“There is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art” has been up at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art since mid-September and runs through Jan. 30. If you have not seen it, it’s well worth your time, both for the way it fills in one of the most gaping holes in art history – which, as we know, has been dominated by white male artists – but also for the many ways it illustrates Black female artists potently pushing against their egregious omission.

Thankfully, the white male art canon has been disintegrating for decades. One of the things this show makes clear, however, is how long various stereotypes of Black women – the Tragic Mulatto, Jezebel, Mammy – permeated their depiction throughout American art, and how deeply etched into our consciousness they continue to be.

There’s no question that challenging accepted views is a major function of art scholarship, which is why it’s important to always confront art with an open mind. This show asks us to ponder many questions around assumptions about Black women, so be prepared to have moments of discomfort.

In examining my own reactions to certain wall texts presented by the exhibition’s curator, Elizabeth S. Humphrey (Bowdoin class of 2014, and curatorial assistant and manager of student programs at the museum), I discovered ways that these stereotypes have influenced my own view. I was grateful for the opportunity to dissect this dilemma in my own soul. I also found there were times where I felt Humphrey’s thesis could be over-reaching.

The exhibition is organized more or less chronologically, beginning with Eastman Johnson’s “Dinah, Portrait of a Negress” from 1867. To me, the painting emanates a stolid dignity, while at the same time conveying the sense of that dignity being devalued and subjugated. I see resilience, but simultaneously realize that the circumstances that summoned this resilience were so horribly inhuman that you can feel the natural arising of this woman’s survivalist imperative.

This is my 21st-century view. However, though Johnson was known for painting “sympathetic” portraits of enslaved people, the wall text reminds us that “Dinah” and “Negress” were both stereotypical terms that concretized the “other” status of enslaved souls in the popular imagination. I realized Johnson was having it both ways – at once acknowledging his subject’s dignity while cluelessly excluding her from his world. This is what we would call white privilege today.

I also found Deschamps de la Talaire’s 1760 “Portrait of a Biracial Woman” quite beautiful initially. Then I learned from the wall text that it was a portrait de fantasie, a common genre of the day based in fictive subjects of the artist’s own imagining. In this light, the woman’s clear sensuality – swelling bosom, idealized features – acquires a certain creepiness that approaches fetishistic soft porn, despite its fairly chaste 18th-century context.

Works such as these point up at how these antiquated stereotypes continue to subliminally function in our consciousness (or unconsciousness), and how they contribute to a certain psychological denial of realities that our 21st-century view fails, mostly out of ignorance, to take into account.

Further along in this gallery are various Black female nudes shot in the 1940s and ’50s by William Witt. The wall text here reads: “Their unrecorded names and invisible faces are a form of erasure, leaving only their Black bodies on view for the world. Playing into Western art traditions of portraying the female nude, Witt’s photographs are layered with a legacy of enslavement, ethnographic exhibition and conquest of Black bodies. His photographs raise issues about the connotations of the Black female body: hypersexual, unfeminine, obscene, and grotesque.”

Parts of this statement seem incontrovertible. “Sleeping Nude,” for example, depicts a woman with her back turned away from us to face a radiator flanked by two windows. Compositionally, the radiator stands erect at exactly a point coinciding with the woman’s genital area. It’s hard to believe this phallic allusion is innocent rather than lewd, especially for a photographer for whom composition was a paramount concern.

Yet one of Witt’s hallmarks was the anonymity of his subjects. He always played the outsider, looking onto scenes that felt private from a distance, through a window, from behind. Nor did he reserve faceless portrayals of female nudes to Black women, as evidenced by his 1966 photo (obviously not in this show) of a white woman with a blonde bob looking out the window of a doorway, her back to the photographer. Erasure? Perhaps. But might it not also be the artist’s sense of his own alienation from the world? An observer rather than a participant in life?

“Tell Me What You’re Thinking,” 2016, chromogenic print by Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971). Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. © 2021 Mickalene Thomas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I also didn’t sense anything “hypersexual, unfeminine, obscene and grotesque” about “Black Nude Hands on Chest.” The subject gazes straight at us, unashamed and, to my mind, incredibly self-possessed. There is not a quantitative difference for me in her expression and that of the model in Mickalene Thomas’s forceful, resplendent “Tell Me What You’re Thinking” (2016). The title in this case is almost a dare, as if to ask, “Do you have a problem with this?”

Thomas, of course, is upending tropes of classical (read: white) art by posing her model as odalisque – a female slave or concubine – in the manner of Manet, Titian and others, then layering the setting with a riot of patterned fabrics that jolts our recollections of the tastefully restrained environments in which those male painters placed their subjects.

“American Icons: Untitled (Salt and Pepper Shakers),” 1988–89, silver gelatin print by Carrie Mae Weems, American, born 1953. Archival Collection of Marion Boulton Stroud and Acadia Summer Arts Program, Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Gift from the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

This sort of politically charged representation runs throughout the show, mainly in modern works by Black female artists. “American Icons: Untitled (Salt and Pepper Shakers)” by photographer Carrie Mae Weems, shows Mammy and Sambo shakers on a kitchen counter, illustrating how the prevalence of Black stereotypes infiltrated the most quotidian objects in our homes – and, thus, our consciousness.

The provocatively titled “African/American” by Kara Walker certainly confronts the viewer with racist ideas about out-of-control Black female sexuality (the last two sentences of the Witt wall text would have been perfect here). More documentary in nature are the protest photographs of Danny Lyon and Accra Shepp.

“Arrested For Demonstrating In Americus, Georgia, Teenage Girls Are Kept In A Stockade In The Countryside Near Leesburg. Some Had Been In The Stockade For A Few Days, Others Had Been There For Three Weeks. They Have No Beds And No Working Sanitary Facilities. I Make Pictures Through The Broken Glass of the Barred Windows,” 1963, printed later, gelatin silver print, by Danny Lyon, American, born 1942. Gift of Drs. Steven and Linda Lee, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. © Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Lyon’s images record the imprisonment, under appalling conditions, of 32 Black teenage girls in Georgia, and Fannie Lou Hamer demonstrating in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Shepp’s are portraits of women at a 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest. Whitfield Lovell’s conte crayon drawing on paper, “Kin XLVI,” pairs a Black woman’s profile with an object used for target practice. It’s not exactly subtle, but it does, as the wall text says, prompt us “to consider the history of violence on the Black body and issues of domestic violence toward women.”

It’s encouraging to see modern expressions of Black female power in works like Thomas’s. This sense pervades Elizabeth Catlett’s print (which lends its name to the show). It’s also in Barbara Dewayne Chase-Riboud “Zanzibar #3,” which deals with the legacy of the slave trade while also acknowledging the regal origins of Black women with a gorgeously crafted headdress. And Barkley L. Hendricks’s “Sister Lucas” is an unabashedly proud portrait of Black femininity.

“Double Cherry Blossoms,” 1973, acrylic on canvas, by Alma Thomas. Gift of halley k harrisburg, Class of 1990, and Michael Rosenfeld, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Photo by Luc Demers

There are also artists such as Alma Thomas, Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Julie Mehretu who eschewed explicitly “Black” themes for more personally expressive styles in which they acquired a measure of freedom from the politics of identity.

But it is the very variety of genres, media and themes presented in this exhibition that underlies a larger, depressing reality that is at the root of any kind of generalized marginalization. All these women – whether subject or author of a work – were and are unique beings whose individual value and contribution has been ignored. And the unconscious effects of this indignity still inform the way many of us look at and interpret art today.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com

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