“Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work in the New Millennium”

In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, my project charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. My manuscript collates what I term “undesirable” representations of perverse Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art. These representations move beyond the visual, producing olfactory, haptic, and sonic experiences that depart from how Blackness and womanhood have typically been understood within art history, Black Study, and feminist and queer studies. While other scholars frame Black women’s cultural production as sites of recognition, resistance, healing, and pleasure, my study urges viewers and readers to see the speculative, irreconcilable, irreverent, and ambivalent ways of contemporary Black women’s art.