Ajuan Mance is a Professor of English at Mills College and a lifelong artist and writer. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. In both her scholarly writing and her visual art, Ajuan explores the complexities of race, gender, and identity in the lives of Black people. The creator of the 1001 Black Men online sketchbook, Ajuan has shown her work in exhibitions and festivals from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Ajuan's comics include the Gender Studies series and the comic strip Check All That Apply. Her comics have also appeared on several media sites and in several anthologies including, most recently, NewYorker.com and the Drawing Power anthology from Abrams Press, winner of the 2020 Eisner award. The 1001 Black Men book will be published in 2021, by Stacked Deck Press.
Professor English and Ethnic Studies / Dean of Digital Learning and Innovation
Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613
Renee Cox
Renee Cox is one of the most controversial African-American artists working today using her own body, both nude and clothed to celebrate black womanhood and criticize a society she often views as racist and sexist.
She was born on October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica, into an upper middle-class family, who later settled in Scarsdale, New York. Cox's first ambition was to become a filmmaker. "I was always interested in the visual" she said in one interview, "But I had a baby boomer reaction and was into the immediate gratification of photography as opposed to film, which is a more laborious project."
From the very beginning, her work showed a deep concern for social issues and employed disturbing religious imagery. In It Shall be Named (1994), a black man's distorted body made up of eleven separate photographs hangs from a cross, as much resembling a lynched man as the crucified Christ.
In her first one-woman show at a New York gallery in 1998, Cox made herself the center of attention. Dressed in the colorful garb of a black superhero named Raje, Cox appeared in a series of large, color photographs. In one picture she towered over a cab in Times Square. In another, she broke steel chains before an erupting volcano. In the most pointed picture, entitled The Liberation of UB and Lady J, Cox's Raje rescued the black stereotyped advertising figures of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima from their products, labels. The photograph was featured on the cover of the French newspaper Le Monde.
"These slick, color-laden images, their large format and Cox's own powerfully beautiful figure heighten the visual impact of the work, making Cox's politics clear and engaging," wrote one critic.
But her next photographic series would be less engaging for some people and create a firestorm of controversy. In the series Flipping the Script, Cox took a number of European religious masterpieces, including Michelangelo's David and The Pieta, and reinterpreted them with contemporary black figures.
"...Christianity is big in the African-American community, but there are no representations of us," she said. "I took it upon myself to include people of color in these classic scenarios."
The photograph that created the most controversy when it was shown in a black photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City in 2001 was Yo Mama's Last Supper. It was a remake of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper with a nude Cox siting in for Jesus Christ, surrounded by all black disciples, except for Judas who was white. Many Roman Catholics were outraged at the photograph and New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani called for the forming of a commission to set "decency standards" to keep such works from being shown in any New York museum that received public funds.
Cox responded by stating "I have a right to reinterpret the Last Supper as Leonardo Da Vinci created the Last Supper with people who look like him. The hoopla and the fury are because I'm a black female. It's about me having nothing to hide."
Cox continues to push the envelope with her work by using new technologies that the digital medium of photography has to offer. By working from her archives and shooting new subjects, Cox seeks to push the limits of her older work and create new consciousnesses of the body. Cox's new work aims to "unleash the potential of the ordinary and bring it into a new realm of possibilities". "It's about time that we re-imagine our own constitutions." states Cox.
Harmonia Rosales
Afro-Cuban American
Ever since she began her art career, Rosales’s main artistic concern has been focused on black female empowerment in western culture. Her paintings depict and honor the African diaspora. The artist is entirely open to the ebb and flow of contemporary society which she seeks to reimagine in new forms of aesthetic beauty, snuggled somewhere between pure love and ideological counter-hegemony. As a young girl, the renaissance masters impeccable skill and composition fascinated her but she could never relate because they depicted primarily a white male hierarchy and the idealized subordinated woman immersed in Eurocentric conception of beauty. Her message is not to create an ideal or to simply copy, but rather to create a sense of harmony, a yin to the yang.
The black female bodies of her paintings is the memory of her ancestors expressed in a way to heal and promote self-love. In addition, the approach that nourish Rosales’s art are closely linked to her Multi-cultural Afro-Cuban background. The ethereal creations to which she gives birth on the canvas are a synonym of female empowerment and cultural acceptance, by which she has grappled with.
In Rosales’s universe, the Orishas represent physical manifestations of life’s healing tools. Let us set aside any religious association and focus on the history and meaning of each painting. There are elements that relate to everyone that not only empowers but provokes thought and conversation. Rosales’s figures are astounding in the hues of their skin and the often dark cast to the paintings because they separate you from physical reality to become lost in our own emotions. The resulting depiction is a world of female power, which largely transcends the two dimensional canvas.
To instill ethereal depth in her works, as the expression of her spiritual world, Rosales uses added blue and silver hues to the skin that creates a natural luminescent glow against an often contrasting background. The gilding of metals and rust techniques provides a unique balance to her composition, allowing the artist to introduce varying mixtures of textures to the canvas. The use of rust serves as the motif of moral decay in our society. Due to these interactions in which the figures are placed, the artist succeeds in creating an image of the ways contemporary society fluctuates. Rosales draws on the energy of living life as a woman of color, with its objectifications, which she then conveys through her work. Her subjects embody something within us all. They serve as conduits to an inner struggle within our society which the artist depicts using metaphorical crowns and deities. The art is and will always be to encourage sympathy, empathy, and empowerment.
