The Paradox of Riot: Faith Ringgold and Semiotics in The Black Arts Movement

INTRODUCTION

Faith Ringgold began her American People Series the very same year James Baldwin asserted, in his 1963 collection of essays The Fire Next Time, that the “brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling White men may be to hear it.”[1] Spurred to do in her work what Baldwin had done in his essays and novels, as noted by her daughter and biographer Michelle Wallace, Ringgold would create this series well into 1967.  By that year, the U.S. had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while the war in Vietnam raged on, claiming the lives of African American soldiers, who felt as much at war abroad as in their own country. Segregation had ended, but the divide among White and Black Americans had already been etched into the fabric of the country, so much so that it began to unravel; the country was in a constant state of riot.  

By 1967, a new artistic movement had also emerged, shaping the climate for art by Black artists. The Black Arts Movement – often regarded as the artistic and cultural sister of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s – would evolve out of the creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School by Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka). Spanning literary, visual, and theatrical arts, the Black Arts Movement emphasized the necessity for Black artists to highlight the lives of African Americans through their struggles and strength, as well as through a celebration of Black culture. Embedded in these works was a push toward economic and cultural freedom from the existing White power structure in the United States; as was the case with Black Power, Black art was of the Black community and for the Black community.

Ringgold created a number of figurative works for the American People Series, twenty in total and the last of which was Die (Fig.1), that told “her side of the story,” of living in 1960’s America.[2] At play in the majority of the works are the palpable racial tensions Ringgold experienced first-hand; Die, however, is by far the most violent. In response to the string of riots that erupt in the summer of 1967, most notably in Newark and Detroit, Die is Ringgold’s “imagined rendering” of the most gruesome of the events.[3] Although Die is largely associated with the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, the painting presents a paradoxical use of visual language and symbolism that is contradictory to the most important facets of those movements – imaging Black empowerment and referencing Black tradition – in a decade when the impact of art on the Black community was tantamount to the revolution’s success. Through a semiotic analysis of Die and later works by Ringgold this paper will examine how Die has been incorrectly associated with the Black Arts Movement, Ringgold’s subsequent progression toward a more characteristically “Black aesthetic,” as well as highlight the importance of the use of cultural symbolism and visual literacy by Ringgold and Black artists during this defining era.

A scene of “interracial bloodletting,” as described by Anne Monahan, the painting at twelve feet in length envelops you almost immediately as you approach it.[4] What is striking at first, besides the obvious violence, is the way the figures seem to occupy no particular plane. It is not clear whether the uniformly dressed cast is standing, laying on the ground, or in flux between the two. The multi-tonal grey backdrop provides a stark contrast to the black, white, and amber costumes, in addition to the hyper-realistic splatters of blood. Ringgold perfected a stylized technique of conveying a range of emotions through life-less eyes, ghastly expressions, and specifically in Die, the splaying of limbs in a highly unnatural manner. Across the two panels of the piece, form and line suggest a rhythm to an otherwise confusing and dramatic composition, but what may be less obvious at first inspection is Ringgold’s careful attention to race. There are an equal number of Black and White rioters, both Black and White are armed as well as injured, and the children cowering and clutching to each other at the near center of the painting represent both races. Monohan argues that the “painting’s seemingly paradoxical embrace resulted from Ringgold’s visualizing riot in terms that allowed Die to speak differently to various constituencies,” exploiting the duality of her identity as an American but also an African American.[5] In terms of her “duality of consciousness,” the concept of which has been eloquently defined by W.E.B. Dubois, it is more likely that Ringgold was straddling a need for acceptance from her White peers – as an African American artist – and a hesitant desire to participate in the burgeoning movement of activist art – as an African American – rather than a mindful decision to leave Die in such neutral territory. [6]

Contemporary critics of Die have noted that the painting does not illustrate the reality of the race riots, which were largely associated with Black males in urban environments coming into conflict with White police officers. The equilibrium of race in Ringgold’s riot is a curious choice, one that according to Monahan “comes at a cost.” She posits that Ringgold’s neutral ground disassociates the work from the reality of the riots as a result of institutionalized racism, police brutality, poverty and corruption. Without making that connection viewers, like the White patrons of her midtown gallery, are relinquished of accountability even if only through complacency. Moreover, “her racially balanced cast obscures the reality that people of color not only disproportionately effected the summer’s violence but were also disproportionately affected by it.”[7]  Ringgold has commented on her use of figures as a method of communicating her messages through painting, asserting that she wanted viewers to see themselves in the work and in this case Monohan implies the viewers she was most concerned with were White.[8] Where she lacks in representing the facts of the 1967 riots, she is successful in instilling an alternate, fearful scenario for White Americans, where they are equally capable of what Monahan calls the “homicidal irrationality attributed to the rioters of the ‘long hot summer’, usually identified as African American.” By avoiding a direct commentary on the grounds for the uprisings – unjust police practices, unemployment, underemployment, and inadequate housing – Ringgold is guilty of bypassing her Black audience to address the White majority.[9] This position, it would seem, leaves Ringgold and Die on the outskirts of Black Arts Movement, for if the work was not made for the consumption of Blacks, was it indeed Black art?

Contrastingly, Die can often be seen, as Ann Monahan notes, as a pictorial accompaniment to the Black Power call to action. She states “for those receptive to such messages, Die could illustrate the necessary, albeit frightening, means required to achieve desired revolutionary means.” It is important to note though, Ringgold was not heavily politically activated until after this painting was completed and did not subscribe to the militant rhetoric of the time, so this was more than likely not her intent. Instead Die symbolized an ongoing “non-communication” between Whites and Blacks, and Ringgold’s goal was not to sensationalize the brutalization of “the Black body”, she was looking at the bigger picture of race relations in America.[10] The bodies in Die are not symbols of the struggle they vividly depict, they are merely characters in Ringgold’s prophecy of what was to come of America.[11] Despite the assertions of Lisa E. Farrington in her book Faith Ringgold, that Ringgold was willing to “put her as yet established career on the line so that she might remain true to her identity as a politically engaged artist,” the artist’s memoir clearly defines the moment in which she decided to politicize her art.[12] A radical switch would occur the year following the completion of Die, in 1968, when she would begin the Black Light series. Still, because of the applied meaning in its bloody tableau, Die is still largely tied to the Black Arts and the Black Power movements.

THE BLACK LIGHT SERIES

It is unclear if any specific event compels Ringgold to become more politically activated in 1968 – her memoir provides no insight – but by the end of the decade she is a frequent political organizer, protesting at the Museum of Modern art and the Whitney museum of American Art for the inclusion of Black artists. Concurrently, it is in her Black Light series that Ringgold really began to “emphasize the social and political content in [her] work, the substance of which was characteristically expressed by forthright narrative and African inspired patterns and colors.”[13] The most controversial of the pieces in the Black Light series was without question Flag for the Moon, Die Nigger (Fig.2), both for its shock-inducing title and the court case that would follow Ringgold’s “desecration” of the American Flag. This was not Ringgold’s first time addressing the flag, much like Die she would splatter blood across it in The Flag is Bleeding (Fig.3) part of the aforementioned American People series. Die Nigger, however, served as a commentary on the millions of dollars spent by the American government to put a man on the moon, while the citizens of the nation’s urban centers lived in abject poverty. This body of work would also include pieces like U.S. America Black (Fig.4) that featured her trademark kaleidoscope-like composition and Black figures of varying shades of brown and red – since in the Black Light series Ringgold eschewed the color white from her canvas, symbolically relying on the color black to create different shades. Ego Painting (Fig.5), also incorporating the kaleidoscope configuration, would rely on large, bold lettered words like “Black” and “America” within the geometric divisions of the canvas, a technique notably used by AfriCOBRA, an artist group emerging out of Black Arts Movement in Chicago.[14] The Black Light series would be followed almost immediately by the Political Poster Series, works that would become a staple of the Black Arts and Black Power movements and rightfully solidify Ringgold as an activist artist. Ringgold’s Woman Freedom Now (Fig.6), United States of Attica (Fig.7), and Committee to Defend the Black Panthers (Fig.8), are examples of the Black Arts movement’s emphasis on visual literacy, community access, and reliance on African influences, most noticeably the implementation of red, green, and black – the colors of the Pan-African flag.[15]

AFRICAN AMERICAN TRADITION IN THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

After moving into the Black Light series, there is no question that Ringgold joined other artists in creating a language of resistance in her work. It is important to address how this idea of visual literacy and symbolism in the Black Arts Movement can be linked to the concept of “signifying” in literature, largely defined in the book The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates.[16] Part theoretical discourse and part literary analysis, Gates sets the stage for a thorough understanding of the trajectory of an African American literary heritage. To understand the Signifying Monkey is to discern that as Africans were forcibly implanted across the Atlantic, their assimilation to European culture and language was often demanded. “Signifying” is part of the hybrid vernacular – or “double language” – that emerges out of the reluctance to relinquish African languages and the necessity to master the language of the oppressor. Slaves needed to be able to communicate with their captors enough to survive, but maintain a level of secrecy among each other, resulting in a generationally inherited codified language. “In Black vernacular, Signifying is a sign that words cannot be trusted, that even the most literal utterance allows room for interpretation, that language is both carnival and minefield,” notes John Wideman in a 1988 review of the book.[17] This would be true of the work of Black artists in the Black Power era as well – what you see is not always what you get. Ringgold’s The United States of Attica, for example, at first intake is a map of the continental United States. Though under more careful inspection, the map is annotated with causalities of war, hate, and violence in relevant geographical locations.[18]

In the same year Ringgold painted Die, artwork was already being created for the direct consumption of a Black, radical audience on the west coast, in Oakland, California. Emory Douglass in his capacity as the Cultural Minister of the Black Panther Party created mass-produced artwork to accompany the literary contributions of the Panthers in the Black Panther Community Newspaper. The graphic art of Emory Douglas exemplifies Gate’s notion of signifying as well as the use of cultural symbolism, promoted by the Black Arts Movement, in an attempt to reach an audience “in which Western literacy was not universal, but the African American aural and visual vernacular was easily recognized.”[19] While the Panther Party Newspaper and its dissemination was aimed toward educating and informing the Black communities in the Bay Area and beyond, devoid of input from the White mainstream, Douglas and the paper’s editors were acutely aware of the impression it would have on that very mainstream. This “double voice” is pertinent to the effectiveness of signifying in the visual arts, utilizing Black imagery to subvert the widely accepted stereotypes purported by the White majority, and no image would have more impact on White culture than the “strong Black male.” Historically, the caricature of the Black male in White society had been one of the “menacing brute” and “child-like buffoon;” beast-like but easily fooled, hypermasculine yet impotent in the presences of Whites.[20] This would set the foundation of Douglas’s representation of the Black male in his artwork. In “Emory Douglas and the Art of the Black Panther Party,” Mary Duncan breaks down the work of Douglas, parsing out the ways Douglas was adept at creating this tension of symbolic meaning. Duncan’s first example comes from a 1970 Halloween inspired issue of the Panther Party Newspaper (Fig.9). Douglas creates an image of a Black man in an ill-fitting clown costume, wearing a white mask while holding in one hand a Molotov cocktail and in the other a grenade. The accompanying text reads: Trick or Treat Pigs, Trick or Treat. The image plays on the well-worn minstrel character, the “passive buffoon,” while also posing a threat of violence toward racist Whites in its caption.[21] To properly conduct a semiotic assessment of the work, Duncan raises two questions:

Is the message contained in the juxtaposed visual and textual language understood by the Black community and others the same or is it a counter-narrative? What is the meaning to the Black community for which it is intended and why is this significant?

The ability for the Black viewer to decode the symbols presented is crucial to the success of the image and Douglas provides two of the most archetypal icons of the Black sign system, the mask and the trickster, to insure the message is received.[22] Duncan notes, that the masked clown character is a trickster Like Esu the Yoruba God, masquerading much like a child does on Halloween as something he is not. Those symbols received and prioritized by the Black viewer make the image “laughable.”[23] On the contrary, with a predisposition to accept the image of an armed Black male – clown costume withstanding – as a threat or danger, White viewers are liable to miss the joke.  

There is a stark contrast between the “strong Black males” of Douglas’ graphics and the male characters of Ringgold’s Die, and it does not simply rest in their physicality or their dress. In the 1960’s the Black body had not yet become the politicized symbol that is so easily and frequently employed in contemporary art by Black artists. At this point the depiction of Black bodies as victims of violence and as the sexual objects of the colonizer, for example, is not as consistent a theme as the use of the body as a vehicle for resistance and change. The Black Power movement would usher in not only a coded visual language surrounding Black linguistic traditions, but also “an awakening consciousness of the body as an instrument of power,” as posited by bel hooks in her essay “Representing the Black Male Body.” Throughout the essay she credits the Black Power Movement as well as the Women’s Liberation Movement with this awakening and charts the representation of the Black male body through different eras of American history. The answer to the White preoccupation with the Black body, according to hooks, has been to “formulate a counterhegemonic discourse of it.” [24]  Where Black men in colonial America were seen as beasts and rapists, abolitionist period depictions would desexualize them. By the Black Power era, counternarratives take on a much more hypermasculine and “sexually potent” image, evident in the work of the Emory Douglas as previously discussed, but also in the work of painter Barkley Hendricks. [25]  This return to the repressed oversexualized and hypermasculine male is an intentional, though questionably effective, tool employed to critique the White racist structure. One of Hendricks’ more infamous paintings, Brilliantly Endowed (Fig.10), one of several self-portraits of the artist, presents a nude male – save for a hat, socks, tennis shoes, and jewelry – against a pitch-black background. His gaze is seductive yet skeptical, and his gesture though not overtly sexual, directs your attention to his penis. The tongue-in-cheek title, though a mocking nod to a phrase used by Hilton Kramer to describe the artist, is seemingly a commentary on the racist stereotyping and objectification of the Black male body. Though when asked, before his untimely passing last year, he would deny any outright agenda in his work, rather that he and his work were political because America was unwilling to acknowledge what Black artists were doing in the 1960’s. [26] Hendricks’ work, much like Ringgold’s Die, is consistently associated with the Black Power movement, though in this case rightfully so. His imagery was directed toward a viewership that understood the subtle nuance of gesture and pose, illustrated in works like Steve (Fig.11) and Northern Lights (Fig.12), where the Black male body takes center stage. Hendricks’ work exudes a “swagger” and style that embodies what the movement sought to articulate in “Black pride” and “Black is beautiful.” In these iconic life size portraits the artist “elevates the common overlooked person to celebrity status with bold portrayals of his subjects’ attitude and style.” [27]

Throughout the late 60’s and into the 70’s, both Douglas and Hendricks would also depict the strong Black female figure in their work. Where Douglas armed doting mothers with rifles (Black Panther Poster, Fig.13), Hendricks would immortalize them as Byzantine saints (Lawdy Mama, Fig.14). The female perspective, however, was enormously lost in a movement dominated by male artists. Faith Ringgold would answer the bell toll and emerge as not only an activist artist but as a feminist. She, along with Los Angeles based Betye Saar, would create some of the Black Power era’s most indelible artworks surrounding the Black female.  Saar’s foray into the body of work, that in 2018 is getting its long over-due celebration, came at a time when the Black Power movement and Feminism began to intersect and “the racial and gendered body became a hotly contested site,” as posited by Jessica Dallow in her article “Reclaiming Histories: Betye and Alison Saar, Feminism, and the Representation of Black Womanhood.”[28] This concept harkens back to bel hooks’ assertion that these movements indeed “awakened” the body as a symbol of power.[29] Navigating a predominantly White feminist movement as well as a male oriented Black Arts movement, Saar’s work would explore autobiography of Black womanhood heavily influenced by these competing yet invariably different groups. Dallow analyzes the ways in which Saar, though empowered to address the Black female after decades of apprehension in the arts, still resisted “imaging the Black body,” as her representations do not explicitly represent her body. As Dallow notes, this resistance was in opposition to White feminist ideals of a “feminine aesthetic” as well as attestation of her “view of identity as metaphysical rather than material.” [30]  Her preferred artform of assemblage, sets her apart from the majority of the Black arts community; as an artist in Los Angeles, on the “periphery” of the 1960’s American arts scene – with New York at the center – Saar and her California cohorts had the opportunity to experiment with a more “radical and proactive” medium.[31] Her box-like constructions have an intimate quality to them that compounds upon the unique, personal experience Saar offers her audience. To understand Saar’s work is to engage in a process of decoding symbols of her African heritage, astrology and mysticism, and the personal yet universal stories of Black womanhood. In an early work Black Girl’s Window (Fig 15.) Saar utilizes a window pane, a found object like much of her work uses, to frame the silhouetted head of a Black female. With palms pressed against the window and eyes peering out intently, Saar conveys a sense of entrapment. Above her head in the smaller panes of the window are a number of symbols. A lion, representing Saar’s zodiac sign, a picture of her Irish grandmother, and a profile of a human head alluding to phrenology, among others.[32] Dallow’s summation of Black Girl’s Window acutely describes how Saar utilizes symbolic imagery to connect viewers to a narrative they are already aware of:

The entire structure functions like a child’s treasured type-tray containing rocks, miniatures, and other precious collectibles. The girl is trapped, her interior thoughts and connections bound and compartmentalized: she is conscious of her surroundings and beyond but not able to escape. This early, potent work forces the viewer to recognize a self-conscious black girl, struggling both to understand and to resist her past and present history, family, relationships, religion and myth.

Saar would go on to create her most recognizable piece, the seminal work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in 1972 (Fig.16). In a 2016 interview, Saar admitted that her work would not become politicized until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965, but that The Liberation of Aunt Jemima would be her first explicitly political work. At less than a foot in height, Saar’s most well known assemblage features a flea market mammy figurine holding a broom in her right hand and a rifle, cleverly added by Saar in her left.[33] She stands in a “field” of pulled cotton, and her midsection is covered by a found postcard of a Black caretaker holding a White child, a Black power fist partially obstructing the postcard. This work, rife with recognizable imagery pulled from a sordid history of African American representation by Whites, exploitation of Black female workers and their bodies, and the ubiquitous Black Power call to arms of the 1960’s, is exemplary of the art of the Black Arts movement. The effectiveness of Saar’s signifying is undeniable, and her reliance on ancestral cultural heritage goes a step further than Ringgold, Douglas, and Hendricks. She often references the mysticism and occult tied to African and African American religious tradition. For Saar, collecting “dead” objects that have been discarded and utilizing them in her work creates a “crossroads between death and rebirth.” There is an intuition to her collecting, a pull towards objects that possess “power.” Her assemblages center around a powerful object, and the rest, Saar says, is decoration to attract positivity or thwart negativity.[34]  This concept of mingling the realms of life and death, as well as the attraction of positive energy or spirits can be closely linked to West African religious practices that dispersed throughout the Caribbean and Americas during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Saar and her Los Angeles group of assemblage artists would experiment with “diasporal, race-conscious collectivity, using a spiritual, introspective tone” in addition to the Black radical themes prevalent on the east coast.[35] Saar’s combination of social consciousness, African ancestral and spiritual tradition, and intimate feminine reflection has garnered a mounting level scholarship around her work, and the work of Black feminist artists in the Black Power era and onward.

CONCLUSION

Although Faith Ringgold, in her art practice and in her activism, acclimated to Black Power later than some of her contemporaries, her work post-Die­ cements her place in a defining era of creative and political expression. These artists – Ringgold, Douglas, Hendricks, and Saar making up only a fraction of the movement’s artists – would go on to shape over two decades of representation of Black people in the United States, and have influenced a hoard of contemporary artists grappling with a similar climate of exclusion. The 60’s would provide a number of variations of the “Black aesthetic,” but an unflinching dedication to ancestry and empowerment would be the linchpin of a movement that’s reverberations can still be felt forty years later. It is interesting to consider the possibility of work by artists like Kehinde Wiley, Kara Walker, or Alexandra Bell existing without the work of Hendricks, Saar and Douglas paving the way.

NOTES

[1] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. (New York: Dial Press, 1963).[2] “I have always wanted to tell my story, or more to the point, my side of the story.” Ringgold, Wallace, Collins, and Fitzpatrick, American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s. (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2010), 7.[3] Michelle Wallace, Black Light, 34.[4] Anne Monohan, “Faith Ringgold’s Die: The Riot and Its Reception.” Journal of Contemporary African Art 36, (Spring 2015), 29.[5] Anne Monohan, 30.[6] W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903).[7] Anne Monohan, 34.[8] Morris, Hockley, Choi, Hermo, and Weissburg, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 a Sourcebook. (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2017), 111. When asked why she painted figuratively, Ringgold responded saying needed people to see themselves in the work for her messages to get across.[9] The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 7. The Kerner Report, released in 1968, detailed the reasons behind the U.S. uprisings outlined by level of intensity, these three reasons being the top three.[10] Commenting on Die, Spectrum Gallery Director, Robert Newman, would say “Ringgold’s deep emotion about the terrible incommunication is unforgettably vivid in her stunning mural of the riot, Die.”[11] Faith Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 159.[12] Lisa E. Farrington, Faith Ringgold. (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2004), 26. [13] Lisa E. Farrington, 33.[14] African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, established in 1968.[15] The Pan-African flag, also referred to as the UNIA flag, Afro-American flag or Black Liberation Flag, is a tri-color flag consisting of three equal horizontal bands colored red, black and green. The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) formally adopted it on August 13, 1920 in Article 39 of the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, during its month-long convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, United States. Variations of the flag can and have been used in various countries and territories in Africa and the Americas to represent Pan-Africanist ideology. Various Pan-African organizations and movements also often employ the flag's colors for their activities.[16] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).[17] John Wideman, “Playing, Not Joking, With Language”, New York Times, August 14, 1988.[18] The title of this work alludes to the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional facility where prisoners, in an attempt to protest for better conditions, took control of the prison, culminating in the deaths of forty people.[19] Mary Duncan, “Emory Douglas and the Art of the Black Panther Party”, A journal on Black Men 5, no.1, (Fall 2016), 119.[20] Mary Duncan, 118.[21] The “pig” character in Black Panther Party imagery represents the oppressive White majority, most often used to depict law enforcement.[22] Mary Duncan, 127.[23] Mary Duncan, 127. Esu-Elegbara, a figure of Yoruba mythology, acts a messenger between man and the gods, often utilizing trickery. This character is essential to The Signifying Monkey and the theory of signifying.[24] bel hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. (New York: The New Press, 1995), 204.[25] bel hooks, 205.[26] Andrew Russeth, “Barkley L. Hendricks, Whose Tender and Immaculate Portraits Define an Age, Dies at 72”, ARTNews, April 18, 2017, http://www.artnews.com/2017/04/18/barkley-l-hendricks-whose-tender-and-immaculate-portraits-define-an-age-dies-at-72/.[27] A quote pulled from the exhibition materials of Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, February 7- July 13, 2008.[28] Jessica Dallow, “Reclaiming Histories: Betye and Alison Saar, Feminism, and the Representation of Black Womanhood”, Feminist Studies 30, no.1 (Spring 2004), 78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178559.[29] bel hooks, 205.[30] Jessica Dallow, 79.[31] As explained by Ashley James, Assistant Curator of Contemporary at the Brooklyn Museum, and co- curator of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, when describing regionalism in the Black Arts Movement on BRIC TV, October 2018.[32] Phrenology, the study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities, was used widely throughout the 19th century to rationalize the marginalization of Black people, as a “biologically inferior group.” The subject was later discredited.[33] Usually portrayed as an over-weight, dark-skinned woman with bulging eyes and a bandana tied around her head, Mammy is an archetype of antebellum racist imagery cultivated in the southern United States.  [34] Betye Saar, “Influences: Betye Saar,” Frieze, September 27, 2016, https://frieze.com/article/influences-betye-saar.[35] Jessica Dallow, 85.