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THE INVISIBILITY OF black women has been much on my mind of late. Asked recently to speak on the topic “Can women artists take back the nude from a voyeuristic male gaze as a site to represent their own subjectivity?” I have to discard the premise: from mass culture to high culture, white women may have been objects of the fetishizing gaze, but black women have had only the blank stare. In fact we feel lucky when we get to take our clothes off. Manet’s
Olympia, Picasso’s
Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Judy Chicago’s
Dinner Party, 1973–78, are landmarks in our unseeing erasure by both the multicolored male and the white female. I believe in the mathematics of myth, which is why I’m always asking, How many black women in this anthology? in this exhibit? in this picture? What are they made to signify? Of the 39 places at Chicago’s dinner table, 35 are set with plates painted with vaginas that glow miraculously. Sojourner Truth, the only black guest, must make it with
Co-published with Intervenxiones of the Latinx Project.
Last year marked 50 years since the founding El Comité-MINP (Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño), a radical socialist movement that would last throughout the 1970s and into the early part of the 1980s. Former members held a virtual commemoration hosted by the People’s Forum, which included panels, performances, and presentations, as well as a screening of
Rompiendo Puertas (Break and Enter) a 1971 documentary produced by Third World Newsreel that focuses on Operation Move-In and the early housing reclamation movement in New York City.
The film portrays low-income families on the Upper West Side of Manhattan facing eviction under the guise of urban renewal. In response, Operation Move-In, a two-year movement involving direct actions to reclaim vacant housing stock, began in the summer of 1970 and eventually grew to include many buildings and over 200 families. The founding members of El Comité quickly joined