About This Project
This project investigates the historical shaming, stereotyping, and deliberate marginalization of Black women within the visual culture of Western art history. The foundational premise is that for centuries, dominant artistic practices actively diminished Black women’s humanity and existence.
This visual violence was achieved through specific, institutional mechanisms, including:
1. Erasure and Whitewashing: The project analyzes how Black women were systematically made invisible in narratives of power and beauty because, for many Western artists, “blackness and beauty… was dichotomous”. This resulted in the whitewashing of powerful historical and mythological figures, such as the Ethiopian Princess Andromeda and the Queen of Sheba.
2. Deployment of Caricatures: Art and popular media employed specific racist stereotypes that functioned deliberately as social control mechanisms used to enforce subservient behaviour and dehumanise Black women in the perception of white society.
The Critical Frame: Misogynoir and the Trope Triad
The relevance of this project is its focus on understanding misogynoir, the specific intersectional prejudice directed toward Black women. This research centers its critique on the three core exploitation tropes that violently distorted Black female identity:
• The hyper-sexualized “Jezebel”.
• The desexualized and servile “Mammy”.
• The aggressive “Sapphire”.
The primary goal of the project, “Seen Wrong, Seeing Right: Black Women in Art History,” is to demonstrate the definitive visual shift from the historical erasure and objectification of Black women to their current authority and self-representation in contemporary art.
Hypothesis
This research reveals a clear and deliberate correlation between the extreme objectification present in historical artistic stereotypes and the contemporary artistic shift towards nuanced, complex, and highly individualized self-portraits and artworks.
This modern work, produced by artists who are now at the center of conversations about identity, narrative, and power in visual art, serves as a powerful corrective by actively utilizing visual content that emphasizes the full range of intersectionality present in the lives of Black women today.