Beverly McIver, Silence, 1998. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.
That hiding behind Aunt Jemima and her inscrutable, grinning mask is an equally puzzling, flesh-in-blood black woman was a message proffered by several contemporary black women artists in the wake of Betye Saar and Maya Angelou’s early 1970s art projects. Notable among these of postmodern take-offs on stereotypic mammies were Beverly McIver’s painted self-portraits as a black-faced, fright wig wearing, and housecoat-dressed clown, shown eating watermelon, engaging in common household tasks and, occasionally, dancing and playfully wrestling with a half-naked white man. The innocuous, everyday situations in which McIver located her Jemima-like alter-ego contributed to her enigmatic character: a weird yet familiar presence whose pivotal place in these paintings, as framed by McIver in luscious oil pigments on canvas, unsettled the assumed idiosyncrasy or revulsion such black female stereotypes typically conveyed. In several of these richly textured works McIver emptied the watermelon of its iconographic, stereotypic baggage, turning it into a prop and colorful wedge that transected the painting and stood out alongside its black-faced counterpart. McIver’s occasional couplings of this stirring black caricature with a white man broached America’s deep-seated fears and fantasies about sexual liaisons between the races, but unlike the sex scenes in Robert Colescott’s Jemima’s Pancakes, McIver’s interracial horseplay alluded to a kind of easy intimacy or a filial bond between the stereotype and whites that could be interpreted as more seditious than sexual.
Going There: Black Visual Satire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).
