“A History Hidden in Deep American Soil:” Shyanne Dickey’s Portraits of Black Kansan Matriarchs

In life-sized, mixed-media portraits, Black Oklahoman artist Shyanne Dickey celebrates her female relatives’ agricultural and familial successes in Kansas. Specifically, in artwork such as Land Sold, Exodusters, and The Load, she references and memorializes the often overlooked legacy of female Exodusters—Black Southerners pushed to Kansas in the late nineteenth century—within her lineage and how the results of their movements continue to impact the farming women within her family today. Depicting an older, Black woman painted over a dynamic background thrumming with vignettes, Dickey’s Exodusters presents a narrative of Black migration to and through the American West—starting with migrants’ arrival in the country due to the slave trade and ending with the settlement of the central figure, Eliza Bradshaw, Dickey’s five-times great-grandmother. Similarly, The Load and Land Sold feature Dickey’s mother, Lisa, painted over collaged archival material and familial photographs. Ghostly images, one can see the land and sky through them—a formal detail that connects their subjects physically with the landscape. In this paper, I argue that Dickey’s portraits not only counteract assumptions that settlement in the American West has been predominantly white, but also emphasize to viewers that Black women have and continue to be excluded from popular conceptions of American farmers and the spaces in which they gather.