Reclaiming Visual Culture: BLACK VENUS at Somerset House
Does Somerset House achieve its stated aim in BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture?
September 18, 2023
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
-min.jpg)
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
.jpeg)
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
.jpg)
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
%2C%20Kara%20Walker%20(2022)-min.jpeg)
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
‘Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.’ [bell hooks]
BLACK VENUS aims at such radicalism and achieves it; borrowing the spindly text of Somerset House’s own horror show, curator Aindrea Emelife reexamines troubling historical representations of Black women in visual culture. To do so, she has created a show that moves back and forth in time, both between more distant pasts and our present, and within the practices of the eighteen contemporary artists on display.
Here it begins, with Renee Cox and Carla Williams’ reinterpretations of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the main visual trope under investigation. Oft sexualised, these ‘nude’ women stand defiantly, gazing out at the words of bell hooks and other academics like Audre Lorde on the walls. This is our connection, a perfectly accessible entry point, which enables us to delve into the historic archive materials that follow.
In 1810, the South African Khoikhoi woman Saartjie (‘Sarah’) Baartman was ‘enlisted’ as a performer in South Africa by Dutch colonialists, then toured as a ‘freak show’ across Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Reproduction etchings from Frederick Christian Lewis advertise her arrival in Liverpool, suggesting her popular reception and celebrity. William Heath further exaggerates Baartman’s features in a print poking fun at Prime Minister Lord Grenville’s ‘broad-bottom government’, which passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. A little digging reveals little about the satirist’s own politics, save for his anti-government stance.
Heath’s curvaceous caricatures couldn’t be further from the svelte Josephine Baker, performing her infamous danse sauvage (savage dance) in 1920s Paris. Baker’s legacy also lingers in our present; Beyoncé borrowed her banana skirt for a show in 2006. As such, her image encourages us to consider more complex histories about how Black women have also appropriated and profited from derogatory stereotypes. It crops up again in ‘Miss Thang’ (2009), as Cox’s pool-princess embodies the intricacies of Black wealth, class, and socioeconomic status. With three rooms, the show can only dip its toe into exploring inequalities within Black communities.
Importantly, Emelife calls out the Hottentot as merely one such ‘dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation’. Others – Josephine Baker as the Jezebel and the Sable Venus – are interspersed throughout. The boundaries between these three tropes are not always so clearly defined, but this only encourages us to consider standard features used to portray other Black women.
The Sable Venus pretends towards an even older history, as the tale of an African slave emerging from the ocean, with white cherubs and Triton, a Greek god of the sea. But here, he waves the British flag, a nod to the image’s more modern construction, and its use as a propaganda tool to promote the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On either side of these archives, we find two works from Maud Sulter’s Zabat series (1989-1990), recasting contemporary Black creatives as classical Greek muses. Produced to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography, they bookend this film-heavy exhibition, perhaps itself an implicit reclamation of a practice historically used to perpetuate racism and violence. Interspersed - though somewhat lost - in the archives is a self-portrait by the Black photographer Florestine Perrault Collins.
Hanging over Somerset House’s fireplaces – architectures of its own colonial history, as the former government Navy Offices – Sulter’s muses sit in a distant conversation. BLACK VENUS broadly opts to show a few different works by the artists on display, a rare treat which enables us to see differences in their practice over time.
In Les Bijoux (2002), Sulter produces a series of performative self-portraits as Jeanne Duval, the ‘romantic companion’ (not lover!) and muse of the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The French-Haitian’s history is little known or credited, though, also depicted by painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, she no doubt shaped representations of beauty in modern and contemporary art.
In addressing particular representations of Black women, BLACK VENUS also casts a critical gaze over visual tropes and traditions in art history more widely. The muse is but one example, famously explored by the artist Carrie Mae Weems. Here, we get her famous photographic series, but better, one of her wallpapers, produced as a photo backdrop for her 1993 installation, The Apple of Adam’s Eye. The design reimagines a pattern by British artist John Farleigh, used in the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw’s book, The Adventures of The Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), combined with photographs taken during Weems’ own ‘pilgrimage’ to Ghana and West Africa in 1991.
Beyond the muse, other tools of marginalisation get taken back too. In ‘Anarcha’ (2017), Ayana V Jackson turns her back on the eroticised genre of the odalisque, an eighteenth-century trope of orientalism recently on display in the neighbouring Courtauld. (Take Me To The Water, another of her series, shares a great deal with Peter Brathwaite’s Rediscovering Black Portraiture, displayed on the other side at King’s College London back in 2022.) Masks – a homogenised, stereotypical symbol of ‘African art’ – crop in the works of Coreen Simpson and Delphine Diallo, suggesting how Black women are simultaneously deprived of their individuality, and sexualised.
Diallo, like Weems, also travelled to Africa to ‘discover her heritage’. But there’s little space to explore these voyages, or two-way flows back from the diaspora, ones which suggest identity is something to be found, or constructed. Weems is instead positioned as one of many well-known artists boasted in the show, like Alberta Whittle (and her digital collage dual, Tabita Rezaire), Sonia Boyce, Shawanda Corbett, and Zanele Muholi - an artist first encountered by the curator in her own study at the neighbouring Courtauld, a satisfying full circle for this exhibition.
More interesting are the everyday scenes, often left out of other exhibitions for the greats of African studio photography. BLACK VENUS focuses less on celebrity and more on representation of one’s self and one’s community; from Ming Smith, we get ordinary people participating in protests, long before ‘Grace on Motor Cycle’ (1978) or her self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe. More people are found in Maxine Walker’s and Amber Pinkerton’s collage-like series or Lorna Simpson’s ‘Photo Booth’ (2008), which features 50 found portraits alongside 50 ink drawings.
It all culminates in Corridor (2003), Simpson’s two-channel film showing the daily routines of two different women, both living in Massachusetts but distanced by a hundred years of history. Artist Wangechi Mutu performs both, drawing parallels and connections between the women’s experiences, underrepresented, of both the 1860s Civil War and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the embodiment of this exhibition about plural narratives which can co-exist within and throughout time.
From its debut at New York’s Fotografiska, and recent display at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), this iteration of BLACK VENUS incorporates more UK-based artists, reworking its themes of the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel. It claims these three as ‘thematic pillars’, foundational to its structure, but in reality, they’re moments in a long history that spans geographies and times. Indeed, it is this global approach that enables the exhibition to speak to different experiences of Blackness in Europe and the US, diasporas and Black-majority countries.
Kara Walker’s ‘Juried Art Competition’ (2022) punctuates BLACK VENUS, an inky depiction of a nude Black woman reclaiming agency as an artist. Overlooked by a cynical white man, likely a critic or reviewer, it gets to the heart of who and what this exhibition is for. It’s carefully designed and perfectly placed to bring in communities – with Pay What You Can tickets and a wealth of free events – inviting us all to see histories - and ourselves - in different ways.
BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture is on view at Somerset House until 24 September 2023.
