“come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” – Lucille Clifton 

Femme Noire cites Black women artist’s embodiment of the ferocious persistence that the practice of sovereignty demands. The exhibition brings to the fore the fecund and autonomous minds of a global group of 20 artists, hailing from Kenya, the USA, France, Jamaica, Switzerland, Sweden and more. Eternally unrelenting in the pursuit of ways of being that triumphantly exceed the heteropatriarchal status-quo, these artists use the inexorable erosion of constricting power systems as dream-fuel and are adamant about excavating aesthetic lexicons of care out from the Earth’s steaming core. Denying logics of extraction and exploitation, as well as the normative belief that freedom for one social group must come at the expense of another, this exhibition gives credence to the redemptive potency of hands anointed by the rhizomatic relational intelligence needed to support life itself in the broadest terms. Here, co-curators Modou Dieng Yacine and Larry Ossei Mensah, in collaboration with the Seattle Art Museum and Wa Na Wari, present artworks that call worlds of wonder into being. 

Harkening back to poet Léopold Senghor’s text by the same name, Femme Noire is a gesture towards radical listening and suggests the vital importance of broadly engaging Black feminist modes of world-building, which involve the holding of contradiction, the development of language that thoughtfully addresses harm, the consideration of bottomless pleasure as a collective birthright, and the honing of an oppositional consciousness in the face of systems that obfuscate both Black women’s inherent value, and our unique capacity to craft viability out of destitution. All in all, Femme Noire offers audiences an opportunity to speculate, gather gravity at their fingertips and continue, in earnest, the Black feminist legacies that, as Senghor articulates, “feed the roots of life.” 

It is in this spirit of nourishment and in an attempt to remove artworks from the heart of oppressive localities that Dieng Yacine and Ossei Mensah, along with community partner Elisheba Johnson of Wa Na Wari, decided to site the exhibition in the Central District: a historically Black neighborhood, thereby dissolving the institution’s fortitude as an intermediary between artwork and audience and positioning the community itself as the primary authorities of how the work will be lived with and interpreted. Thus, Femme Noire sets new precedent for our encounters with art. For instance, what does it mean not to have to seek art out but, rather, for it to punctuate the landscape one navigates each and every day? In this sense, the exhibition’s experimental format exists as an offering of time and space to speculate, scheme and congregate on one’s own terms. 

To this end, scholar Sarah Jane Cervenak notes in her text ‘Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life’: “Black women have long been de-architecting… toward practices of deregulated togetherness.” Certainly, the public nature of Femme Noire materializes the sort of “de-architecting” Cervenak speaks of to make space for “deregulated togetherness.” In other words, the removal of art objects from an institutional context challenges notions of individual property and ownership and, instead, proposes that we may consider the stewardship of Black women’s creative brilliance as a collective responsibility.

Ultimately, Femme Noire pays homage to the fact that the will to survive has long lined Black women’s bones and that the artworks presented here put forth the reality that, as articulated by The Combahee River Collective in 1977, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” The exhibition, then, serves as a timely reminder that Black women’s positioning within the crucible of interlocking oppressions counterintuitively primes us, and our creative labor, as indispensable to the ongoing project of Black liberation and therefore also collective liberation. Consider then, in the spirit of this essay’s epigraph and the bridging of theory to praxis, how you may sincerely listen to the life-giving resonance of the artworks gathered here, and also to the Black women that bless your own intimate life with splendorous possibility.