Abstract

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If Shango was a Woman: Geoffrey Holder and the Black Female Nude, 1965-1980

– Erica Moiah James

In the late 1960s, amid civil unrest in America, Geoffrey Holder began a remarkable series of nudes featuring black women as subject. The history of representing the black female nude in American painting is not long. Besides the occasional work by artists such as Archibald Motely, William H Johnson, Eldzier Cortor and Romare Bearden, this representational subject seemed verboten in black arts circles; the desire to protect this body from an annihilating white male gaze overrode granting freedom to Black artists to take on the female nude as subject. However, Holder did not believe that hiding black excellence and beauty would ever result in the protection and freedom such actions sought to create. This chapter explores how his paintings disrupt the politics of Black embodiment during the period through the representation of a dialectical body capable of capturing and countering each objectifying gaze. I argue that Holder’s work not only interrupted the fetishization process and through it, circuits of power concretized by the gaze, it also created a space of regard for the viewer to recognize and acknowledge their own violent actions towards this figure and the ways it comingled with desire.