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North Carolina artist Minnie Evans is well-known for the symmetrical, abstracted floral drawings that she produced from 1930 until her death in 1987. Less well known are her naturalistic compositions of identifiable locations around Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived. Evans's choice of local spaces, notable for welcoming Black residents during the Jim Crow era, reminds us of the real issues of access and segregation that she faced as a Black woman in twentieth-century North Carolina. Evans's images, especially Airlie Oak (1954), recall the histories of enslavement, violence, and refuge in Wilmington's surrounding forests, particularly those associated with the city's thriving nineteenth-century turpentine industry and its 1898 White supremacist coup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since decolonizing aesthetics should demand that we question historical templates that are treated uncritically as the vehicles for conveying authoritative knowledge, this experimental essay aims at the level of form to enact the content for which it is arguing. It suggests that interacting with the works of three African-American women artists involves viewers in a mode of creolizing or reenfranchising marginalized creative resources. Specifically, the relevant aesthetic objects facilitate relationships among spheres of life that have been attenuated or made distant from one another in worlds dominated by Euromodern hegemony and its models of scientific and technical rationality. These works cultivate the meeting of the once and still living by centring the continued dynamism of shared aspirations; they bridge an affirmation of dignified Black femininity and ladyhood with facing and fighting the gruesome attacks on projects of Black freedom; and they connect ancestral and contemporary artists similarly involved with making the everyday sublime through concretely interweaving the extraordinary with the quotidian. As they clasp together what have been severed domains, they offer their viewers a distinct context for becoming in ways that exemplify the larger quality of a decolonizing aesthetics focused on creating a world in which many worlds thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faith Ringgold exemplifies Black female creative expression. Drawing upon her own experience as a Black woman artist in America as well as the quiltmaking tradition, marked with resistance and protest, she produced picture books which are counterstories to the existing narratives of Black life. The article demonstrates how Ring-gold's stories foster resistance and resilience by featuring children exercizing agency, as well as offering "counter" images. It provides examples of how the narratives acknowledge Black pain while accentuating Black joy. It focuses on the characters' subversive strategies such as flying or secrecy. The article ends with the conclusion that Ringgold challenges ideas about who counts as a children's writer as well as what kinds of cultural work picture books do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gabrielle Civil, a Black feminist performance artist, and Anna Martine Whitehead, a Black transdisciplinary artist, formulate, exchange, and respond to embodied strategies of creativity and resistance. They discuss Black performance dreams and their own movements as Black performers. Recorded on June 4, 2020, during the coronavirus shutdown and shortly after George Floyd's tragic death, their words have become a time capsule. Their conversation is part of Black Motion Pictures, Civils interview series with radical Black creatives on Zoom, an internet video conference platform. Time signatures and ellipses from the original Zoom transcript highlight the glitchy strangeness and mediation of the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) is a cultural hub, meeting place, and gallery on the South Side of Chicago. The only surviving Works Progress Administration (WPA) community art center, it functions as a space for African American art, intergenerational dialogue, and as an institution for community education in the arts. In this interview with Natalie Battles, artist, activist, and former employee at the SSCAC, we learn about the center's history and its connections with social and cultural movements, her work there, and what it is like to be a young artist involved with a long-standing institution of African American art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes her quilt "Baron Samedi Visits His New Orleans Cousins" acquired by the Michigan State University. She cites the importance of her projects such as the African American Crafts Initiative and Will to Adorn to her practice as an interdisciplinary artist and a public folklorist. She explains the meaning of the boats and water portrayed in the quilt. She mentions that her early mentor and influence in needlework is artist Faith Ringgold.

The author reflects on over ten years of conducting and collecting interviews with and by women artists of African descent in a variety of formats. Topics covered include the ways that artists' interviews in national archives within the U.S. similarly uncover counternarratives within African American culture and across the African diaspora, and the significance of using critical methods found in black feminist thought for artists' interviews.

In this essay, I explore how the contemporary black female artists Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine work with photography and text to develop what I call, after the famous 1975 American landscape photography exhibition, a new, anticolonial, topographics. Connecting the geographical and anatomical meanings of the word "topography," I approach their works via the phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, tracing how the two artists decentre and throw into relief what Ahmed terms "whiteness as orientation." Enacting an affective, visual politics of discomfort and disorientation, Weems and Rankine, this essay contends, open new terrain from which to encounter the American landscape in visual, corporeal, and phenomenological terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews exhibitions "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85" at Sackler Center for Feminist Art form April 21–September 1 featuring cultural, and political work; and "The Waiting Room" by artist Simone Leigh from June 22–September 18.

For over a century, Black women performers have challenged racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. However, the ephemeral traces of historical performances are always in danger of being erased or misinterpreted. In the 1920s and 1930s, Josephine Baker both shocked and delighted audiences at Parisian dance halls with her scandalous banana belt. For many critics, the belt symbolizes either her agency or her submission to primitivist caricature and racial/sexual objectification. Instead, through what I call female phallicism, I theorize the belt as a multiple dildo harness that intervened in complex ways in colonial racial and sexual discourses. The banana belt offers contemporary critics a multidimensional, dialogic space for dismantling racial and sexual hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of performance artist Lorraine O'Grady in promoting black feminism art in the U.S. Topics discussed include O'Grady's persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire or Miss Black Middle Class, the influence of O'Grady's interruptive performances in the 1980s on the structures of race, gender and class, and the reinvention of radical black aesthetics through O'Grady's performances.

The article discusses the appearance of the African American woman artist taisha paggett and her performance art piece "underwaters (we is ready, we is ready)" presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial art festival. It mentions the controversy that arose over Biennial curator Michelle Grabner's inclusion of work purported to be that of another African American woman artist Donna Woolford but that was created by white artist Joe Scanlon and the withdrawal of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican?

The article explores the life and works of African American mixed-media artist Bernice Appelin-Williams. Topics mentioned include the start of Appelin-Williams' artistic career in Cuero, Texas, her habitual liking for repurposing discarded materials or found objects, her contemporary altars featuring photographs of women victims of domestic violence, and her strong interest in artistic experimentation.

This article considers Emma Amos's relationship to canonical Western art by positioning her use of appropriation as a form of both emulation and challenge. The author argues that Amos speaks to a dominant artistic culture by wearing its codes, performing from within that space but also from her distinct perspective as an African American woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1978, Corcoran Gallery of Art registrar Theresa Simmons, Renwick Gallery museum technician Edith T. Martin, and others organized a national show of black women artists to coincide with the 1979 annual meeting of the College Art Association. The show never secured adequate funding, and was canceled. This essay explores Contemporary Afro-American Women Artists through its documentation in the Archives of American Art. It considers the historiographical ramifications of Martin's decision to lend her research files for the exhibition to the Archives for microfilming in relation to feminist and black revisionist curatorial practices of the 1970s. This analysis of the failed exhibition and its paper trail offers a critique of the power and the limitations of the archive for the study of African American art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Sonya Clark, an African American visual artist who uses human hair and textiles as the media for her art, is presented. She talks about her use of materials and provides insights into her artistic production. When asked what led her to use the two different materials in her artwork, she refers textiles as a materials to make utilitarian objects. Clark also describes her creative process and how she moved from one medium to another.

An interview with African American visual artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards is presented. When asked to describe her work, she says that she create a mixed media portraiture, which primarily consists of drawing and collage. She talks about her which she mentions as biographical/autobiographical. She also discusses about her family, her relationship to them and how the relationship affects her.

The article presents images of artwork and discusses the role of collective memory and the history of African Americans in the work of artist Malaika Favorite. Emphasis is given to topics such as the technique of collage with found objects, the painting of gloves, and historical interpretation in art.

Patterson's analysis of Diary of a Mad Black Woman uncovers how content and artistic form mutually embed Tyler Perry's black women characters in masculinist paradigms that restructure but do not transform the patriarchal bases of black women's oppression. I argue that Perry's use of womanist theological paradigms in his representation of religion, gender, sexuality, and wellness would help him achieve his self-professed goal of defying Hollywood's stereotypical representations of black people, and, by extension, black life and culture. This analysis finally argues that if black womanist theological reflection figured more prominently in black religious practice and ideologies, black theological reflection could reconstitute a theological practice that truly aims to liberate all black people and engender experiences of wellness for black women in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the queering of blackness, or African American identity, in the work of the African American artist Mickalene Thomas. The author argues that Thomas' work opens up a conversation around post-blackness, an ethos that challenges traditional and heteronormative definitions of what it means to be black. Particular focus is paid to the depiction of African American women in several of Thomas' works, including the painting "Hotter than July." The author argues that in this and other works, Thomas takes on the stylistic tropes of heteronormative images and rearticulates them through a distinctly queer-feminist lens.