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AH 342 Black Subjects in White Art History: Fall 2021 Compendium

Jessica Wimbley, Cabinet Cards: Ebony 2, #21, 2014-2019

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Redefining Portraiture and Black Identity: Jessica Wimbley’s Biomythography
The representation of black bodies in artistic spaces has historically been marginalized or founded on racial stereotypes. In the twenty-first century, artists of color who produce work to revise or construct ideologies surrounding race and identity such as Jessica Wimbley are contributing to a larger socio-cultural movement to redefine and question constructions of identity, ancestry, and race. In the lens of critical race theory, Jessica Wimbley’s work which focuses on biomythography, functions to not only reframe the white narrative of portraiture to include people of color, but her work also functions to display how racist ideologies at work in the relationship between ancestry, portraiture, and biology have contributed to the historical oppression of the black community.
Jessica Wimbley currently resides and works as an artist in Sacramento, California. She attained a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, Davis, and an MA in Arts Management from Claremont Graduate University.[1] Wimbley’s art has previously been in multiple shows across the United States with her most recent curatorial project series being Biomythography collaborating with artist and curator, Chris Christion. The series has been exhibited in both academic and nonprofit artistic spaces predominantly in Southern California including Cerritos College, California Lutheran University, Eastside International, Los Angeles, University of La Verne, and Claremont Graduate University.[2] Throughout Wimbley’s work, particularly seen in her curatorial project series Biomythography, she focuses on elements of biology, ancestry, identity, race, genetics, and history. In the use of the term biomythography, Wimbley draws from the works of poet Audre Lorde in which Lorde defines biomythography as an integration of “biography, myth, and history.”[3] In terms of her own integration of Lorde’s ideologies surrounding biomythography, Wimbley uses it as a focal point and interdisciplinary visuals art practice, meaning her works as part of her series Biomythography function to create a narrative that reshapes the African identity narrative and the construction of identity.[4] Wimbley’s source of inspiration for the concept of her series stems from the writings of poet Audre Lorde in which Lorde contrasts the typical notions of autobiography instead with biomythography in which:
If autobiography is traditionally believed to refer to accurate, chronological, and stable representation of the events of one’s life (even if only illusorily so), then for Lorde ‘biomythography’ refers to the self-conscious act of destabilizing such conventional dictates. Deliberately engaged in an African Atlantic-inflected act of revisionism, biomythography simultaneously invokes, interrogates, and celebrates the mythic (and/or imaginative) possibilities encoded within acts of representation, providing always a polysemous cast to the ‘historicity’ of events being represented. Myth, dream, and history assume equal footing as efficient causality and equivalent epistemological value.[5]

With this concept of biography, myth, and history at the forefront of the series, Wimbley sets out to “investigate and question identity and history, merging both the genetic biological with socio-historical, creating narratives that shift between micro and macro representations,” in addition to the composition of “narrative, in conjunction with photographic digital, and printed images, painting and drawing.”[6]
With particular focus on Wimbley’s cabinet cards within her curatorial project series Biomythography, Wimbley’s integrated approach of biology, myth, and history from Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography functions to illustrate the need for a reframing of black bodies within portraiture. In one of Wimbley’s cabinet cards from 2014-2020 titled, Ebony, Melanin, and Me, #8, Wimbley uses elements of layering, collage, and mixed media in order to put forth a powerful representation of black bodies in the traditional space of portraiture. The juxtaposition between the composition of the original aged photograph with the interlacement of a black couple in the in-between space of a rip in the original photograph functions to draw the viewers’ eye to the black couple in an intimate embrace.[7] This duality between traditional and an interruption in the traditional illustrates the work’s function in not only representing black bodies in a positive light, but in commenting upon the historical oppression of black bodies in the art world. In addition to this work, another one of Wimbley’s cabinet cards as part of her series Biomythography titled Ebony 2, #21 from 2014-2019 further illustrates the relationship between representations of black bodies and the traditional function of portraiture in the past in relation to the black experience. Wimbley depicts a traditional aged photographic portrait of a white man with a tear in the portrait of the white man’s left side of his face. Behind this tear and creating an illusion in which the part of the white man’s face is gone is the partial face of a black man, mainly the eye and cheek region of the face.[8] In making the black man’s face the only colored part of the portrait, Wimbley is able to make the black man’s face poking through the portrait the central focus of the work which the viewer cannot avoid. It is in this powerful assertion of revisionist black representation through the cabinet card that Wimbley is able to both put forth black representation as well as reveal the role of portraiture, ancestry, and racism. The depictions of people of color historically have primarily been founded on racist stereotypes which has permeated into not only the social and political sphere of the United States, but has manifested a presence for the black community which has historically marginalized or dismissed black artists.[9] As put forth by scholar Jacqueline Francis, portraiture has historically been one of the most profitable genres for artists through catering to a predominantly white audience in which portraits which depicted “middle- and upper-middle-class sitters decorated homes, offices, and public venues, announcing the subjects’ social status and power to viewers who stood before them.”[10] Portraiture in this way has functioned to upkeep the power dynamic between the wealthy white and people of color. Wimbley’s revisionist representation of black bodies in portraiture then plays an important role in how race in relation to history and identity is viewed or socially constructed. The importance of Wimbley’s work is then central in the reconstruction of the historical representation of identity and ancestry in relation to the black body.
While racial stereotypy in artistic representations, scientific racism, and the white power dynamic upheld through white portraiture and lineage/ancestry has permeated the space for how black identity is viewed, artists such as Jessica Wimbley contribute to an important socio-cultural movement of redefining the constructions of identity, race, and biology. In producing work which questions the historical conceptions of black bodies through portraiture, Wimbley is able to, from a critical race theory lens, not only reframe the white narrative of portraiture to include people of color, but to display how racist ideologies are intertwined with historic value on ancestry, portraiture, and biology and how these constructions have contributed to the historical oppression of the black community.

[1] Jessica Wimbley, “Artist Info: Bio,” jessicawimbley, accessed November 28, 2021, https://www.jessicawimbley.com/artist-info.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Jessica Wimbley, “Artist Statement,” jessicawimbley, accessed November 28, 2021, https://www.jessicawimbley.com/artist-statement.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Heather Russell, “The Poetics of Biomythography: The Work of Audre Lorde,” In Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, University of Georgia Press, 2009, 60.
[6] Jessica Wimbley, “Artist Statement,” jessicawimbley, accessed November 28, 2021, https://www.jessicawimbley.com/artist-statement.
[7] Jessica Wimbley, Cabinet Cards: Ebony, Melanin, and Me, #8, 2014-2020, mixed media collage on panel, 10 x 8 in.
[8] Jessica Wimbley, Cabinet Cards: Ebony 2, #21, 2014-2019, mixed media collage, 6.5 x 4.25 in.
[9] Karin D. Wimbley, “Framing the ‘Art of Stereotypy’: The Politics of Race and Presentation in African American Literary, Visual, Performance Culture, 1985-2005,” (University of Chicago: 2012), 5.
[10] Jacqueline Francis, “TYPE/FACE/MASK: RACIAL PORTRAITURE” In Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art" in America, University of Washington Press, 2012, 78.