‘Black Venus: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture’ at Somerset House

Sara Makari-Aghdam

Writer and academic Sara Makari-Aghdam reviews ‘Black Venus: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture’. Curated by Aindrea Emelife, on show until 24 September 2023 at Somerset House, Terrace Rooms and Courtyard Rooms, the exhibition is divided into three main sections. Sara Makari-Aghdam offsets each one in their historical and cultural contexts, at once conveying the luxurious imagery of the show and demystifying some of the tropes and archetypes that its rationale refutes and counteracts.

‘The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes.’ Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 1970

As I write about ‘Black Venus: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture’ curated by the British born Nigerian Aindrea Emelife, I sit outside Morrison Hall with its crawling ivy and quaint painted door in the grounds of Princeton University, New Jersey. The building, constructed in 1886 in the neo-Gothic architectural style of most of the campus, houses Princeton’s African American Studies, and pays homage to the literary hero Toni Morrison (b.1931–2019), the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Morrison had taught at the University for 17 years. So, what is the link to ‘Black Venus’, an exhibition at Somerset House in London that I visited on 1 August, other than Morrison’s obvious identity as a strong and pioneering Black woman? It is perhaps that her work also ultimately explores Black bodies.

Morrison’s groundbreaking first novel, entitled The Bluest Eye is no exception to this. A dark and harrowing tale of a young African American girl named Pecola Breedlove, The Bluest Eye is set in the author’s birthplace of Lorain, Ohio, around 1941, after “The Great Depression” of 1929–1939. In the novel, Pecola is continually made to feel physically “ugly” by those around her and the narrative plunges into white supremacist beauty standards that still sadly thrive today. Additionally, it concerns the subject of child abuse; Pecola’s Black father Cholly Breedlove rapes and impregnates her. Desperate to be liked, even loved, Pecola envisions her problems being solved if she were to have blue eyes, like that of a white girl.

In the exhibition ‘Black Venus’, Emelife knits together an empowering story of Black bodies through more positive renderings in the twenty plus female and non-binary artists’ work on display.

The most ubiquitously referenced Venus imagery throughout art history comes from fifteenth century Renaissance Italian art. An erotic porcelain skinned, billowing red-haired Venus who emerges from a shell in The Birth of Venus, housed in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, was painted circa 1482 by Sandro Botticelli (b.1445–1510) (1). It is a painting that explores classical Greek mythology, the ideal of perfect beauty and the power of the gods to instil it, painted lacking in melanin and with racially white features. Artists have produced many such atypical white Western Venuses across the centuries. 

‘Black Venus’ draws upon the archetype of the “Sable Venus”, which took inspiration from Botticelli’s Venus. English painter Thomas Stothard (b.1755–1834) inscribed his plate with the “Sable Venus” in his 1794 The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies. The etching is from the third edition of racist politician and supporter of the slave trade Bryan Edwards’ (b. 1743–1800) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1801), currently located in educational collections such as the Royal Museums of Greenwich and the Wellcome Collection, London, in the form of allegorical prints (2). 

It presents a rosy picture of bringing Africans to the Caribbean to work as slaves in the British West Indies. Central parts of the image are based on Isaac Teale’s poem first published in Jamaica in 1765, The Sable Venus: An Ode. The poem plays off inadequate Blackness like the night against superior whiteness. Whilst orbiting the attraction to Blackness, the poet writes:  

‘Both juft alike, except the white, No difference, no, ---none at night,
The beauteous dames between.’  

The “Sable Venus” of Stothard's etching sails towards the West Indies on a shell powered by white cherubs and Greek gods, however, it is impossible to know whether the white man swimming in the sea in the right-hand corner is a god, as his white gaze is affixed to Venus. Perhaps, by this logic, white men are synonymous with gods, therefore slavery is justified by the gods and for white men carry it out is in itself an act of god.   

French born Guyanese-Danish digital artist Tabita Rezaire recreates exactly this scene with herself as a Black “womxn” in Inner Fire: Bow Down (2017), rising not from a shell in the ocean, but from a space-age Sun Ra-like image of a world wrapped in serpents, as a life size snake writhes around her own body (3). Serpents and snakes carry huge symbolic meaning in history, in art, biblically, and in the occult. In the book of Exodus, the staves of Moses and Aaron are turned into snakes, and in Genesis 3:1– 6 the snake facilitates choices between good or evil. In the occult, the snake is associated with divination, biting its own tail – the ouroboros serpent representing the natural cycle of destruction and re-creation. Rezaire’s artwork represents an effort to take the power back, to control who exactly creates the story and how.

Cowrie shells frame the image, used for money as early as the fourteenth century off the west coast of Africa, to trade for goods and services throughout Africa, Asia and the Oceania region. This is suggestive of how Black people were traded and commodified, not just through the Atlantic slave trade (between around 1526 to 1867) but also the Indian Ocean slave trade (estimated to have lasted longer from 1400-1900s). Black African slaves were the earliest known to Arab-Muslims, who firmly believed that “kafirs” (the non-believers of Islam) were subordinate to Muslims, and therefore conquerable. Additionally, Black African women could be made into slave-concubines, some becoming an “Umm al-walad”, the name given to a slave who bore the child of the master, and who ultimately gained more rights through doing so.

Women were classed as property and could be sold by their Muslim owners, a practice that was endorsed by the Prophet Muhammad. For example, he kept a slave-concubine, Mariya, an Egyptian woman born of a Coptic father and a Greek mother. Mariya had been given as a gift to the Prophet by the Roman Governor of Alexandria. It is said that whiter skinned concubines had a higher value (4). This has undoubtedly influenced visual representations of Venus in art down the ages, including from a non-European perspective, as well as re-enforcing the idea of women as property. Alberta Whittle’s C is for Colonial Fantasy (2017) similarly uses cowrie shells to convey the same ideas.  

Fusing much of this history into the exhibition, ‘Black Venus’ was also the title of a 2010 film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche based on the harrowing and tragic life of the Khosa woman Saartjie Baartman, or Sara (b. Camdeboo Local Municipality, South Africa 1789­–1815), referenced in Emelife’s first Venus classification of woman, the “Hottentot Venus”. At the age of 16 years old and an orphan, Baartman's Khoikhoi partner was murdered by Dutch colonisers. She was then taken from her home and trafficked into slavery, for although the slave trade had officially ceased in 1807, slavery continued (5).

After this Baartman was exhibited in London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” in a type of freakshow, on account of her Blackness and her natural steatopygia, wherein substantial tissue collects on the buttocks and thighs. Baartman died at the early age of twenty-six, in an often-debated illness, possibly complicated by smallpox or pneumonia. In death she was exploited too, as her body parts went on display in a museum in Paris pickled in jars, until Nelson Mandela repatriated the body parts to South Africa in 1974.

Particular works in ‘Black Venus’ that draw upon the “Hottentot Venus” include a 1994 self-portrait with the same title, by Jamaican American artist Renee Cox (b.1960). Here, as Baartman stands nude with prosthetics profusely accentuating her womanly torso, Cox attempts, as is written, to ‘take back the depiction of black women and rescue an ideal of beauty’ (6). It is no accident the self-portrait appears in black tones of silver gelatin print with a jet-black backdrop, with the artist’s own gaze verging on the expressionless. Instead, Cox ignores the male and in fact the white male gaze, looking out to the viewer instead (7).

More recently, critics have complained about images reminiscent of Baartman, such as the 2014 Kim Kardashian cover for PAPER, with the photo referencing a 1976 image by the same photographer Jean-Paul Goude in which he showed the Black model Carolina Beaumont naked, whilst balancing a champagne glass on her protruding buttocks. Kardashian, a popular celebrity of Armenian, Scottish and Dutch ancestry not racially known to be Black, has faced multiple accusations of “Blackfishing”, meaning appropriating Black culture and/or trying to appear Black.  

Lastly, the largely American originated anti-Black stereotype of the “Jezebel” paints Black women as lascivious characters, similar to the “tragic mulatto”, a biracial person often forced into prostitution. In this racist trope, they cannot be raped, as they are, according to white supremacists, automatically consenting. In the American 1915 silent film remembered as possibly the most racist film ever made in Hollywood: The Birth of a Nation (directed by D.W. Griffith and making use of “blackface” – like Blackfishing, a form of dressing up as a Black person), Lydia Brown is a lustful “mulatto” character. She is the mistress of the white character Senator Stoneman, played in “blackface” by the white actor Mary Alden (8).

Here in ‘Black Venus’, Emelife has peopled the gallery space with Black women and non-binary artists reclaiming their sexuality, and also parodying these tropes – for example, Ming Smith’s portrait of herself as blonde sex-bomb Marilyn Monroe in Me as Marilyn in the 1991 hand-coloured photograph with revealing dress, blonde wig and red lipstick. Recalling Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of the cinema icon, Smith reinvents the image into her own Black femininity, laced with references to the jazz age. Smith was possibly an early stimulus for artists such as Rezaire as previously mentioned, whereby Smith’s photograph captures a glittery and electric pink element of Sun Ra, in Space is the Place from 1974. After all, she went on to photograph Sun Ra in 1978. 

Perhaps my favourite works in the exhibition are Smith’s, and also those of the late Ghanian-Scottish Maud Sulter, who similarly worked in headshot portraiture in the photographic medium of Daguerreotype. However, Sulter’s own gaze in Calliope (1989) is curiously averted, her head turned to the side, looking away from the viewer, unlike most of the portraits in ‘Black Venus’. Calliope and Sulter’s Zabat series from 1989 are a far cry from the “Jezebel” stereotype; instead, the artist celebrates Black women and their accomplishments. As in the style of Victorian portraiture in rich dark coloured oil paints, Sulter’s women are her version of muses and sister goddesses (another type of Greek Venus possibly). The work Calliope hangs above its elevated setting, a marble and stone fireplace in what must have been curatorially quite a difficult space to work with.

All in all, ‘Black Venus’ is a packed and quite complex display that leaves a lot to think about. Perhaps it could have done with a catalogue essay rather than the quite basic pink labels. Whilst full of emancipation it also surveys decades, if not centuries of embedded discrimination and stereotyping, pain and injustice. Emelife, dubbed a groundbreaking new voice in the visual arts, gives hope to aspiring Black female curators, highlighting the importance for Black women to be the protagonist in their own story. Whilst not forgetting: ‘A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes’, Pecola Breedlove. Morrison’s protagonist faced a cruel world that would not see her and could not allow her to see herself in her natural beauty. Exhibitions like ‘Black Venus’ illuminate the path that provides a way for Black women to reassess society and reassert themselves and their place within it, an inspiring force for good.

Footnotes

(1)  John Richards, Martin Kemp, ‘The New Painting: Italy and the North’, The Oxford History of Western Art, ed. Martin Kemp (Oxford University Press, 2002), 157.  

(2)  The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, Thomas Stothard; William Grainger, circa 1800, allegorical prints. Collection of Royal Museum Greenwich, https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-254621 

(3) “Womxn”, an alternative spelling to “woman”, along with the term womyn, has been around since the 1970s to avoid the “man” part of the word. However, “womxn” is supposed to be trans and non-binary inclusive but has been criticised for having a transphobic connotation that trans women are not women. Similarly, non-binary people criticised the term as it still uses part of the word women. 

(4) Behnaz A. Mirzai, Identity Transformations of African Communities in Iran, in The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 67

(5) See Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Sarah Baartman (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)

(6) “Hottentot Venus”, SMoCA, https://smoca.org/collections/pages/objects-1/info/377/ 

(7) The “male gaze”, although dating back centuries when men made art for other men to view, the feminist concept of it arrived in 1975 via Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

(8) “Tragic mulatto”, an offensive name for a biracial person (Black/white usually) who is perceived as sorrowful that they cannot fit into a "white world". It featured heavily in 19th and 20th century American literature.