Through Her Looking Glass: Emancipation of the Black Muse

Abstract

Through Her Looking Glass: Emancipation of the Black Muse, An Undertaking of Black Women Artists, and “Emancipated Spaces” seeks to explore the creative possibilities of Black Women Artists when disassociated from the stigma of misogynoir. Using closed spaces that protect and permission artistic practice and embodied engagement as technologies to reach the truer self, these spaces become a site to acknowledge and support the self-actualization and agency of Black Women Artists. In doing so, the showing of the produced art transcends the vulnerabilities of experienced misogynoir while making visible the autonomous Black Woman. Engaging race, gender, and performance theory, this research unpacks the embodied reside of layered structural marginalization Black Women face in the U.S., through curatorial practice, collective artistic process, and embodied offering. In a six-month excavational undertaking, Ife Michelle Dance, an all-Black Woman dance company based in Charlotte, NC explore overlapping spaces: inner space, intersubjective space, rehearsal space, and intentionally curated public space where Black Women Artists can be supported mentally, physically, and artistically as liberated women and muses of [their] art.