Black Women and Postminimalism

In the 1960s and 70s, many black women artists adopted artistic practices now commonly referred to as postminimalist. These practices include such subcategories as process art, installation art, site-specific and land art, and performance art that opened up social, experiential, and bodily possibilities often disavowed by formalism’s and minimalism’s preoccupation with “purity” of visuality and form. Instead, these artists both engaged and challenged dominant, masculinist minimalist conventions that favored closed systems, rigid geometries, and claims of dispassionate coolness, and, therefore, placed pressure on such disavowal of the social and helped to produce an expanded form of postminimalism, inclusive of racial and gendered implications.

This panel asks: what does black femininity/gender bring to bear on postminimalism’s expressive, open, and sensuous forms? Like minimalists, black women artists paid particular attention to materiality, but they refused to shy away from metaphorical and metonymic associations to the social, the bodily, the re/productive. Further, black women’s expansion of form through postminimalist idioms brought in the historically excluded and illuminated the racialized and gendered underpinnings of modern notions of form itself. We welcome papers foregrounding black women’s engagement with postminimalist strategies from the 1960s to the present.