Juxtapoz Magazine – Exhibition Surveys the Legacy of Black Women in Visual Culture

Black Venus at Fotografiska, New York is an exhibition that surveys the legacy of Black females in visible society – from fetishized, colonial-era caricatures, to the current-day reclamation of the rich complexity of Black womanhood by 19 artists (of quite a few nationalities and with birth yrs spanning 1942 to 1997). This exhibition is a celebration of Black splendor, an investigation into the several faces of Black femininity and the shaping of Black women in the general public conscious – then and now.

Juxtaposed from archival depictions of Black females dating back again to 1793, the modern performs on see collectively generate a world wide, cross-generational investigation into Black women’s reclamation of company amid the historical fetishization of the Black woman system

Curated by Aindrea Emelife, the exhibition’s thematic basis is the Hottentot Venus, a visual-society archetype named for the assigned phase identify of Saartje Baartman (born 1789 in South Africa). Enslaved by Dutch colonizers and toured close to Europe as element of a ‘freak show’ due to her non-Western overall body variety, caricatured depictions of her distribute all around the world and indelibly catalyzed the Western exoticization and othering of Black gals. In Black Venus, archival depictions of Baartman and other historic Black women of all ages pair with the vibrant, narrative portraiture by some of today’s most influential Black impression-makers whose get the job done deals with layered narratives of Black femininity.