In the context of an essay about art, visual culture, and racial blackness, the qualities of embodiment and abstraction might seem at odds with one another. The transitive verb embody connotes the act of giving bodily form to something, to incarnate or make something corporeal, and to give something a definitive, tangible, visible, or concrete configuration. A noun rather than expressing an action, the word abstraction and its descriptive form abstract broadly insinuate the antithesis of concreteness: the formation of an idea (as of the qualities or properties of something) by mental separation from particular instances or material objects. As one considers artistic conceptions of racial identities, embodiment stresses the artistic act of visibly capturing a racial quintessence, whereas abstraction enables an artist to avoid racial specificities and corporeal materializations altogether, ostensibly through artistic designs and forms that differ from the embodying kind. Is it possible then for these two qualities to coexist (or, at least, to serve an artist’s creative potential without compromising her integrity), especially as pertaining to art and visual culture that privileges an African American or black diasporic point-of-view (in terms of subject matter, aesthetics, or production)?
“Walking on Water: Embodiment, Abstraction, and Black Visuality,” in Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ed., Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014), 1-19.
