Eight images of Caribbean women: Exploring issues of representation and ontological in/security through visual art

Abstract

This presentation features eight artistic representations of black Caribbean and diasporan women, paired together to explore different compositional, social and technological modalities. The visual analysis commences with an art-historical critique of ways that black women have been portrayed in classical figurative painting, and then compares different styles of photographic portraiture, before concluding with a review of recent installations by contemporary Caribbean artists. Each selection provides opportunities to consider the role of artworks as archives of social history, artists as documentarians, and exhibition spaces as sites for critical engagement with the politics of black portraiture as an issue of ontological in/security.

The works in focus are:
• Two oil paintings showing aspects of Haitian history depicted through black female corporeality: Portrait of a Haitian woman (1786) by François Malépart de Beaucourt; and Mama Legba (2011) by Elizabeth Colomba

• Performance-themed artworks that feature coded styles of dress and movement: Dancing scene in the West Indies (c. 1764-96) by Agostino Brunias; and “Whip it Good!” (2015) by Jeanette Ehlers

• Contrasting examples of colonial photography and contemporary photographic self-portraiture: “Woman selling Jack Fruit, Trinidad” (1908-9) by Harry Hamilton Johnston; and Redcoat, from the series Queen Nanny of the Maroons (2004) by Renée Cox

• Twenty-first century mixed-media installations that question and challenge racialized gender stereotypes: “Brown Girl in the Ring” (2015) by Jodi Minnis and Edrin Symonette; and Post j'ouvert self-portrait (2013) by Brianna McCarthy.

Drawing on the work of art historians Charmaine Nelson and Samantha Noel, as well as black feminist scholarship from other subject disciplines, artists’ and curators’ reflexive commentaries on their own practice are aligned to wider discourses about the unmasking and counter-narration of “controlling images” (Collins 2000: 69-72), the de-centering of the “mythical norm” (Lorde 2007 [1984]: 116), and the importance of self-representation for “talking back” (hooks 1989: 9) and “restablilis[ing] the integrity of the black female self” (Henderson 2010: 6).