In 1969, jazz singer, composer, pianist, and arranger Nina Simone began her performance of the song “Four Women” in Antibes, France, with a striking preface: “It is a picture of four different women. Negro women.” To name the Black woman with intention, to emphasize Black female subjectivity in pictures, is to sing the Black woman’s blues. The song catalogs and memorializes Black female archetypes to lay bare slavery’s gendered legacies, bringing forth each named woman as an amalgamation of identities, positions, and struggles. She creates a lineage of Black womanhood by telling the stories of Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches—four Black women who speak for themselves, yet who are not in control of their representation in public culture.
At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a multimedial exhibition organized by theo tyson, the curator of fashion arts, draws inspiration from Simone’s words and offers a critical context for responding to these archetypal images of the Black woman. Presenting recent poetry and film-based works by Shanequa Gay, Le’Andra LeSeur, C. Rose Smith, and Porsha Olayiwola, “Four Womxn: New Musings on Blackness” illuminates the intersections between Blackness, queerness, and womanhood, and offers an oppositional gaze to dominant representations in contemporary culture. Just as tyson’s curatorial practice focuses on creating spaces of reclamation and authority for Black women and queer folks specifically through a lens of clothing and dress, the artists in this exhibition channel corporeal expression as a medium for manifesting Black, queer, and female voices. These artists create dynamic, moving images of multidimensional Black womanhood and further situate distinctly queer Black women in visual culture.
Like the soulful timbre of Simone’s ballad, Gay’s Crooked Room (2018) fills the dimly lit exhibition space as incidental music, creating a makeshift soundscape that accentuates the unsettling and unifying Black female experience in the United States. It is a combination of distorted video, photographs, and audio recordings, including the voice of writer Melissa Harris-Perry discussing four fictional chimera-like goddesses called The Devouts, who conjure Black spirituality to ground the space in a healing practice. The Devouts demonstrate a somatic response to what Harris-Perry describes as “the consistent lived experience of African American women walking around in a room where everything you expect to meet at normal field-perception is always off-kilter.”
These four Black women of varying ages join hands and don raven, vulture, deer, and bull masks to both obfuscate the viewer’s gaze and personalize their own. Meanwhile, Harris-Perry explicates the plight of Black women’s sociopolitical vision: “the field, the perceptual field for Black women is literally off-kilter.” Gay’s assertion of Black female existence, through her multimedia practice and the backgrounding audio, rejects a phenomenon defined by scholar Patricia Hill Collins as “controlling images,” which stereotype and degrade Black womanhood. In this rejection, Harris-Perry reimagines a life that she understands as “in line with the crooked images”—that is, inhabiting and reclaiming queer life. Intimate contortions of time, space, color, and sight mirror negative environments of misogynoir and misrepresentation, but The Devouts divinely occupy Gay’s expansive Crooked Room and thereby invite the three other featured artists to do the same.
As sparse mentions of “fields,” “crooked”-ness, and “off-kilter” sight audibly illuminate the exhibition’s background, LeSeur, a performance artist, draws viewers into an intrusive act of watching. In White Out (2018), LeSeur addresses the erasure of queer Black womanhood in feminist spaces that are predominantly white, cisgender, and heterosexual. Inverting the performance of blackface, LeSeur uses Wite-Out—the white correction fluid—to cover herself from the top of her exposed breast to the landscape of her abdomen. LeSeur marks herself with streaky lines of white, an attempt to hide and sanitize her identity at the hands of a white gaze. Her jagged, repeated movements provide a visual echo of “crooked images”: assimilation as a trauma response to the intensity of white eyes, as a means of remedying the “crooked room.” Yet, the contours and shades of LeSeur’s dark skin prevent the white liquid from settling in as opaque. The fourteen-minute video presents the Black female body as a fugitive entity holding the viewer captive; an entity too long sexualized, commodified, and discarded. It is the viewer’s privilege to watch LeSeur’s “White Out” from beginning to end, to be allowed to witness a queer Black body in liminal space.
Like Gay and LeSeur, Smith challenges the viewer’s gaze in Untitled no. 000 (2020), taking us on a journey of identity, power, and Black gender expression through a simple white cotton dress shirt. Influenced by the aesthetics and postures of nineteenth-century portraiture, Smith queerly interrogates constructs of respectability, class, and race through her embodied reinterpretations of feminine and masculine representations on three video channels. The work oscillates between perspectives of her face, torso, and full body as the artist buttons and unbuttons various iterations of the cotton garment. She wears the shirt as an adornment, carrying with her histories of the cotton economy during chattel slavery; the exploitation of Black bodies sustained the wealthy lives of cotton merchants and plantation owners. As Smith brings forth the white cotton dress shirt’s ability to function as a code of hierarchy and control, her androgynous embodiment also makes this piece a statement to queer culture and the role of fashion in Black queer expression. The shirt marks a formation of Blackness outside inventions of structure and a balancing act of race, gender, and sexuality grounded in the politics of looking. In each video clip, Smith stares starkly at the audience, reclaiming what it means for the Black female spectator to gaze back.
Porsha Olayiwola, Boston’s current poet laureate, ties the exhibition together with her poem “Twerk Villanelle” (2019), originally published in her 2019 poetry collection i shimmer sometimes, too. Foregrounding her own unequivocally Black lesbian gaze, Olayiwola sets an intimate scene of watching a lover “twerk,” a dance popularized in the New Orleans bounce music scene during the late 1980s. She writes about the dance move, which consists of squatted legs, thrusting hips, and shaking buttocks, with profound appreciation: though long appropriated and abased by white popular media, twerking has been a glorious site of the liberated Black female body. Queer Black female intimacy is celebrating the deeply cultural expression where, for Olayiwola, “dance is proof she loves herself” and “this dance is proof she loves me.” The poem’s lines are liberatory as Olayiwola’s villanelle “break[s] hold, turn whole in a twerk session. / body charmed, spell-bent, toward progressing.” With the queer Black body functioning as a sacred entity, Olayiwola reframes historical persecution into pride, honoring the process of constructing one’s sense of self in relationship to other Black women.
Discussing the interconnectedness of Blackness and womanhood, “Four Womxn” makes visible the Black female body beyond monolithism and highlights powerful alternative modes of self-representation. This exhibition represents Black womanhood through four artists whose practices vary in medium, geography, sexuality, and age, yet ground Blackness and gender as uniting, not limiting, facets of identity. Gay, LeSeur, Smith, and Olayiwola situate identity as functioning on a profoundly individual and spiritually communal level. Their works interact seamlessly because Black womanhood is explored outside of any binary; Black self-embodiment at large is the priority. The actual aesthetics of their work—and, under theo tyson’s vision, the bodily representations of how each artist defines Blackness for themselves—are the visual interventions that shape four distinct, connected experiences of Black womanhood.
The artists in “Four Womxn” create their own archetypes of resistance, working on multiple fronts to define contemporary Black art always in the tradition and spirit of historicity, while continually pushing the boundaries of how we visualize intimate formations of Black identity. Like Simone before them, they are establishing a new tone for what Black queer womanhood has the possibility to look like in the cultural realm. The Black queer woman is not a one-dimensional subject, and her visibility in the museum contributes to a queering of art history that represents Black gender formation as rooted in multiplicity.
“Four Womxn” moreover employs a multitude of mediums that revises what is accepted as “fine art.” Whether through conceptual art, performance, film, video, poetry—or the foundational reference point for this exhibition, song—these artists are engaging with storytelling and image-making on their own terms. In this sense, “Four Womxn” revolutionizes the art world itself to honor Black women largely ignored by society and to urgently chart an innovative path where Black womanhood exists without bounds.
Agency, visibility, and identity root this exhibition in a present past that continues a legacy of Black female survival. Each artist occupies their own “crooked room” with grace, collectively authoring a more intersectional and liberatory Black gaze. When Nina Simone utters the first syllables, My skin is black, in “Four Women,” it is not merely a statement of observation or objectification. It is one of freedom.
“Four Womxn: New Musings on Blackness” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, through November 17, 2024.
