Wooden window frame with paint,
cut-and-pasted printed and painted
papers, daguerreotype, lenticular
print, and plastic figurine, 35 3/4 x 18
x 1 1/2″ (90.8 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm). Gift
of Candace King Weir through The
Modern Women’s Fund, and Committee
on Painting and Sculpture Funds
On the American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt’s utilization of the African American conjurer as a recurrent character in his short stories, the literary critic Richard H. Brodhead wrote that the act of entreating, via a vernacular hermetic, invariably appears in these writings “as a recourse, a form of power available to the powerless in mortally intolerable situations.” I thought about this statement and its articulation of a particular set of remedies when I saw Betye Saar’s art assemblage Black Girl’s Window recently. Completed in 1969 – at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the United States – and exhibited widely in its forty-odd year existence, Black Girl’s Window has long functioned, in the aforementioned framework, as an intersectional, multivalent talisman, inadvertently transforming Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ black-woman-at-the-window allegory into a threshold for which the occult combats a delimiting racial and gendered status quo. Now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Black Girl’s Window tacitly cajoles that revered institution, famous for celebrating formalism and for its indifference to racial and social matters in art, to now confront social concerns and political activism, albeit through Saar’s phantasmagoric aperture.
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Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer. Elvira Dyangani Ose and Mario Marinetti, eds. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2016.
