FOR COLORED GIRLS

If ever there was a body of work that served to shape a new narrative for women of African descent, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is at the top of the list.

For those lucky enuf to have secured a copy of the original 1975 release of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, the book cover remains etched in our memories as much as the individual poems contained inside. The cover art by Paul Davis Studio illustrates the expression on the face of a colored girl. Not quite mournful, not truly happy, but a woman carrying a full body of emotions and experiences. The drip of colors that form the title seems to signify that the paint is never completely dry for colored girls.

In the book’s opening, Ntozake speaks about the process of creating the work and her recognition that everything she wrote was simply to be, for colored girls. It is a moving statement about the impact of the process, along with her encounters with dance, academia, coffee shop performances, and connections with other colored girls.

"I moved what was my unconscious knowledge of being in a colored woman's body to my known everydayness."

An awakening that is an invitation to readers and to her fellow colored girls to take this body of poetry and movement and make their own way into our known everydayness.

Fifty years after its first arrival onto the very public scene via a Broadway run, colored girls are still awakening, evolving, reaching forward and back on the wings of dramatic prose and movement to realize our fullness.

Perhaps that is the enduring gift of Shange’s work.

Out of the Flower VI by Carla Golder, as part of Colored Girls for Colored Girls - Evolution of Expression.

She gave us permission to name the things that had been carried silently. She gave language to joy, rage, desire, loneliness, friendship, violence, sexuality, spirituality and survival. She refused to separate the beauty of Black womanhood from the complexity of being a Black woman. And she understood that sometimes the most radical act is simply to tell the truth about who we are.

Fifty years later, that truth continues to move.

It moves through the artists whose work fills galleries and public spaces. It moves through dancers, poets, musicians, playwrights and visual storytellers. It moves through the women who came before us and the girls who are finding their voices now. It moves through the ways we continue to see ourselves, challenge ourselves and imagine what is possible.

And perhaps most importantly, it moves through community. That is why this moment feels particularly meaningful to ARTE NOIR.

Our collaboration with the Ntozake Shange Trust and our presentation of Colored Girls for Colored Girls: Evolution of Expression is more than a commemoration of an important anniversary. It is our opportunity to enter into a conversation that Shange began five decades ago—and to ask what that conversation looks like now.

What happens when contemporary Black artists take up the invitation?

What does a colored girl see when she looks at herself today?

What have we carried forward? What have we released? What have we yet to say?

The artists represented in this exhibition offer some of those answers—not as a single narrative, but as an evolving constellation of perspectives, experiences, colors, forms and voices.

That feels very much in the spirit of Shange.

Because for colored girls was never simply about one woman’s story. It was about the power of many voices occupying the same space and, together, creating something larger than any one of us could create alone.

That is the beauty of the choreopoem. That is the beauty of Black creative expression. And that is the beauty of the work we are privileged to do at ARTE NOIR.

We are continuing our involvement in this 50th anniversary national conversation with the exhibit up through November 15th, the exhibit analysis in this issue by Beverly Aarons, by making colored girls the center of our September 19th 4th Anniversary Celebration, and celebrating the October 18th birthday of Ntozake. She would have been 78 years young.

I am especially grateful to Paul Williams, Jr., Ntozake Shange’s brother and Managing Trustee of the Ntozake Shange Trust, for inviting ARTE NOIR into this extraordinary collaboration and for making the journey to Seattle to celebrate this moment with us.

Fifty years later, the rainbow is still enuf.

And the paint is still wet.

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Vivian Phillips, Founder, ARTE NOIR