Since the 1970’s feminism has found a niche in contemporary art. Feminists combine both feminist theories with artistic methods to assert a feminist visual language. Artists like Cindy Sherman who do not identify as “feminist artists” are frequently referred to in the cannon. Her “Untitled Film Stills” are quintessential pieces in the feminist art cannon. What makes a piece of art feminist? The case of Cindy Sherman illuminates that it is not always dependent on the artist’s intentions. To grasp the entirety of feminist art one must also understand feminism. bell hooks defines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.” Lucy R. Lippard calls feminist art “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life.”
Feminist art was shaping into a movement around the late 1960’s. By the mid 1970’s and 1980’s many feminist artists who were influenced by post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and subaltern theory distanced themselves from aspects of the early women’s art movement. They criticized the celebration of innate femininity, and the retrieval of traditional female culture, for confining women to separate biological and cultural spheres. They doubted the subversive potential of the “feminine”, fearing that women would be placed on the negative side of language at their peril. And they criticized the emphasis on personal experience as narrowly individualistic and lacking an account of the unconscious.

     Second wave feminist ideology in the 1970’s held the standpoint that the “personal is political,” so that the individual simultaneously acknowledged and transcended. This standpoint enabled feminists and feminist artists to employ a more tangible political agency. Undeniably, feminist scholars and artists were reclaiming their voice as it related to representations of the body, race, and modes of abstraction. Feminist concerns of deconstructing traditional gender stereotypes, reclaiming images of the female body, raising consciousness, and transforming oppressive institutional structures by exposing institutionalized sexism were a few of the ways feminist artists of the 1970’s were seeking to enact change. Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” forged new territory for feminist artists by asserting, “the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian is proving to be inadequate.” Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago’s “Womanhouse” project at the Feminist Art Programs of Fresno State and Cal Arts epitomized collective efforts of feminist artists to shift the patriarchal power structure. Unfortunately, the ideas of “sisterhood” that emerged from the feminist movement of the 1970’s were exclusively white. In other words, the voice being represented was that of the middle class white woman. Therefore, the main problem with feminist art of the 1970’s as a whole was the exclusion of Black women in race representation.

     Black artists such as Faith Ringgold who used her art as her activism, Betye Saar who used assemblage, and Adrian Piper who used disguise and performance were not only faced with the sexism imbedded within the Black community, but also the racism within the feminist community. Black artists of the 1970’s influenced and broadened the definition of feminism in profound ways. By the close of the 1980’s “a new generation of African-American, and black British feminist artists explored the intersection of racial and sexual identities and the legacies of colonialism, and drew attention towards the dominance of white women within feminism.” Adding new and complex layers, women of color helped give dimension to a two-dimensional way of thinking. In the early eighties, feminist scholars and social scientists introduced the concept that one cannot look at categories of sex without simultaneously considering categories such as race and class and ethnicity. Feminist art grew tremendously in attempts to include all its “sisters.” Pieces like Carrie Mae Weems’ “Mirror, Mirror” made in 1987-88 juxtaposed Black identity with the White identity that dominated feminist thinking at the time. The text at the bottom of a back and white photograph reads, “Looking into the mirror, the Black woman asked, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?’ The Mirror says Snow White, you Black Bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!”

     Seemingly disparate fields of inquiry about representations of the body, race, and modes of abstraction do not seem so altogether different today as they might have appeared thirty years ago. The emerging art of the 1970’s was on the right track by surveying seemingly separate categories. It aids in the understanding of how oppression is linked to one’s identity in multiple ways. Sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism are major oppressive structures pervading white, capitalist patriarchal culture. The art world is no exception.
Discord between the Arts and Social Theory can be difficult to reconcile. Both are concerned with identity politics and representation as a category of analysis, even though applied meanings change across discipline. In Women’s Studies, ideas about the intersections of gender, ethnicity and class compose a lens to view identity. Discussing ways that society oppresses women through a feminist lens requires an understanding of sexism. Understanding how Art can oppress women by inscribing sexist ideologies becomes more complicated because the identity of the artist is calculated into the equation. Should artists be responsible for pejorative images and stereotypes found in their work? Artists that harbor sexist, racist, classist, and heterosexist ideologies can manifest such thinking in their work. At the same time, artists seeking to change patriarchal, racist structures also appropriate negative stereotypes in order to reclaim and therefore empower the image. Because reinforcing false stereotypes is a system of oppression, should art- work containing stereotypes be criticized as a form of oppression?

     While it is important to look critically at art with an analytical gaze it is also important to avoid scapegoating the artist for negative imagery found in their work. There is a “politic of seeing,” as bell hooks puts it, and the perspective from which we approach art is over determined by location.” Seeing is political. The politics of vision can convolute the true meaning of an image-if there is such a thing as true meaning. If anything, the politics of what we think we see when we look at art is complex, laden with relationality of viewer to object/subject and vice a versa. The range in between the intimacy or distance one feels in relation to art allow multiple meanings to occur. If art is ontologically indefinable, which I believe it to be, then the “answers” are filled in by the meaning we give to it. In other words the meaning is there because we put it there.

     Coco Fusco writes of Lorna Simpson’s work, “[Her] focus on the construction of meaning and value, and how they are generated out relationship among the artist, viewer, and object, places her work within a realm of philosophical questioning that has been central to conceptual art for decades.” Lorna Simpson “continually makes the point that her images do not give answers.” Fusco suggests that Simpson’s images are “fetishlike symbols of something or someone unfathomable or unrepresentable.” If her images, often of Black women, symbolize the “unrepresentable,” then the merging of art with social theory resonates by informing each other. If feminists argue that poor representations of women lead to perpetuating false stereotypes, then art responds by offering the possibility of the “unrepresentable.” Art affirms that one does not have to choose a poor representation of oneself because there might not be a representation capable encompassing one’s identity. A white feminist criticized Simpson’s work for “enforcing black women’s invisibility. ” Coco Fusco would argue that the work was actually “reflecting the audience’s own limitations back at them.” In other words, people “see” what they want. People bring their own political context and personal identity to art as a lens to “see” with. bell hooks writes of Simpson’s work:

     In general, in this culture, black women are seen and depicted as down to earth, practical creatures of the mundane. Within sexist, racist iconography, black females are most often represented as mammies, whores, or sluts. Caretakers whose bodies and beings are empty vessels to be filled with the needs of others. This imagery tells the world that the black female is born to serve-a servant-maid-made to order. She is not herself but always what someone else wants her to be. Against this backdrop of fixed colonizing images, Simpson constructs a world of black female bodies that resist and revolt, that intervene and transform, that rescue and recover.

     The Feminist Art Movement of the seventies, dominated by middle-class, liberal, white women, prescribed to racist ideology in the sense that “universal”, “essential” experience for women was readily embraced. The paradox of excluding women of color from the art world while simultaneously calling for “sisterhood” proved problematic for Black artists working at this time. Artist such as Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems are important figures to discuss in the development of the Feminist Art Movement. Not only were representations of Black female imagery missing from the newly formed cannon, but also so were the Black artists themselves. The ways feminism as a social movement was influencing the art world must be viewed as incomplete based on the limited agenda of white, middle-class feminists in the seventies. Posing the question, “How can we harness social and political science for the benefit of women and people of color?” constitutes the consideration of “How can we use art for the benefit of women and people of color?” Most importantly is the question of, “What women?” and “What people of color?” There is no one group that will be affected by art or social theory in the same way. The idea of a “universal” experience for all women is a lie; in the same way that stereotype is a lie. Serving to maintain oppressive structures, stereotype exists for many complicated reasons, which will be discussed in more detail later in this paper.

     Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party used female genital imagery literally and metaphorically to describe women. Each of the thirty-nine place settings (except for one) presents an abstract “central core,” vulvic image symbolic of the historically significant woman at the place. It is important to note that Sojourner Truth’s place setting is made from the only non-genital imagery. She is also the only Black woman represented at The Dinner Party. Judy Chicago’s repetitious use of vaginal imagery has a clear relationship to the body and women’s biology. Therefore, it is easy to see why The Dinner Party was severely criticized at a time where the notion that sexual identity was thought of as culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. Charges of “essentialism” and “universalism” are commonly launched at liberal white feminists among other charges of racism, heterosexism, and idealism. Chicago’s project was critiqued as being exclusive. It did not fulfill its utopian goals of including everyone through the mode of collaboration. The Dinner Party epitomizes a “universalist” view of womanhood in a visual way. Chicago’s use of a biological thread that supposedly knitted the “universal” experience of all women together, busted at the seams. The frayed mess unraveled with countless accusations of “universalism” and “essentialism”. Critics pointed out the problematic nature of who was not invited to join The Dinner Party. Articulated in various ways was the idea that the vagina is not enough. Especially when the only Black woman at the table is represented without one. The vagina is not what ties our experience as women together. Neither is sexuality. Sexuality is culturally constructed, and its meaning metamorphisizes across the globe.

     The ontology of The Dinner Party is paradoxical in the sense that it evoked strong responses from many people who could relate, and many people who could not. It helped broaden the feminist expanse by bringing universalism, racism, and heterosexism to the forefront of feminist dialogue. The myriad responses to The Dinner Party prove its success. A paradigm seemed to shift alongside the creation of this artwork. Homogenizing the female experience was exposed as problematic on multiple levels. Feminist Audre Lorde illuminated how “white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone.” The late 1970’s and early 1980’s notion of a “universal female experience” was being challenged by feminist theorists of that time and The Dinner Party was an important catalyst for this consciousness. Visual culture was informing feminist theory and vice a versa.
Since the late 1960’s many of the major innovations of contemporary art, both theoretical and practical, have been indebted to feminism. Moreover, some of feminism’s most important political achievements have been indebted to artists, who have inspired new ways to think about the public and the private, the art object and the art subject. Exposing assumptions about gender, feminism has also stressed the implications of the marks of race, age, class and sexuality on art production and reception. Both critical of the art world and central to it, feminist artists have revised the possibilities of art as a political and aesthetic practice.

     By 1981 the domination of white women in mainstream politics was taking hold, but the domination of white women in feminism, “especially within academic feminist theory,” was being revealed for its conservatism. An important milestone in 1981 was the publication of the anthology “The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by radical Women of Color.” No longer dominated by the racial binary of whites and non-whites dialogue opened including voices of Third-World women more interested in relationships between women than relationship between men and women . Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement engendered offshoots in the art world. The artist Faith Ringgold worked as a Black feminist artist and activist. She examined intersections where artist could contribute to Civil Rights. In 1965, an exhibit titled “Black and White” dealt with race issues, but was also composed exclusively of male artists. “Afro-American” artists in the 70’s were not communicating with Black feminist artists. Faith Ringgold’s work was included in a 1971 exhibition titled “Where We At Black Women Artists. ” She is a revolutionary figure for many reasons. For example, in 1968 she led a picket against the current Whitney Museum exhibition that contained the work of no black artists. In 1969, she led a movement to petition the Museum of Modern Art to open a Martin Luther King Wing specifically to show artwork of artists with varying ethnicities. In 1971 she formed WSABAL (Women, Students, Artists, Black Arts Liberation.) She is best known for her work that uses the flag as a figurative vehicle to refer to ideas of nation, and imbedded in nation- ideas of race. She used the flag as a subversive and revolutionary abstraction, and was even arrested for flag desecration.

     To reiterate, bell hooks defines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” Peggy Phelan describes feminism as “the conviction that gender has been and continues to be, a fundamental category for the organization of culture. Moreover, the pattern of recognition that usually favors men over women.” Concerns to end “sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” as hooks writes automatically include concerns to end racism, classism and heterosexism. Talking about one form of oppression constitutes discussing another. The interconnected modes of oppression form a web. Touching one strand of the web is like causing the entire structure to vibrate. For instance gay black men face discrimination because of their sexual preference, and because of the race. However, they are privileged in certain ways based on their sex. Black women artists face varying intersections of oppression. For example, her “blackness” meets her “womanhood” in a difficult place. Multiple modes of oppression make the Black woman artist susceptible to complex discrimination. It is not the aim of this paper to provide answers about how Black women artists are discriminated against, but rather to examine the context where Black women are making work. It is impossible to clearly see the affects of oppression as a whole with out noticing the intersection of gender, race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. None make sense without the other. This idea was birthed by the 1970’s conception of race as a separate category of experience and insisting on the inextricable intersection of all aspects of identity.
bell hooks writes that “within sexist and racist iconography it (the black female body) is often depicted as a site of betrayal. Just as the white female in racist sexist iconography most often symbolizes innocence and virtue, the absence of sexual passion, the black female body is usually marked as the opposite.” Representation is not, no matter how close to the truth, a just replacement of reality. In an interview with Allison Saar hooks says “It’s important when we look at the work of any group of people who’ve been marginalized, whether we’re talking about white immigrants or any of us, that there be a willingness to acknowledge complexity-profundity-multilayered possibility.”

     Patricia Hill Collins articulates myriad ways Black women are objectified in U.S, culture as the “other.” She writes, “Domination always involves attempts to objectify the subordinate group.” Dominating ideologies that oppress Black women are made visible by placing them in reference to the body. Bodily representations of the Black woman are highly stereotyped. Collins traces the origin of Black female stereotypes to the “dominant ideology of the slave era,” that “fostered the creation of several interrelated, socially constructed controlling images of Black womanhood.” Patricia Hill Collins writes about stereotype in her book Black Feminist Thought,
           Portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas helps justify U.S, Black women’s oppression. Challenging these            controlling images has long been a core theme in Black feminist thought.

     The stereotype of the Mammy, the “faithful, obedient, domestic servant. Collins writes, “By loving, nurturing, and caring for her White children and “family” better than her own, the mammy symbolizes the dominant groups perceptions of the ideal Black female relationship to elite White male power.” The “mammy” stereotype alone cannot control Black women’s “behavior,” and therefore is seen in contrast with a more recent image of the “matriarch.” “While the mammy typifies the Black mother figure in White homes, the matriarch symbolizes the mother figure in Black homes.” “Matriarch’s” are stereotyped as aggressive, unfeminine, and supposedly emasculate their lovers. Both the mammy and the matriarch are constructed in relation to Black poverty. Once again class is intrinsically connected to race and sex. The most recent manifestation of pejorative stereotype is that of the “welfare mother” or “welfare queen.” A phrase coined by Ronald Reagan, that degrades Black women’s class status by stereotyping women living in poverty as criminals taking advantage of a system.

     Among other degrading images are the “hot mammas”, “jezebels”, and “hoochies” that are all examples of hypersexualized derogatory stereotypes. bell hooks writes about the intersection of race with sex:
           Few contemporary American artists have worked with images of the black female body in ways that are counterhegemonic. Since most black folks in the United States are              colonized-that is think about “blackness” in much the same ways as racist white mainstream culture-simply being a black female artist does not mean one possesses the vision    and      insight to create groundbreaking revolutionary images of black females.

One does not have to be Black to be well versed in Black feminism. Being a Black woman does not make it simple to understand Black feminism. However the idea of subjugated knowledge must be considered in the dialogue between art and Black feminism. Subjugated knowledge implies that the “marginal knower” has a privileged view that can only be seen from their perspective. What is a marginal knower? Perhaps, it is more important to identify with Black culture. What is Black culture? If there is a Black aesthetic, how does it appear to from the inside as opposed to the outside? One way to describe it is by recognizing that it is not one monolithic entity. “Living in white supremacist culture, we mostly see images of black folks that reinforce and perpetuate the accepted, desired subjugation and subordination of black bodies by white bodies.”

How is Representation not enough? bell hooks writes, “As is often the case in revolutionary movements for social justice we are better at naming the problem than we are at envisioning the solution .” Replicating stereotypical images can help “name” them. This is insufficient because one must see an image for it’s falsity, and then bust it apart at the seems, sewing back together an image devoid of sexist, racist, heterosexist discrimination. Representing the “mammy”, or “matriarch” is not enough. Transgressing the stereotypes helps shed deeply imbedded racist, sexist, heterosexist thinking many are not aware of.

Creating counter-hegemonic images of blackness that resist the stereotypes and challenge the artistic imagination is not a simple task. To begin with, artists have to engage in a process of education that encourages critical consciousness and enables them as individuals to break the hold of colonizing representations. The work of Kara Walker counters stereotype by using stereotype. One function of stereotype is to keep oppressive power structures in place. “A system of oppression draws much of its strength from the acquiescence of its victims, who have accepted the dominant image of themselves and are paralyzed by a sense of helplessness.” Stereotype’s ontological duty to oppression is not only to maintain its structures, but it also serves to further oppress already marginalized groups. Exposing stereotypes through art and is like “decolinizing” the mind from colonialist ways of thinking.
Patricia Hill Collins writes extensively about “The Power of Self-Definition” in Black Feminist Thought. Self-definition is something that applies to all human beings. Even though Collins is investigating Black female experience of self-definition, I am compelled to apply her analysis to my white experience. Including myself in the context of “Black Women’s Relationships to One Another” and “The Black Women’s Blues Tradition” seems irrelevant at first, but after thorough analysis it makes Collins’ discussion seem more viable. Issues of self-valuation, respect, and consciousness as a sphere of freedom transcend distinctions of race, gender, and class.

Collins frames the discussion of Black women’s “self-definition” by identifying the dualistic nature of their lives. By being “de mule of de world” Black women are forced into a complicated state of being. One life is of service to the oppressor and the other life is her own as she defines it. The imposed world of the oppressor exists in complete contradiction to the world created and defined by Black women themselves. Black feminist poet Audre Lorde wrote, “In order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers.” Collins refers to this “watching” as the source of dual consciousness for African-American women. Audre Lorde explains that becoming “familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection,” is only a superficial layer of identity. Hiding the other layers from the oppressor is a common mode of survival. Contradiction and tension between the two worlds epitomize the duality Black women are forced to live in. Binary options for Black women provide a rigid circumstance for the formation of identity according to societies standards. Creating complicated contradictions in the formation of identity leaves much to be revealed about “true” identity (if there is such a thing.) Out of this contradiction, theory arises. bell hooks writes that theory is the story one tells of their life, and Collins notes Ella Surrey in chapter five saying, “we have always been the best actors in the world.” Tension between the two worlds stems from pejorative stereotypes of Black women, such as the mammy, matriarch, welfare queen, mule, and sexual deviant that serve to objectify and dehumanize them. How these “objectifying” images are used in art can serve the purpose of bettering the Black woman’s condition, rather than perpetuating oppressive stereotype. Art’s ability to facilitate political dialogue reflects its transcendent capabilities. Meaning is not a fixed point in space, and transcending meaning through art is something bell hooks calls a “location of freedom” in art.

Using a Feminist lens to examine Art illuminates interesting intersections of self-representation, identity, and abstraction Using the art of Kara Walker I will attempt to show that appropriating stereotype is not always counteractive to feminist gains, and is actually a powerful tool to combat sexist and racist oppression. Specifically I will look at some images of the Black women in her Art, as it coincides with Black Feminism. Kara Walker does not have to identify as a Feminist Artist in order for viewers to extract poignant feminist concerns found in her work.

Kara Walker describes her work for an article in Art News (April 2002):
I really started investigating in a slightly anti-intellectual way how black
Womanhood is being defined from a number of different perspectives, because I didn’t seem to be defining it myself. I began reading [Harlequin romance] novels and got very interested in that way of couching inconsistent desires into one format. It’s about power, it’s about submission, it’s about glorified rape fantasies…It’s a really interactive way of linking the reader with the heroine with the author. Everyone’s involved in this titillation. That’s what I wanted to do.

Kara Walker’s work is often summarized as “iconography of the antebellum South.” Titles of her silhouettes include “Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored.” She uses long rolls of paper to draw on, cut out and glue final images to a surface. In her instillation “Emancipation Approximation” her images include “Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, Leda and the Swan, the mistress beheading girls with an axe, and a boy kissing a chicken’s ass and dropping eggs into a frying pan.” About her controversial images, Walker says,
Working with such loaded material as race, gender, sex, it’s easy for it to become ugly. I really wanted to find a way to make work that could lure viewers out of themselves and into this fantasy. Seduction and embarrassment and humor all merge at a similar point in the psyche-vulnerability.”
With Walker’s work it is not clear who is implicated. It is also not important for it to be clear, and that is the point. As we question who is implicated, we also question how they are implicated. Her works are repeatedly referred to as “disturbing.” I argue that they are disturbing in part because people are faced with the most ugly racist fantasy they may have once thought. Or in seeing Walker’s images, they realize their own capability to imagine such a scene. Her work is not only controversial in the art world, but also in the Black community as well.

I think I had naively assumed that the work I was doing would raise a lot of questions, and that, within the black community in particular, it would foster a dialogue more than a diatribe. But I think the question of whether or not this work should be “seen, which was raised in Betye Saar’s letter, was absurd. You look or you don’t look. But I’ll make it as long as I have to…The audience has to deal with their own prejudices or fears or desires when they look at these images. So, if anything, my work attempts to take those pickaninny images and put them up there and eradicate them.

Audre Lorde’s pivotal essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House delivered in 1979 examines the racist patriarchy. “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Applying Lorde’s essay to Walker’s work, I would argue that Walker is using the “master’s tools” to subvert the meaning. In that subversion, she is re-created meaning around familiar stereotypes. She is changing the meaning of the stereotype all together, and therefore empowering the image. Lorde writes, “It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Artist Adrian Piper wrote, “Racism is a visual pathology.” Images are loaded with meaning in different ways than feminist theory is has meaning. Visual language can serve to counter intervene in the social context. Developing a positive visual language can intervene in stereotyped imagery. Cleverly subverting common stereotypes also subverts their meaning and therefore can act as agency for social change. Imagery can also deconstruct meaning. Race is represented differently depending on the agent of representation. Does it matter that Kara Walker is Black? Likewise, does it matter if the viewer is Black? “Thelma Golden, deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, admits that when she first saw the piece, she instantly wanted to know the race of the artist and then hated herself for the thought.” Again one is left to wonder who is being implicated. Regardless of ethnicity, confronting a viewer with a stereotyped image is like confronting them with their own “prejudices and fears.”

A new addition to the infinite list of “posts” is “Post-Black” As the title implies, it is meant to describe artwork, or theory that “maintains the conception of blackness even as it claims to go beyond it.” The “Post-Black” culture might argue that it shouldn’t matter whether Kara Walker is Black. Or rather, “Post-Black” thinking might offer an avenue for the acknowledgement of race while maintaining the consciousness to move beyond it. Reality dictates that it does matter. Likewise, by hypothetically changing Kara Walker’s identity, the work would automatically become something else.

Kara Walker is included in the feminist art cannon even though she does not label herself as such. Walker’s controversial success has led her to exhibit work at numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The feminist art movement is constantly charging forward into new terrain. It has come so far that Betye Saar who made work dealing with race issues in the 60’s can argue that Kara Walker’s work should not be seen. Full of contradiction, feminist art shifts fluidly and suddenly along with feminist thought. Kara Walker uses imagery from the antebellum South from her 21st century perspective. In essence she is re-making history by allowing subjugated images to speak.

Art can be a location to discuss the unexplainable, or the unthinkable for that matter. Work such as Kara Walker’s is not meant to perpetuate stereotype, but rather to confront the viewers with their own racism and sexism. Art can also be transformative. The transformative nature of replicating an image of hatred is different in that the representation is just that-a representation. Kara Walker’s Two-dimensional, silhouetted, cutouts are representations of racist, sexist images. The ability of art to transcend reality and speak to the ambiguous or abstract is its property I argue best suits it relationship with feminism. Sometimes naming the problem is insufficient. I can write about the ways sexism oppresses all women differently, but I cannot create a counterhegemonic image in doing so. Creating progressive visual culture for anti-sexist, anti-racist social theory can only add to its powerful impact.

Viewers of art have a responsibility to ask themselves questions about what they are seeing. Using critical methods of seeing and experiencing, we must challenge ourselves to question how we inscribe our own meaning onto art. Or at least realize that people are bringing their own context to the art and viewing it through their own personal lens. Artists do not have a responsibility to make their art about any one thing. Rather their responsibility is to make art. Artists must make art no matter what. Ricardo Levins Morales wrote in his essay titled The Importance of Being Artist,

The more society has to hide, the greater control it must exercise in order to keep artists from doing what comes naturally: exposing the most private dreams to the light of sun. We artists have no special answers unavailable to other people…Our greatest challenge is to accept that what we do with our work and our lives is exactly as important as we believe our people and their world to be.

What gives art meaning? People give art meaning. People give images meaning. Therefore, images have multiple meanings and contexts beyond one person’s interpretation.

Reflections
I find it important to situate myself in the context of this paper. I have a complicated relationship to “blackness.” As I young educated middle class white woman I am situated in a privileged social position. I am engaging in these ideas from my embodied place of young white woman artist. As a dancer I am concerned with representations of the body. Knowing first-hand the problematic nature of examining identity alongside the body, I am aware of how stereotyped ideologies can find a forum on the body. I would never want my identity to be over-simplified to the point where it loses meaning. Privileging identity over content in art analysis can be seen as a flaw. Black feminism resonates strongly for me as I agree with many of Patricia Hill Collins’ arguments. I find it important to write about what resonates for me. As a student of both Booker Elementary and Booker High School, both located in the predominately Black neighborhoods, I have grown up with an awareness of race relations. I was a white girl going to a school in the “ghetto.” I am of a generation of suburbanite white kids infatuated with Black culture. Unfortunately, the infatuation is one coated in the demons of pop-culture, which includes stereotypes, violence, and hyper-sexuality. I have been aware of “White” and “Black” identities from an early age as I was saturated in cultures rich with diverse tradition. It is important to call on these experiences as my mind matures and find effective ways to articulate my ideas from this embodied place.

I cannot be afraid to write about Black women in art. I prefer to think about writing about artists and feminists. Neither category is definable or monolithic. However, white patriarchal, racist culture oppresses women of color in different ways than it oppresses white women. Furthermore, not all women of color are oppressed in the same way. After reading this paper I would criticize myself for implying that Black women artists have some inherent statement to make about race in their artwork. However, I realize that I have made a choice to talk about artists who use race identity in their work. Studying the art of Kara Walker has helped created a vessel for me to merge my “art mind” with my “feminist mind.” I am discovering that the two are not mutually exclusive, even though rhetoric surrounding each is different. I am learning to shape shift between the two worlds of politics and art, realizing that the cultures of the two worlds overlap and inform each other. I am searching to examine the tension between the two, and have much more to explore.

References
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Fusco, Coco. English is Broken Here. New York City: The New Press, 2000.
hooks, bell. Art on My Mind. New York City: The New Press, 1995.
hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South
End Press, 2000.
Jones, Amelia. the post-black bomb. www.moma.com. 4/28/02
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984.
Mark O’Brien and Craig Little, eds. Reimaging America: The Arts of Social
Change. Philadephia: New Society Publishers, 1990.
Nochlin, Linda. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? From Art and
Sexual Politics. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Peggy Phelan and Helena Reckitt, eds. Art and Feminism. London: Phaidon Press, 2001.
Sheet, Hilarie M. Art News: Cut It Out. April 2002.

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