Labor and Radical Possibility in the Work of Black Feminist Artists

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Black feminist thought has been a resource for empowerment language and creative disruption, used for personal and political transformation. Hortense Spillers’s essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (2006) is an exemplar of this tradition: an analysis of the Black woman in cultures, histories, and literatures, the essay calls for insurgency and monstrosity to break apart the constraints of gender so that human subjects can move more freely in unbounded, social space. Spillers described this necessary work as reconfiguring, a word that productively suggests shaping and forming—necessarily again and again—and applicable to the notion that feminisms are many and varied. Building on Spillers’ enduring insights, this conversation will explore the labor of Black feminist artists to create new vocabulary that imagines the human beyond the constraints of heteronormative white supremacy.

Morris is a visual/performance artist and assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Francis is an art historian, associate professor and chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer and healer.

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