Surface Abstraction in Black Women’s Contemporary Art

Taking as a point of departure, two seminal texts, Social Text Journal’s special edition, “What is Queer about Queer Studies Now” (2005) and the recent publication of the Black Scholar Journal, “Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics” (2019), I meditate on the queer potentiality of artists Mickalene Thomas and Zanele Muholi’s work as abstractionist practices. In 2014, Mickalene Thomas created the work Tête de Femme that deviated from her more representational work and towards abstract iterations of femme faces. Most recently, Zanele Muholi has returned to self-portraiture. In Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness, Muholi utilizes the body, vernacular props, and the skin as site. This paper looks at Tête de Femme and Somnyama Ngonyama and towards the problem of race, gender and sexuality as structural positions to negotiate a different orientation to the aesthetic. Thomas and Muholi’s work disrupt logics of beauty and the sublime, towards one that articulates a difference and through what I argue is an abstractionist sensibility.