HERE WE ARE: BLACK WOMANHOOD FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE RAINBOW IS ENUF
by Beverly Aarons
On view at ARTE NOIR Gallery through November 15, 2026, Colored Girls for Colored Girls—Evolution of Expression invites us into a visual continuation of the collective story of Black womanhood. What happened to Black womanhood in the 50 years since Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf transmuted Black women’s grief, endurance, strength, and resilience into collective testimony? The pressures endure, but Black women have changed. That is the evolution of expression.
The ‘I’ exists. When examined collectively, the artworks in Colored Girls for Colored Girls treat self-possession as the default condition. Across most of the 30-plus works, individual Black women appear only in relation to themselves, not the roles they perform for others. In Adetola Ababtan’s Iyalode series, three monochromatic portraits of lone female figures sit in stark contrast to a colorful assembled background. Their faces are serious, but the field on which they rest has a kind of joyfulness to it. Yet the figures don’t perform joy. In fact, they don’t regard the observer at all. They appear to be focused inward and their gaze averted. The faces have a mask-like quality, as if the person is just beneath the surface, present but unreachable. And the “mask” emerges in several works in this exhibition, both literally and figuratively. In Yellow Mask – Nostalgia Unmasked by Velicia Gourdin and Freedom Exquisitely by Oluwakemi Arigbon, masks are visible, unforgettable, and ornate. The mask can serve as a portal to self-realization, enlightenment or freedom but it could also be something from which the self emerges. In Gourdin’s Nostalgia Unmasked, the figure’s eyes and face seem to emerge from the yellow mask as most of her body is consumed by it. The mask has long functioned as protection for Black women, a shield against facial expression policing from strangers to bosses. Paul Laurence Dunbar eloquently describes the function of the mask in his 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask.” The mask signals what must be performed, what must be discarded, and what can serve as a protection.
Earth Mother by Tracy Poindexter, Yellow Mask - Nostalgia Unmasked by Velicia Gourdin; Marks in foreground by Elisheba Mrozik. Image credit: Hilary Northcraft.
Mapping the Visage. In Jasmine Carsky’s Sacred Cartographies, Black women’s faces are not just shaped; they are mapped and excavated through what Carsky describes as “intuitive bilateral drawing and pattern-making.” The interconnected lines and shapes create a geometric landscape where the face is both a map and a puzzle—something to solve or an intricate container in need of a key. The result is a dimensional mask made of interconnected parts but still a covering behind which there is more to discover. This is where the idea of the mask becomes most pertinent. Have Black women, in the 50 years since For Colored Girls, begun to examine the masks they wear? Have they begun to deconstruct them, reassemble them, and even make them serve their interior life?
The ‘I’ is Whole. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” an essay collected in Audre Lorde’s 1984 book Sister Outsider, Lorde wrote, “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition.”
Jurnee Ta’Zion’s triptych distorted sense of self and Aliyah Sidqe’s Black on Both Sides explore and embrace the multiplicities of Black womanhood. Ta’Zion’s distorted sense of self comprises three self-portraits rendered in electric blue, reddish-orange, and yellow. They initially appear to be three different people, but upon closer examination, it’s clearly three different versions of the same person. Ta’Zion said she spent hours studying photographs of herself until she could clearly see the person staring back at her. “The triptych reminds us that wholeness isn’t found in choosing one version of ourselves over another, but in honoring every part that makes us who we are,” Ta’Zion said. Black on Both Sides presents the self as duality—playful, sensual, and unbothered by contradiction. These works explore what happens when the mask slips, is discarded, or even subverted.
Unsanctioned Expression. As Though I Were God by Egypt Muhammad centers a full-bodied woman wearing a red lace teddy. She is splayed across a satiny bed—sensual, self-possessed, and not performing sexuality for the observer. In “The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood,” a chapter in Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, Collins examines a race/sex/gender hierarchy in which Black women’s sexuality is regulated through controlling images, including the Jezebel—the construction of the Black woman as sexually promiscuous and perpetually available. Audre Lorde approaches the problem from another direction in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” arguing that women have been taught to suppress and distrust the erotic even though it is a source of knowledge, pleasure, and power. Read together, Collins and Lorde expose a brutal contradiction: Black women can be hypersexualized by the culture while simultaneously alienated from ownership of their own sexuality. The resulting pressure can demand a mask of propriety. Muhammad’s reclining figure refuses that contradiction. Her sensuality is neither repression nor an offering. It belongs to her.
In another manifestation of unsanctioned expression, Tiffany Johnson’s Refined by the Fire subverts the controlling image of the Sapphire archetype by giving visual form to anguish—an emotion that Black women are rarely permitted to inhabit without it being reinterpreted as anger or strength. In Refined by the Fire, anguish is simply allowed to exist.
Nature as Witness. In nature, the tree does not know the meaning of a Sapphire or Jezebel. The river does not construct controlling narratives and images about Black women or anyone else. Surrounded by the forest and the ocean or a vast desert, collective Black womanhood just ‘is’ energy, a biology life-form, a daughter of earth seeking shelter and sustenance. Nature does not disprove the racialized social construct; it exposes its fiction. In Marika by Larissa Umulinga, a woman lies on a patch of grass; a soft-focused leaf obscures one eye while the other eye directly addresses the observer. Just like a bee extracting pollen or a bird in search of shade on a hot summer day, this human rests her body on nature’s couch and looks upon those who might be watching her. Another resting woman appears in Carla Golder's Out of the Flower VI. The nude figure is embraced by magnolia-like petals; her back is to the observer. One might imagine her sleeping or simply inhaling the light, sweet aroma. She is not performing. She is not conforming to or fighting a construct. She is a self-possessed being.
The Return. In Kendria Huff’s vessels, two netted sculptural forms spill strings of white fiber from their openings. Huff said that the vessels are a visual exploration of hope and reciprocal connection. “As I honor my ability to hold for others, I am exploring what it means to be held.” A direct answer to the controlling image of the Mammy and the suffocating mask of the self-sacrificing pillar of community, family, and sisterhood. So, what does sisterhood look like 50 years after Shange’s choreopoem? It may look like a mosaic of Black women who have transmuted pain and suffering into an earned self-confidence that does not seek permission to fully inhabit the self. Like the rainbow-colored women in Suzette Royster’s Spectrum of Sisterhood, they have come to understand that to connect to the sisterhood authentically, they must embrace the self fully.
On view at ARTE NOIR Gallery through November 15, 2026, Colored Girls for Colored Girls—Evolution of Expression features artworks by Adetola Abatan, OluwaKemi Arigbon, Jade Burel, Jasmine Carsky, Tara Coyt, Carla Golder, Velicia Gourdin, Kendria Huff, Ashley Jeter, Elisheba Mrozik, Egypt Muhammad, Tracy Poindexter, Suzette Royster, Aliyah Sidqe, Tiffany Steele, Jurnee Ta’Zion (Weeams), Larissa Umulinga (Lens), Brenetta Ward.
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