Portrayal / Resistance

A first-generation Canadian born to Guyanese parents, Sandra Brewster grounds her practice in portraying people of the Caribbean diaspora, often depicting subjects in motion and deliberately obfuscating their identities. In this photograph from Brewster’s Blur series, the figure is moving, as if displaced from one geography to another, refusing to be pinned down by race, gender, or temporality. Because Brewster prevents viewers from seeing who is portrayed, this work has been referred to as an anti-portrait.

Afro-Latinx artist Firelei Báez creates defiant forms of portraiture that reveal the subtleties of overlapping identities and celebrate Black and Latinx women. Layering abstract swirls of paint with opaque and ambiguous figures, Báez sometimes uses her own image for inspiration. The figure’s layered skin tones suggest fluidity of race and color and avoid a scrutinizing gaze. Perhaps collecting, or deflecting, shouts along the way, Báez says the figure serves to “disrupt the current system of social categorization.”

Lisa Reihana’s photograph portraying Hine-nui-te-pō, goddess of night and death, honors women’s powerful roles in Māori culture and re-envisions the mythical figure for the present. Shrouded in darkness, Reihana says that the goddess, “sits above an inner-city Auckland carpark, in reference to the levels of Rarohenga (the Underworld).” Guiding the souls of humans when they die, Hine-nui-te-pō holds a 19th-century glass walking stick, signaling her right to speak. Adorned with multi-gender tattoos, the Māori elder who posed for this photo works with men imprisoned for violence against women.

Shelley Niro often confronts stereotypes of Indigenous identity and represents women as visionary changemakers. In this photograph of her granddaughter, Niro connects the pre-teen to the powers of nature and the night sky. As the figure’s hair merges into floating tree branches, her form offers both rest and exhilaration. The vision of a starry sky can also refer to Indigenous connections to the constellations as well as the historical practice of helping people escape enslavement by watching the night sky.

This double-sided painting considers the imagery and implications of fences to highlight the ongoing fight against women’s oppression.

Barbed
Inspired by the Kansas landscape and history of a barbed wire factory in Lawrence, Zhang fashions her trademark long hair into a barbed wire fence. This personal and powerful image represents the confinement of animals and humans and references the mistreatment of women across the globe.

Chained
Chained depicts an urban view covered with piles of industrial chains intertwined with human hair. The composition suggests a densely populated cityscape with little room for personal escape. The steel chains and hair symbolize the hard and soft power that women must negotiate every day.

Artist Elia Alba describes her Hands series: “Utilizing the personal narratives the sitter has shared with me, along with historical and folkloric narratives I ascribed to them, I create a portrait of them through their hands. Their gestures… are tied to our thoughts. It’s a bodily action that represents information and thus has an indirect effect on the world. The hands are created through a photo-transfer process on fabric of photographs I have taken of a person’s hands.”

Claude Cahun rebelled against conventions of gender and sexuality through self-portraiture. With slicked back hair, a direct gaze, and open posture, Cahun performs aspects of masculinity and embodies a quote from their personal writings: “Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” The artist’s sentiment and gender fluidity remain a relevant forerunner to contemporary acts of resisting fixed definitions of gender.

In addition to defying society’s restrictive gender conventions, Cahun also used art and writing to courageously undermine the Nazi forces during War World II. Alongside their partner and artistic collaborator, Marcel Moore, Cahun created subversive pamphlets and banners denouncing Germany’s violent actions and occupation of Jersey, an island where Cahun and Moore lived together for over fifteen years. The artist and their partner were arrested and sentenced to death for their resistance efforts in 1944. Fortunately, the war concluded before the Nazis carried out their sentences.

The legacy of Cahun’s gender resistance through self-portraiture continues today among many trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming artists, such as Juliana Huxtable.

Angela Hennessy is a survivor of gun violence who lectures nationally on aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundaries between the living and the dead. This work in the shape of a hair locket arranges braided hair almost like plants or a family portrait. In a time of race- and gender-based violence, Hennessy urges us to grieve our many personal and cultural losses, both past and present, so that future generations will not have to.