Jane Kaplowitz, Matisse and Laura Ashley Border, 1987, oil stick and paper collage, 38 × 50 inches. Courtesy Jason McCoy Inc.
Their legs are offered to the viewer in a vase of shadow and stone. One kicks like a stem tilts. They are clearly angels’ legs, celestial dancers, moving on an axis of stilled time. So does Venus, emerging from cloth like a snake in a basket, her own snake and her own apple. Stiff dead Egyptians can be sexy, sensuous like a fossil with a heartbeat. The most overtly sexy female in her Empire recliner is more removed. Her chaise, like a vitrine, shows her off but it offers her less.
The landscapes are where the blackness lives in the photographs. The blackness has its own inner density, printed with absoluteness like a mezzotint. How can we get to the light when the darkness and weight are so inviting? The mossy fountain burgeons with life, a vanitas. The waterfall fountain is a thing unto itself like the Venus, its own dais and its own axis, turning almost imperceptibly. It spills to renew itself.
—April Gornik
MOLLY, MERCY, MADELINE,
MYRA, MAGGIE, MEREDITH,
MARLEY, MAGDA, MARGARET,
MINDY, MILLIE, MAGDALA,
MYRNA, MOIRA, MARIANNE,
MARLA, MAURA, MARIGOLD,
MEGHAN, MARY, MILLICENT,
MAITE, MAPLE, MITZI.
Originally published in
James Rosenquist, Julian Barnes by Patrick McGrath, Diane Kurys, Richard Greenberg, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
