Black Feminist Visuality in African American Women's Art

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses November 2017 We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality in African American Women's Art Kelli Morgan Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Art and Architecture Commons, American Material Culture Commons, Art Practice Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Morgan, Kelli, "We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality in African American Women's Art" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 1060. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1060 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WE ARE ROSES FROM OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: BLACK FEMINIST VISUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ART A Dissertation Presented by KELLI MORGAN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2017 W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies © Copyright by Kelli Morgan 2017 All Rights Reserved WE ARE ROSES FROM OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: BLACK FEMINIST VISUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ART A Dissertation Presented by KELLI MORGAN Approved as to style and content by: _______________________ Manisha Sinha, Chair _______________________ James Smethurst, Member _______________________ Marla Miller, Member _______________________ Lisa Gail Collins, Member _______________________________ Amilcar Shabazz, Chair W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies DEDICATION For the women through whose gardens I learned to grow my own: My mother, Marlene Smith, sister Traci Steele, grandmother Emma McCarty, and my aunts Stella Lee McCarty and Jocey Morgan Major. For the men who encouraged me to fly: My father, Augustus Morgan and grandfather, Foy McCarty. And for my love, who told me to “hold my own hand,” my nephew, Argent Warren Steele, Jr. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with my deepest gratitude that I thank all those who in one way or another helped me to dream and execute this project. I must first thank my mother, Marlene Smith, who above all else invested in my education, and my sister Traci Steele who was my very first role model. The infinite love and support exhibited by you both is beyond words. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for ALL that you do. I thank my nephews, Argent Warren Steele, Jr. and Ryan Anthony Steele for whose futures I strive. I wish to thank my mentor Melba Joyce Boyd for being my coach, my friend, my voice of reason, my example, and my everything. And to Blaire Monica White and Vinetta Lloyd-Hughes for being both my sacred friends and surrogate sisters. I have to thank both the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation for the support and curatorial opportunities to research and complete this project. My academic community at Wayne State University must be thanked; specifically, Ollie Johnson, for challenging my procrastination, David Goldberg, for kicking me out of the nest, Lisa Alexander, for keeping me grounded, and Mame Jackson, for introducing me to the majesty that is African American Art and Art History. I would also like to thank Eboe Hutchful, Daphne Ntiri, Carolyn Campbell, Beth Bates, Todd L. Duncan, Margaret Winters, Xavier Livermon, Lisa Ze Winters, Kefentse Chike, Rayfield Waller, Mark Shapley, Ronald Aronson, Andrew Port, and the late Perry Mars for ensuring that I was a true interdisciplinarian before I even considered graduate school. My earnest appreciation is to the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies for providing me with the academic training necessary for becoming a critical race cultural historian deeply grounded in the experiences of African Americans in this country. I also want to thank the department for allowing me to pursue a course of study that had never been attempted by a graduate student. I have to thank my dissertation committee for its unwavering support of this v project, specifically their encouragement of my decision to complete my curatorial training as I embarked on writing the dissertation. I thank Manisha Sinha for her willingness to learn African American art history right along with me. I thank James Smethurst for his untiring guidance and intellectual mentorship. I thank Marla Miller for showing me that one could in fact break into the museum field without an art history background. And I thank Lisa Gail Collins for her beautiful spirit and tireless encouragement. I thank both Yemisi Jimoh and Kym Morrison for making me a keener critical thinker and for showing me how to successfully execute interdisciplinary methodologies when analyzing art objects. None of this would be possible without the friendship and tremendous administrative support of Tricia Loveland. And I give many thanks to my broader UMass faculty; Nancy Noble, David Glassberg, Barbara Krauthamer, Joye Bowman, and John Higginson. Lastly, I offer my deepest gratitude to Loretta Yarlow and Eva Fierst for granting me my first opportunity at curatorial glory. I have to thank my colleagues who made me laugh and pulled me along with them at times when I found it difficult to proceed. I must first thank Armanthia Nicole Duncan for her unrelenting friendship, for answering every single time I called, and for taking care of me at times when I could not. Our friendship has been an integral piece of my foundation and for that I will always be grateful to you. I thank Ernest Gibson and McKinley Melton for being emerging scholarly models well worth following. I thank Christina Knight for welcoming me into her class and teaching me everything she could about Black contemporary art. I thank Markeysha Dawn Davis for literally living with me. And I thank my cohort members, Emahunn Campbell, Julia S. Charles, and Fang Fang Zhou, as well as the previous cohort; Alex Carter, Crystal Donkor, and Johanna Ortner for embarking on this journey with me. I must acknowledge my community at the Birmingham Museum of Art; specifically Gail Andrews, Graham C. Boettcher, Rose Wood, vi Priscilla Tapio, Eric McNeal, Toby Richards, Margaret Burnham, Suzanne Stevens, Kristi Taft, Don Wood, Robert Schindler, Terry Beckham, Anne Forschler-Tarrasch, Emily Hanna, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, and the late Jeanine O’Grody for giving me my curatorial chops. Also, many thanks to Norm and Carnetta Davis for often being my family away from family and to the number of supporters that comprise my PAFA community, especially David R. Brigham, Jodi Throckmorton, Anna Marley, and Didier William. Most importantly, I thank Vera Smith and Larry Lunsford for literally handing me the book that planted the seed for this project. vii ABSTRACT WE ARE ROSES FROM OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: BLACK FEMINIST VISUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ART SEPTEMBER 2017 KELLI MORGAN, B.A., WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERISTY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Manisha Sinha We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens posits that in differing historical periods African American women visual artists employed various media and create from individual political thoughts, intellectual views, and aesthetic interests to emphasize the innate unification of a Black woman’s race, gender, sexuality, class, and selfhood and how this multifaceted dynamic of Black women’s identity and material reality produces a unique, multilayered form of oppression experienced only by Black women. Their diverse expressions of multilayered, figurative works acknowledge and address how the synthesis of racism, sexism, and patriarchy has been both mercurial and fixed throughout Black women’s existence in the United States. Thus, the dissertation argues that multilayered, figurative works of art by African American women artists are connected across time through Black feminist visuality, a creative imaging of Black women’s self-making, autonomy, subjectivity, and personal empowerment that allows them to transcend the distorted, mythological constructions of Black female identity concretized within western visual culture as it reveals the functions of western culture’s racist visuality and rejects its subjugation of Black women’s identity formation. Its sub-theory of visible-aggregation illustrates how Black feminist visuality exists among African American women artists as a shared viii self-defined standpoint of representing Black women’s identity and material reality in western visual art. Through a close reading of works by Sojourner Truth, Edmonia Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, and Kara Walker the project demonstrates how African American women artists utilize visible-aggregation to express Black feminist visuality through multilayered, figurative art forms that exist as optical illustrations of Black feminism in the western visual realm. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................

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