At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been either a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many nineteenth-century historically specific markers-such as slave, colored, and Negro-from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African-American. “Art” included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs, engravings, any work on paper, et cetera-all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical canon. However, because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs.ģ. While the grammar is completely modified-I erased all periods, commas, semicolons-each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented.Ģ. No title could be broken or changed in any way. The formal rules I set for myself were simple:ġ. What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,OOO BCE to the present.
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