Strategies of Identity

Visual activist Zanele Muholi, whose personal gender pronoun is they, uses self-portraiture to address the politics of gender and race in the ongoing body of work Somnyama Ngonyama (which translates to “Hail, The Dark Lioness” from their mother tongue, Zulu). Muholi poses in locations around the world and incorporates everyday found objects such as props, costumes, and set dressing to build images that draw on their personal family history, consumer culture, and art history. In this photograph, Muholi addresses the viewer with a forceful, piercing gaze, challenging the conventional exoticized, othered, and sexualized depictions of Black female bodies.

Carrie Mae Weems creates powerful, moving works that interrogate the intertwining of race, gender, sexuality, and politics. This picture is from a 1996 collaboration with painter Robert Colescott. In most of the pictures from this series, an unclothed Weems is tucked into the corner, performing the historically passive role of female models while the painter and his work occupy the center of the image. Here, however, Weems reverses the power dynamic by claiming center stage, standing tall, coolly regarding the viewer as the painter retreats to the corner, hiding his face. For Weems, the piece reveals how both the artist and the model are caught (or framed) within art history’s exclusionary set of values and hierarchies.

Over the course of her career, Judy Dater has primarily photographed women, including herself. This work is from a series she made during ten trips to national parks in the West between 1980 and 1983, where she photographed herself nude amidst the grandeur of nature. Seemingly stranded on an empty, endless road, she appears vulnerable and lost, but across the larger series, her photographs veer from savage self-examination to carefully constructed performances that explore identity, subjectivity, and femininity. One of the key influences on Dater’s photography is the work of Imogen Cunningham, who was also a close friend.

Conceptual artist Lorna Simpson’s work derives its gut-punching power from the evocative, allusive, and deeply unsettling combination of words and images. Here, four stacked photographs of a braided hair piece are accompanied by text panels that slide down from “not” to “noose,” along the way invoking related words (including “knot”) to effect a devastating slippage between the loop of the hair and the loop of a noose. The title Double Negative refers not only to the repeated negative phrases (“not”) but also to the double and entwined burdens of racism and sexism that Black women endure.

Afro-Cuban artist Magdalena Campos-Pons meditates on the histories of enslavement and globalization that have shaped the Caribbean and her own identity. She created this triptych after visiting Gorée, a small island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, known for its role in the transatlantic slave trade. Photographing her outstretched hands holding small items she found on the island alongside gathered bundles of sticks, Campos-Pons memorializes this history and connects the labor of her body to those of her ancestors who were forced from Nigeria to Cuba as enslaved laborers in the sugar industry.

Mickalene Thomas creates vibrantly layered artworks that reclaim iconic images to center Black female subjectivity in the history of art. A direct response to Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, this photograph transposes the scene of three White figures having a picnic in a park to an interior view of three exquisitely coiffed and adorned Black women (including Thomas’s partner at right) gazing directly and confidently at the viewer. The colorful, wood-paneled living room, complete with fake plants and mismatched African textiles, evokes Thomas’s 1970s childhood and the aesthetics of Blaxploitation cinema, known for its audacious, dangerous, and sexually confident gun-toting heroines.