Exploring Life for Black Womxn - curated by K. Wilson

Betye Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Her practice explores the realities of African-American oppression and the mysticism of symbols through the combination of everyday objects. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, and her work tackles racism through the appropriation and recontextualization of African-American folklore and icons. Her work, “Black Girl’s Window” is a work of self-reflection, with each fragment in the piece working like a frame in a film or a page in a book that informs but never fully makes visible the story of a Black woman artist living in Los Angeles in 1969. Black Girl’s Window made in 1969, consists of a wooden window frame with paint, cut-and-pasted printed and painted papers, daguerreotype, lenticular print, and plastic figurine.

Delita Martin is an American multimedia artist. Her practice tells the story of women that have often been marginalized, offering a different perspective of the lives of Black women. In her work, “New Beginnings”, she explores the different signs and symbols that help define the space the women reside in. She focuses on the duality of women that project the spirit and its connection to the physical world, which reinforces the bond amongst women and how they co-exist in the physical and spiritual realms. This body of work transitions the women and their place of residence into a spiritual realm, where the symbolism is less defined, the shapes are more organic, and the icons are left for the viewer to ponder and creating a space for the women to be birthed into. New beginnings made in 2017, consists of acrylic, relief printing, lithography, charcoal, decorative papers, and hand‐stitching.

Lorna Simpson is a multimedia artist and photographer. Her practice explores the interplay between historical memory, culture, and identity using her own experiences as a Black woman to inspire her work. Her work, “Five Day Forecast” reflects a time when Lorna Simpson was doing lots of boring office jobs while she was trying to make it as an artist. As the title of the work emphasizes, this structure suggests a diary of sorts, or at any rate, a ‘forecast’, to use its meteorological metaphor. The words, with their negative connotations, imply a repeated breakdown in communication, within personal, professional, and racial relationships while playing on her female identity and questioning the way women are seen and treated in the workplace and more generally in life. Five-day Forecast made in 1991, consists of 5 photographs, gelatin silver print on paper, and 15 engraved plaques.