Being / Becoming: The Act of Portraiture

Being/Becoming: The Act of Portraiture was a group exhibition exploring the self. The project features newly commissioned work by five Black women and gender non-conforming artists, Holly Bass, Renee Cox, Muse Dodd, Dominique Duroseau, and Marcelline Mandeng Nken, presented as performance-based, embodied self-portraits.

Artist-curator Yacine Tilala Fall began with the questions: What is visual emancipation? What does it look like? How do we radicalize Black visual language? She then invited the participating artists to respond by using portraiture as an action, a movement, and a physical experience to explore these questions and their own presence. Through their work, they consider how intentional action may transgress limitations of concepts and disciplines. Their portraits are not fixed. They live, breathe, and transform—as we are all constantly becoming.

Fall describes Being/Becoming: The Act of Portraiture as an exercise of decentralization, embodied self recognition and collective wandering, “born out of a need and a dream for conceptual space away from the container of the white gaze. The dream is simple: to break this container and allow Black artists to actively be and become.”