Self depicts black bodies in a leisurely state. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND THIERRY GOLDBERG GALLERY
The most intimate part of being a person—your body, the thing that should be most your own—takes on different and unfamiliar meanings in certain spaces. Sometimes, the significance of your body has nothing to do with you.
That’s what I was thinking about while touring Tschabalala Self’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, now on view at the Frye Art Museum. As someone who inhabits a black body, someone who is a black woman, I am used to the dissonance between black female bodies in popular culture (from mammy-hood to hypersexualized constant availability) and actual black female bodies.
