THE BLACK ARTIST AS A WITNESS
Updated: 16 hours ago
By Beverly Aarons
Black art makes seen who is merely visible. Over 150 years after the end of the Civil War, Black bodies can be seen everywhere but somehow this representation has rarely translated to Black people being truly witnessed. And yet we search for the familiar brown face, the syncopated cadence of AAVE, the confident presence of Black life in the collective narrative of humanity. We search but what we often find in so many places feels less like representation and more like a funhouse mirror every way we turn. But can we get a witness?
The Black artist has answered the call. The painter is the witness. The sculptor. The photographer. The textile artist. All witnesses. The Black artist witnesses their own life and the lives of others, their looking and seeing, their understanding, their existing. This isn’t something you sign up for, even though it can be intentional. Just by virtue of being the Black artist, every creation can become a mirror, an artifact, a testimony.
Two years after the Civil War ended and nearly 4 million enslaved people of African descent emerged from bondage, the Black sculptor Edmonia Lewis carved Forever Free into marble. The sculpture featured a Black man triumphantly clutching shattered shackles and a Black woman kneels by his side, her hands clasped in prayer as she looks into the distance. They are alone, autonomous, facing the future and leaving their past of enslavement behind. That was radical in the 19th century, a time where most artistic portrayals of Black people were in relation to labor. They were featured as servants who existed to benefit someone else. But in Forever Free, Lewis witnessed Black people as autonomous human beings who were only in relationship to themselves and to each other. In that context, Forever Free existed as a mirror of Black life after emancipation, an artifact of that life for anyone who might be looking in that present or in the future, and a testimony that freedom was not only yearned for but was earnestly embraced. And the last part was critical at a time when a new narrative was being constructed that recast slavery as benevolent and the enslaved as the real benefactors of bondage. A narrative that has endured in various forms especially when applied to Black womanhood, but the most durable idea is that Black humanity exists as a function for the benefit of others, and that this arrangement is natural and beneficial to Black people. This can show up as the Mammy archetype who serves selflessly or the Jezebel who serves carnally. But no matter which points on that schema scale we find Black women represented in the collective visual field, serving others is constructed as their purpose. That has been served up as representation. But some Black artists have witnessed something completely different.
In January 2025, ARTE NOIR exhibited The Women, The Paper, and The Light, by George C. Jennings Jr., which featured a series of digital portraits of Black women. Just like Lewis’ Forever Free, Jennings’ portraits centered Black humanity by allowing each woman the entire frame without placing her in relationship to someone else and without reflecting the funhouse distortions. Every portrait in Jennings’ series rests upon a nimbus, a symbol commonly used in European art during the Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance eras, and mostly associated with sacred, revered, and significant figures. In my analysis of that show, I said the following: “By using this symbol with Black women, Jennings continues the Ethiopian and Nubian tradition of depicting Black figures with nimbuses, honoring their dignity and divinity. Leveraging this visual language, Jennings subtly challenges the racist and sexist narratives of who is considered worthy of sanctification and reverence. But he doesn’t simply revere his subjects. By using the square and rectangular halos commonly seen in Byzantine-era portraits depicting living saints and significant contemporary figures, Jennings places his subjects firmly in the present, as significant individuals who are making an impact today.”
In the contemporary context where Black womanhood is visible but rarely fully seen, Jennings’ portraits serve as a true reflection that allows the hypervisible but misrecognized Black woman to see herself clearly and to exit the distortion. This series also endures as an artifact not just because of the collective narrative that the series tells but because of the intricate care the artist put into creating the artworks, which struck me as meticulous when I wrote my analysis of that show.
Three portraits from George Jennings' The Women, The Paper, and The Light. Courtesy of the artist.
“There’s a soft, gentle glow, as if each face, neck, and shoulder is sun-kissed. In so much digital portraiture, artists fail to capture the complexity of human skin, and digital tools like auto-blending and airbrushing can produce cartoonish results. But Jennings doesn’t fall into this trap. From a distance, the skin looks so realistic that it might be mistaken for a photograph. But upon closer examination, the detailing reveals itself: carefully articulated dips and peaks and lines composed in such a way that I could almost feel the texture. Then there’s the color, the reddish-brown hue in nearly every portrait, whether it’s the deep undertone of a dark brown cheek or a light dusting upon tawny lips; this color contributes to the exhibition’s overall cohesion.”
And the durability of the portraits’ substrate—metal—serves to create a durable artifact that could physically endure beyond the present moment, just like Lewis’ marble sculpture. Together, Jennings’ portraits printed on metal and Lewis’ newly freed couple carved in marble create a continuous narrative across more than a century, the ancestors speaking to the descendants.
The artifacts compound. Together, they provide a map of what it looks like to bear witness: to make the merely visible truly seen, and the truly seen so deeply understood that recognition transforms not only the narrative but the material reality of the present and future.
In LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family in Three Acts, Frazier serves as a witness for the people of Flint, Michigan, who had been without clean drinking water since April 2014. She began documenting the crisis in 2016 through the eyes of Flint residents, particularly poet and activist Shea Cobb and her family. Her photographs recorded not only the crisis as an abstraction, but how that crisis impacted real people, most of them Black. And in 2019, her willingness to witness the people of Flint moved beyond documentation when Frazier, Cobb, and activist Amber Hasan helped bring a 26,000-pound atmospheric water generator to the community, providing free clean drinking water to hundreds of residents.
When Black artists serve as the witness to Black life, they can change not just narratives but the direction of history.
ABOUT BEVERLY AARONS
Beverly Aarons is a writer, artist, and game developer. She works across disciplines, exploring the intersections of history, hidden current realities, and imagined future worlds. She specializes in making unseen perspectives visible and aims to infuse all of her creative work with a deep sense of emotionality. She’s won the Guy A. Hanks, Marvin H. Miller Screenwriting Award, Community 4Culture Fellowship, Artist Trust GAP Award, 4Culture Creative Consultancies Award, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture smART Ventures grant. She was an ARTS at King Street Station Resident in 2021/2022, and her visual art has been exhibited at Studio 103 and Youngstown Cultural Arts Center. She’s currently producing a play about the future of human migration in collaboration with ShoreLake Arts, and she’s publishing Artists Up Close, a monthly e-magazine/newsletter that features in-depth and intimate profiles of emerging and established artists in the Seattle area and beyond.
Learn more about Beverly and her work here.
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