Black creativity that was centered in northern U.S. cities to which more than one million African Americans had migrated in the first decades of the twentieth century. The visual artists, writers, playwrights and actors, musicians, dancers, and scholars in a variety of fields who constituted the Harlem Renaissance recognized and celebrated the idea that Black culture and its practitioners were central to the formation of modern American culture. Sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962) began her career during the Harlem Renaissance and played a central role as an arts educator in Harlem during the 1930s, where she directed the Works Progress Administration-funded Harlem Community Art Center; her expressive realist portrait sculpture Gamin (c. 1929) is the earliest work by a Black woman artist in the Horseman Collection.

While Lewis and Fuller represented Black women as subjects, Savage and Catlett were among the first Black sculptors to portray the unclothed Black female body in their work. Few African American artists have portrayed Black women’s bodies, particularly the nude body, for, as art historian and cultural theorist Judith Wilson asserts, "As both image and idea, the black body has long been a contested site."5 Similarly, art historian Lisa Gail Collins emphasizes “the brutal history of enforced overexposure of black women’s bodies,” a history that encompasses the exploitation of the bodies of people of African descent in America and the pervasiveness in western art history of colonizing images of the fetishized Black female body that has, writes Collins, been “overburdened by historical tensions of race, gender, and sexuality.”6 Extending the arc of resistance to such images, artists represented in the Horseman Collection, such as Emma Amos (1938-2020), Dindga McCannon (b. 1947), Alison Saar (b. 1956), and Simone Leigh (b. 1967), confront this burdened history and recuperate the Black female body as a signifier of selfhood, agency, and an embodied and empowered Black women’s presence.

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, when abstraction rose to art-world prominence, a significant number of Black women artists embraced abstraction as their form of artistic expression. Eschewing the previous decades’ emphasis on social realism and narrative, some of these artists turned to non-representational abstraction, in which gesture, form, line, color, and an ethos of improvisation serve as signifiers of meaning. Some approached abstraction as a visual language of simplification, stripping forms to their essence to represent or suggest the human figure, the natural world, and human-made structures and environments. One of only a few Black women sculptors, Geraldine McCullough (1917-2008) produced often large-scale sculptures, welded from steel and cast in bronze, that range from figurative to abstract. Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) began her lengthy career with explorations of abstract form and materials that are suggestive of forces in nature and the impact of time on human-made structures. Whether or not it contains representational images and references, these artists’ work often alludes to the politics of race and gender that shaped their lived experiences at mid-century. The visionary abstraction of artists such as Alma Thomas (1891-1978) and Mildred Thompson (1935-2003) invokes, in visual form, the beauty of the natural world, cycles in nature, the soul-stirring power of music, and the forces of the universe. These artists refused to be bound by expectations for what “Black art” should look like and the themes it should address.

Such expectations were central to the Black Arts Movement, the cultural manifestation of Black Power that crystallized during the latter part of the 1960s. Black Power principles and ideals found expression in theatre, literary works, music, and visual art as the non-violent Civil Rights protests and acts of resistance by Black Americans to end racial discrimination and gain equal rights under the law, increasingly regarded as ineffective in changing the conditions that shaped Black lives, gave way to the resolve to achieve, by any means necessary, self-definition and self- determination for Black people in the United States and throughout the world. A key question for Black artists at this time was how to visualize Blackness, as they posed these questions: Is there such a thing as a Black gesture, or a Black aesthetic? Some artists prioritized an instructive articulation and celebration of Blackness that was, of necessity, accessible to their African American audience. Other artists took an approach that was evocative rather than descriptive or narrative, utilizing materials, color, pattern, form, and gesture, often invoking elements of multiple African artistic traditions, to explore possibilities for reconciling the idea of a Black aesthetic with abstraction. Some of the artists who worked abstractly also regarded the act of making as performative – linked to dance, music, and experimental theatre – in this way connecting their visual art practice to new, radical forms of artistic expression. Most of these artists and other cultural figures who participated in the Black Arts Movement agreed that art had to contribute to the movement for Black liberation.7

Emma Amos said, “For me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.”8 The art of many Black women artists of this time spoke to concerns that were addressed neither by the male-dominated Black Arts Movement nor the predominantly white Feminist Art Movement. Their work illuminated the intersection of race and that shaped their lived experience as they highlighted their subjectivity as Black women – what Freida High Tesfagiorgis famously termed “Afrofemcentric consciousness.”9 Some formed groups for mutual support, visibility, and a collective voice in the art world. A 1971 exhibition by the New York-based Women, Students, and Artists for Black Liberation titled Where We At, Black Women Artists led to the formation of the group Where We At; Dindga McCannon was among its members. Black women artists also established galleries that featured the work of Black artists; Gallery 32, founded by visual artist, poet, and dancer Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944), was a pivotal venue for the Black arts community in Los Angeles from 1968 until 1970.10

Among the works of art by Black women artists in the Horseman Collection are significant examples of what is often termed “vernacular art.” Produced by self-taught artists such as Clementine Hunter (1887-1988), Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982), and Helen La France (1919-2020), this work does not fit neatly within the categories to which modern and contemporary works of art are generally assigned. Art historian Lisa Farrington writes, “Like the artists themselves, vernacular art has been equated with a succession of conflicting epithets, including decorative and restrained, unsophisticated and abstruse, static and unstable, obsessive and unpretentious, serious and whimsical, and visionary and functional. Such a range of descriptive terms suggests to what degree vernacular art resists classification and how important it is to examine this art on relatively fluid terms.”11 Working with readily available materials and incorporating substances and objects that resonate with symbolic meaning, these artists created and adorned objects of daily use that transcend any limitations of function and transformed their living spaces into expressive artistic environments. In drawings and paintings that are variously bold, exuberant, and elaborately detailed, they depicted their immediate environments, lived experiences, individual and familial memories, and people, animals, and fantastical beings that conjure spiritual and ancestral power.

Within and beyond the confines of the art world, Black women artists have continued to deploy the artistic strategies developed during the era of the Black Arts Movement, often in new ways that were shaped by the postmodern theoretical constructs that came to prominence in the 1980s. At the leading edge of postmodernism, their art interrogates the construction of meaning through visual, written, and spoken language, and how the meaning of a work of art is not fixed but can be perceived differently at varying times and in varying circumstances. As did many of their predecessors, these artists recognize identity as complicated and mutable, and ways that race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, class, and other social locations intersect to shape social perspectives, lived experience, how one is seen in the world and how one sees oneself. Some of these artists choose to utilize materials (often including materials that were previously not considered “art” mediums) that are imbued with historical and personal resonance. Alison Saar (b. 1956) invokes the arts of Africa and the African diaspora to investigate ritual, healing, power, and memory. Her materials – repurposed wood, hammered metal ceiling tiles, utilitarian fabrics, and other found objects – convey her rough-hewn figures’ potent spiritual charge, while their poses assert their subjectivity.

As well, artists such as Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) and Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968) extend the lineage of Black abstraction that is central to the story of modernism and postmodernism in the United States. Since the 1970s, Pindell has explored autobiography as personal, familial, and ancestral in densely layered, abstract collages. In a variety of mediums, including video, she has also produced conceptually based critiques of structural racism and for decades has worked to draw attention to the pervasive institutional racism in the art world. Jones’s minimalist sculptures and paintings mounted on acoustic panels reside at the conjunction of Black avant-garde music, visual abstraction, and modernism; her sound works are audio collages that incorporate earlier recordings by Black musicians of the work of Black avant-garde composers.12

African American women artists working in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first two decades of our current century have continued to challenge and recontextualize the history of representation and misrepresentation of Black people and dismantle the narratives contained within these images. These artists thus claim space for Black women’s presence in art historical narratives from which they have often been excluded. Artists such as Beverly McIver (b. 1960), whose work features prominently in the Horseman Collection, deploy strategies of appropriation, irony, and satire to interrogate and subvert longstanding stereotypes and illuminate their own lived experiences – their “true selves.”

In our globally interconnected moment, Black women artists from throughout the African diaspora who live and work in the United States are making substantial contributions to contemporary conversations about identity as mutable and intersectional, and about gender, dislocation and relocation, and the ongoing impact of colonialism in Africa and throughout the world. Born and educated in Uganda, Leilah Babirye (b. 1985) assembles and transforms discarded and devalued materials to signify the impact on LGBTQ+ people of politically and socially sanctioned homophobia in Uganda and, more generally, Africa. Layo Bright (b. 1991) addresses themes of inheritance, colonialism, and gender in sculptures that are infused with visual and material references to the arts of her Nigerian homeland.

The term “Post-Black,” introduced in the first years of our current century by curator Thelma Golden and artist Glenn Ligon, encompasses the resistance by some Black artists to categorization by race and to the circumscribed definition of “Blackness” articulated by the Black Arts Movement. These artists, writes Golden, “were adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in defining complex notions of blackness.”13 Contemporary Black women artists continue to define and redefine blackness as complex and nuanced, through work that embraces the intersectionality and fluidity of racial, gender, and ethnic identities, incorporates historical, global, and contemporary images and references, illumines personal and familial narratives, bears witness to history and its difficult cultural legacies, and asserts the right of freedom from subjugation of body and spirit for all oppressed peoples.

Melanie Anne Herzog