P005Black Women : seen it before
RAFIA | Artist
KOREN MARTIN | Artist
JOYOUS PIERCE | CURATOR
The work of Harlem Renaissance artist and scholar Zora Neale Hurston speaks to the adornment of Black women, highlighting their embodiment of beauty, strength, tenderness, and vulnerability. These women, through their mere presence, challenge and transcend societal definitions that attempt to constrain them.
Black (w)omen: Seen It Before is an ode to Black women in all their moments. It is an opportunity to view Black women the way we have always seen ourselves—at rest, in solidarity, in abstraction, in the present, and in the infinite, boundless future.
The work of documentary photographer Koren Martin offers a window into intimate moments known only to us, while also providing a platform for public presentations of defiance. The vibrant energy of her subjects, drawn from ancestral knowledge and power, radiates through her use of contrasting black, white, and muted tones.
Visual and performance artist Rafia Santana’s self-portraits bend reality into the abstract. Rafia’s playful use of mixed media—such as bubble wrap, barrettes, and toy mirrors—channels the delicate innocence of childhood, which is often denied to Black women who are hypersexualized from birth. Her work forces a reckoning and demands acknowledgment of her existence, our existence, as multifaceted beings. It serves as a timely reminder that Black women owe society nothing—our mere existence is enough.
Together, the works of Rafia and Koren, as presented in Black (w)omen: Seen It Before, call on viewers to see and love ourselves in all our details.
As Paule Marshall writes in Reena:
"This time, as I listened to her talk over the stretch of one long night, she made vivid without knowing it what is perhaps the most critical fact of my existence—that the definition of me, of her, and millions like us, formulated by others to serve out their fantasies, is a definition we have to combat at an unconscionable cost to the self, and even use at times, in order to survive; the cause of so much shame and rage as well as, oddly enough, a source of pride: simply, what it has meant, what it means, to be a Black woman in America."