Combahee and Black Feminist Art History
Collage of members of Combahee, Faith Ringgold, Patricia Hill Collins, Betye Saar, and Sylvia Wynter.
By Tiffany E. Barber
For “50 Years of Combahee”, scholar, curator, and critic Tiffany E. Barber reflects on how the Combahee River Collective helped form her worldview and considers its influence on Black feminist art.
“In 1977, the Collective initiated a new way of thinking about Black women’s social positions as well as the global fight for freedom. Their bedrock manifesto outlines early tenets of Black feminism, a framework for analyzing racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression as interlocking systems of containment and domination.”
My political education began at home. Growing up in Oklahoma, my mother encouraged me to center and value our lineage—a Black Studies approach, a worldview—and to search for stories that had been buried. One such story was the Tulsa Race Massacre, the topic I chose for my fifth-grade history paper. I wanted to write about something that was missing from my school’s textbook, a paper about Oklahoma’s Black history. Yet few official sources about the massacre existed in the libraries we visited to prepare for the assignment. So, I scoured the early-1990s-era internet, looking for first- and second-hand accounts of the event. This was my first encounter with research, and I knew then that I would eventually be a scholar and professor of histories of Black freedom and resistance.
My mother’s drawings and paintings of Black female figures were also my first encounters with Black art, where she modeled a Black feminist ethics of care and love through figurative representation that aligned with her ‘Black is Beautiful’ ethos. Like most artists, my mother studied the masters. But having come of age during the Black Arts movement, she longed for figures and a canon that reflected her own experiences and identity. She made her own, infusing her work and her parenting with aspirational narratives about the right and wrong ways to picture and perform Blackness. Our house was full of images of Black women with Afros, Black Power fists, and more. These formative moments fortify my work as a scholar, curator, and critic of visual and performing arts of the Black diaspora.
My mother graduated high school in 1972. That same year in an oral history interview for the Archives of American Art, artist and activist Faith Ringgold disparaged white museum directors, second wave feminists, and Black male artists for failing to include and elevate Black women artists. Ringgold also talked about her desire to organize exhibitions that were “as political as possible,” in line with her work with Women, Students, and Artists for Black Artist Liberation, as well as the need for “open shows.” Such shows, she laments, surface some of the pitfalls that come with advocating for inclusion based on race and gender, underscoring how institutions, and even participating artists themselves, repeatedly pigeonhole Black women artists into monolithic formations. “See,” Ringgold says of this conundrum, “these are some of the problems that you run into, because so few Black women have been active in this whole rip-off thing that we’ve been doing. It’s going to take a long time before they become politically aware enough to realize that having an all Black women show is another trick bag.” The Combahee River Collective formed two years later.
In 1977, the Collective initiated a new way of thinking about Black women’s social positions as well as the global fight for freedom. Their bedrock manifesto outlines early tenets of Black feminism, a framework for analyzing racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression as interlocking systems of containment and domination. The intersection of these oppressions, the Collective argued, creates the conditions for Black women’s lives and their unique struggles. As Black women and as lesbians, the Collective saw Black feminism as a material and ideological way to combat the simultaneous and manifold oppressions that women of color face; their work continues to inform political life today. Fifty years on, what do their impulses and aspirations tell us about the state of Black feminist art and political praxis now?
The Collective coined and defined “identity politics,” a hot button term that gained traction in the 1980s to name and advocate for cultural, political, and economic equity for historically marginalized groups. Identity politics in art history has been both embraced and criticized as an answer to mainstream museums’ exclusionary practices. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1993 Biennial is one such instance where the museum saw itself as looking beyond “such things as class, gender, or nation,” and we might add race and sexuality to this list, as “propaganda or agitprop,” or as “solely political.”[i] However well intentioned, the exhibition pigeonholed the groups it wished to celebrate: “black artists [were made to] speak only for blacks,” art historian Charles A. Wright, Jr. outlines, “women [were made to] speak only for women, and gays only for gays, bound by a constrained notion of community [and relegating] artists to cultural essences.”[ii] Additionally, the Biennial ignored the possibility of artists existing in more than one of these identity categories—“black, gay, and female for example”—as well as whether or not these artists even self-identified with such categorizations.[iii]
Collage of members of Combahee, Faith Ringgold, Patricia Hill Collins, Betye Saar, and Sylvia Wynter.
Anticipating the debates and failures of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Combahee’s descriptions of racial, gender, and class hierarchy became integral to Black feminist conceptions of intersectionality. Intersectionality as a framework first emerged in the early 1980s writings of bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982) and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), respectively, when hooks argued that Black women’s experience was incommensurate with that of middle-class white women. The feminist movement as a whole, therefore, did not and could not accurately articulate nor fully represent women’s liberation struggles, especially where gender was not the primary identity factor. Building on Combahee, hooks, and Patricia Hills Collins’s own Black feminist writings, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the theory of intersectionality that has become mainstream in today’s civil rights discourse. Crenshaw’s theory names how race, gender, and sexuality comprise Black women’s unique lived experience (for hooks, class, religion, and region, among other factors, were also key to this formation). It also describes how related systems of oppression and domination reinforce each other to buttress social injustice and inequality since laws and policies usually attempt to correct only one form of marginalized identity rather than the interlocking systems that produce and circumscribe multiple oppressed identities.
My book Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (New York University Press, 2025) considers for the first time how Black women’s triple otherness—a visual and embodied alterity at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality—spurs aesthetic strategies of queer negativity. Following from discursive revolutions in identity-based art, its exhibition, and its histories since the 1980s to present, these strategies are concurrent with shifting debates within Black feminist theorizing that underscore how Black women have contested—even outright rejected—the very terms by which their art is grouped because of their marginalization within Black and feminist circles on the one hand and the sameness and essentialism such terms presume on the other. In weaving these threads together, my work builds on recent scholarship on the queerness of Blackness by way of refusal and sensation in the past and present, from the writings of the Combahee River Collective, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense J. Spillers to those of Amber Jamilla Musser, Jennifer C. Nash, Rizvana Bradley, Saidiya Hartman, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Campt, Uri McMillan, and others.
“From womanist theology to public intellectual discourse, Black women’s visual work in the United States has been synonymous with kinship, sisterhood, mothering, salvation, and reproduction. The act of making kin—familial and fictive—has also been tied to Black women’s kind and kindness, especially when that labor takes the form of caring for children—and nations—not their own. Through organized retreats, Combahee members made space for a different kind of kinship—individually and collectively—that challenged these expectations.”
Undesirabililty and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art by collating “undesirable” representations of nausea-inducing, perverse Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, such representations evoke olfactory, sonic, and haptic responses that tarry in negativity vis-à-vis toxicity, bottoming, dismemberment, opacity, and race play. Typically considered counterintuitive to art history’s ocularcentrism and politically harmful to Black and feminist solidarity, these aesthetic strategies directly undermine the expectation for Black women’s work to salve historical pain and trauma and to be aesthetically and politically pleasing.
From womanist theology to public intellectual discourse, Black women’s visual work in the United States has been synonymous with kinship, sisterhood, mothering, salvation, and reproduction. The act of making kin—familial and fictive—has also been tied to Black women’s kind and kindness, especially when that labor takes the form of caring for children—and nations—not their own. Through organized retreats, Combahee members made space for a different kind of kinship—individually and collectively—that challenged these expectations. Alternately, restoring fragments of identity to wholeness animates much of the literature on Black aesthetics while Black women have historically been constrained by public and private protocols of behavior, reproductive value, and aesthetics. In the art world, these protocols materialize in expert and lay expectations that Black women artists testify to the sociological conditions of their own subjugation and address their work to slavery and its legacies to effect racial healing and empowerment.
Chapter 1 chronicles artist Kara Walker’s paradigmatic turn to public sculpture by examining her (self) fashioning of the Black female bottom. Through temporal, material, and olfactory decay, as well as the queer possibilities of Black female bodily abjection, both works merge “bottoming” as a form of submissive sex with “being at the bottom,” a position of devaluation, vulnerability, subordination, objectification, and powerlessness. Black female bottoming, here, exceeds the visual. It inundates viewers with excess via disgust, nausea, and repulsion—minor aesthetic strategies that upend the value hierarchies of beauty and desirability that stem from heterosexist patriarchy and white supremacy against which Black women are repeatedly measured and debased in the past and present. [i] Chapter 2 analyzes the ubiquity of what I call transgressive dismemberment in Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu’s collaged cyborgs from the early twenty-first century when she resided in the United States. These images, which repeatedly center undesirable intercourses and intimacies, proffer Black women’s structural queerness and anti-sociality. In my reading, the recurring acts of cutting, forms of blood spatter, parasite-host dysfunction, and fragmented bodies that constitute her cyborgs engender ways of being not predicated on wholeness and harmonious integration. They instead picture anti-communal relations via dismemberment that trouble the meaning of belonging and diaspora as Mutu and her figures shuttle between the continent and the US.
“Every year when I teach Combahee in my Black Women’s Aesthetic Futures at UCLA, I put the Collective in conversation with hooks, Collins, Evelynn Hammonds, and Jennifer C. Nash, as well as Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, the artists in my book, and others. Doing so encourages students to identify and question how narrow ideas about racial and gender representation continue to homogenize Black women and their creative aims, despite their increased art world visibility and deeper public understanding about the vectors of identity and access to power.”
Chapter 3 considers Xaviera Simmons’s critical engagements with photography’s semiotic properties, namely the index and its function, and the ethics of historical reenactment as a mode of performance. Her staged portraits of obdurate subjects whose faces are covered or hidden cultivate an alternative ethics of representation that obscures subjectivities and thwarts clear-cut interpretations of sisterhood and solidarity that animate Combahee’s own efforts decades prior. The acts of refusal, along with techniques of masking and self-disavowal that Simmons deploys across her practice, constitute a language of opacity that denies legibility in an era when calls for transparency and unprecedented forms of Black visibility proliferate. Narcissister’s topsy-turvy, masturbatory dance-based performances, which many critics see as acts of reclamation and self-love, are the topic of Chapter 4.
A self-identified, mixed-raced “sister,” she caricatures the myriad ways that contemporary American public discourse promulgates images of hybrid figures as loci for multiracial promise and achievement. Her art also challenges staid notions of feminism and narcissism. In my view, her live and video works where she flips in and out of costumes, multiracial masks, and abject sexual scenarios congeal into race play, a form of kinky sex that at once relishes yet exceeds erotic fetishism. Her practice of inversion and repulsion thus recalibrates the political and aesthetic value of marginality, underlining the perils of idealizing positions of social subordination—from being in the middle—the basis for multiracial exceptionalism, which Narcissister literally turns on its head—to looking to the bottom, a core feature of intersectional feminist methodology.
By reflecting on the limits of visibility as progress, Undesirability and Her Sisters constitutes an epistemic rupture that expands everyday viewers, museum professionals, and humanities scholars’ understandings of art’s capacity to mitigate trauma, history, and intersectional identities. Through various reversals, refusals, inversions, and counterintuitive figurations of the body, Walker, Mutu, Simmons, and Narcissister demonstrate how domination and submission can co-constitute Black women’s lived experiences, sometimes necessarily so. In foregrounding the ties that bind Black feminist art praxis, negativity, and nonnormativity in the twenty-first century, my book initiates ways of seeing and thinking about Black womanhood not always accounted for under the banner of intersectionality. Rather than a desire to become “woman” or “human,” the perverse Black female figures I analyze reinvest in the racial itself as a libidinal economy to invert its meanings by playing with the dominant value judgments and norms that provide a foundation for it. Embracing negativity in this way occasions an altogether different, more radical, and more ethical engagement with art, identity, and social life.
Every year when I teach Combahee in my Black Women’s Aesthetic Futures at UCLA, I put the Collective in conversation with hooks, Collins, Evelynn Hammonds, and Jennifer C. Nash, as well as Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, the artists in my book, and others. Doing so encourages students to identify and question how narrow ideas about racial and gender representation continue to homogenize Black women and their creative aims, despite their increased art world visibility and deeper public understanding about the vectors of identity and access to power. It also underlines how Black women artists, from the 1970s to present, interrogate the value of Black feminism and intersectionality in their work—pinpointing how their ideas about these topics and conditions vary and change over time. The Collective itself teaches us that neither Black women nor Black feminism are static or monolithic; Black women’s art thus emerges as a praxis that insists on its own merits and dimensions while questioning itself from the inside.
More people than ever before are engaged with Black women and their creative output as triumphant examples of Black achievement and intersectional feminism, and Black art has garnered unprecedented market visibility, corporate support, and viral social media attention in the past decade. Yet staid ideas about cultural and political representation, racial and gender solidarity, and art’s transformative power continue to constrain Black women’s visual work. How does the increased visibility of Black women artists—at once historically marginalized, yet hypervisible in public and civic culture—impact how we theorize art history and Black and feminist study now? What are the limits and possibilities of radical kinship in the twenty-first century? Taking a cue from Combahee, my work ultimately reorders the radical promise of Black women’s art by claiming negativity as a ternary space that advances new ways of seeing and being that are not necessarily conventional, affirming, or redemptive. Considering the current US political climate, ongoing racial and gender violence, and debates about the relationship between art and social protest, this work is both of its time and urgent.
About the author: Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on visual and performing artists of the Black world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis.
Dr. Barber is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize and author of Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (New York University Press, 2025).
Footnotes
[i] Elisabeth Sussman, “Coming Together in Parts: Positive Power in the Art of the Nineties,” 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Exh. Cat. (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 14; David A. Ross, “Preface: Know Thy Self (Know Your Place),” 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Exh. Cat. (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 9.
[ii] Charles A. Wright, Jr., “The Mythology of Difference: Vulgar Identity Politics at the Whitney Biennial,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, Second Edition, eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 268.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Kara Walker quoted in Jessica Kramer, “Kara Walker Addresses Art and Controversy at the Newark Public Library,” Huffington Post, March 13, 2013, www.huffpost.com.
Works Cited
Tiffany E. Barber. Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (forthcoming, New York University Press).
Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Kimberlé Crenshaw. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139-167.
bell hooks. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London, Boston: South End Press, 1982). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (New York: Routledge, 1984).
Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89, no. 1 (2008): 1-15.