A topless Black figure looks over her shoulder from a ground of sea blue in Tschabalala Self’s Aqua Babe. Two fish are caught in the nets collaged to the background, but the figure stands freely; only bubbles and turquoise jewelry cross her body. Executed in the lead up to the artist’s debut 2015 solo show in New York City, Aqua Babe is a compact synthesis of the key values of Black womanhood, abstraction, and artistic legacy that guided Self’s seminal years.
In the mid-2010s, Self recounts, “I was thinking a lot about identity politics in regard to Blackness and womanhood,” but she wanted to “transcend” aspects of these conversations “which seemed limiting and conventional.”i Aqua Babe achieves this combination of identity-awareness and transcendence through the pairing of historical reference and figural abstraction. The pose of the figure, topless in side profile, with a purple brushstroke emphasizing the curve of her wide hips and glittery bikini, recalls early 19th century engravings of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman.
“Your work has to speak to history if you want it to have any relevance in the future.”
—Tschabalala SelfBaartman, an African woman, was trafficked to Britain in the 1810s, where her body was subject to racist ridicule and abuse as a freak show attraction.ii Depictions of Baartman from this time typically show her in side-profile, like Self’s Aqua Babe, to exaggerate the curves of her body. Self likely knew Baartman’s story--a similar, 2015 painting is entitled, Love to Saartjie—but where the engravings exaggerate Baartman’s body for racist reasons, Self extends the body towards abstraction.
In Aqua Babe, body parts become planes of collaged material. The body undulates across the composition like a wave, creating a scalloped edge against the blue ground with the curves of head, breast, and stomach, shoulder, back, behind. At this stage in her career, Self writes, abstraction allowed her to focus on the “composition and performativity” of her figures against fields of color.iii It was the formal means to interrogate, and even “transcend,” the narrative of Black womanhood that Saartjie Baartman represented. By removing the strictures of historical context, Self frees her figures from a fixed point of view. The ghost of a racialized other becomes a collaged silhouette, a dual citation of fellow Black female artists Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold.
Self is “completely enamored with” Ringgold, a fellow native of Harlem.iv She attributes her confidence with color and textile to the older artist’s compositions; indeed, the nets in Aqua Babe recall the matrices of Ringgold’s narrative quilt series, and both artists engage Black history with a fearless sensitivity. Grounded in the legacies of Saartjie Baartman and Faith Ringgold, Aqua Babe is a bright and true representation of Black femininity, an embodiment of the key themes that Self continues to push in her career.
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