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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Performing Ourselves At The Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Performing Ourselves At The Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Publications and Research
This interview sits alongside an extended version edited for Amanda Curreri’s solo exhibition, The Calmest of Us Would be lunatics, which took place from January 21–May 8, 2016, at Rochester Art Center, in Rochester, Minnesota. Curreri dug through the archival collection of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the country, and their journal, The ladder, at the Tretter Collection in LGBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. The exhibition is titled after a line in Emily Dickinson’s 1877 letter to Elizabeth Holland which reads, “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of …
Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’S Sugar Sphinx And The Intractability Of Black Female Sexuality, Amber Jamilla Musser
Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’S Sugar Sphinx And The Intractability Of Black Female Sexuality, Amber Jamilla Musser
Publications and Research
This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic. In the essay, I argue that both of these responses highlight the difficulty of talking about black female …