Bodies
The following artworks are concerned with the body, often in the context of anti-Black, technological, and gender-based oppressions. Many of these works transform our conceptions of humanity and, by presenting altered ways of being, prompt us to consider the ways Black people have been seen at varying times as human, subhuman, or superhuman.
As scholar Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has elucidated about Black writers such as Octavia Butler and visual artists such as Wangechi Mutu, the works do not seek recognition in the face of anti-blackness. Instead, they interrogate the entire concept of “the body,” using blackness as a material that can be depicted as more or less human.
Bodies was organized by Amber Edmond, former Studio Museum/MoMA Joint Curatorial Fellow.
Zanele Muholi presents themself so that the viewer sees their face but does not meet their gaze, which is notedly reflected in a mirror. This reflection resists objectification by emphasizing the subject’s enjoyment of themself. Muholi’s image evinces the powerful effect of turning a measured gaze toward self-representation.
Tschabalala Self depicts two intertwined figures in shades of brown and pink.
One figure is the central focus of the work, with its face cut off at the forehead, while another’s maroon legs descend from the top of the painting. Entwined leans into a history of sexual objectification—especially of the Black body— instead of resisting it.
Narcissister works with caricature and performance to interrogate race, gender, and sexuality. Untitled (Zagreb #8) is a collaged image of a Black doll with a cut-out image of an open mouth. The result evokes the blank face of a sex doll, recalling the stereotypical boxes in which women’s sexuality is placed.
Firelei Báez invents new possibilities for hybrid figures through imaginative and, at times, abstracted environments. In Fire wood pretending to be fire, a pair of eyes emerge from the swirling, brightly hued composition shaped as a head. A nonrepresentational form reminiscent of a landscape or microscopic view of cells is t
Wangechi Mutu reworks historically inaccurate narratives around African traditions, blackness, and womanhood in her creation of fantastical, hybridized figures and invented worlds. Here, one such figure stands holding a shoe of a floating figure with a monkey’s face—a creature somewhere between human and non-human.
In his series “Android/Negroid” Wayne Hodge uses found images from twentieth-century science fiction magazines to create collages of Black Americans from the nineteenth century. Traversing time and space, Android/Negroid #12 alters the strictly human into cyborgs—human and machine—to consider Afrofuturist possibilities.
In Julia Phillips’s Tuner, a metal bracket holds a ceramic piece with a knob at its center. The title poses a potential interaction with the object as a tool and references both the musical and radio device that detects audio frequencies. The sculpture’s form recalls a pelvis or shoulder blades—suggesting adjustments to physical and social frequencies, from music to technology to ideas of representation.
Cameron Clayborn’s sculpture suggests a biological presence.
Organ-like forms are pierced by a long, mounted nail attached to the wall. Comparable to the inside of the body but made of metal, the sculpture sits between the organic and inorganic.
As scholar Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has elucidated about Black writers such as Octavia Butler and visual artists such as Wangechi Mutu, the works do not seek recognition in the face of anti-blackness. Instead, they interrogate the entire concept of “the body,” using blackness as a material that can be depicted as more or less human.
Bodies was organized by Amber Edmond, former Studio Museum/MoMA Joint Curatorial Fellow.