Tag Archives: Feminist Art

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

Sojourner Truth: CLAIM YOUR SELF

CLAIM YOUR SELF for Sojourner Truth, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print here.

Presence and Representing

APPROACHING TRUTH
I have finally set myself to making some work for Sojourner Truth. Now, because over the course of two weeks at the Female Power hut at Eastern Market there have been at least four different people asking, Where is Sojourner Truth? One of these people was a filmmaker who made a documentary about Sojourner Truth (to be released in 2023). 

Sojourner Truth was a charismatic orator whose imposing presence and way of speaking made a strong impression on those who experienced her. Remembering her meeting with Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe likened her to a sibyl, or ancient prophetess. Truth never learned to read or write, and every text we have of hers is mediated by other writers. Her power is her presence and her voice, the literal voice that disperses as sound. These factors made it hard for me to imagine how transformative she could be and I think that’s why it took me a while to turn my attention her.

The thing that fired me up is this photo I found of Truth. I could see right away that this was a creation of a master representer. She has a photo of her grandson on her lap. This is a photograph that includes a photograph, and now I have made an image out of the pixels I downloaded from the Library of Congress representing this photograph of a photograph. If you are reading this online, you are looking at pixels representing an image based on pixels representing a photograph of a photograph. 

The photo of Sojourner Truth is an example of a carte de visite, or visiting card, which was handed out to acquaintances and pasted into scrap books and albums. These inexpensive photographs exploded in popularity during this time in the US. This was especially the case during the war, since so many people were separated from those they loved. The intimate photos maintained connection and presence across distances, and also through time, fixing the image of a person at a particular state. However, the photo on Truth’s lap is a more permanent and expensive one, the kind intended to last.

On her lap is a tintype or a daguerreotype of Truth’s grandson, James Caldwell, who was a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of two African-American regiments organized to fight for the Union during the US Civil War. Truth worked to recruit black men to fight in the war to end slavery. She was hugely proud of this grandson and she wished that she herself could fight in the war. In this photograph she is taking possession of her grandson and his acts, and re-presenting them to us.

Sojourner Truth sat for “at least twenty-eight different photographs, mostly cartes de visite, deriving from perhaps fourteen different sessions with a half dozen or so photographers,” writes Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in Enduring Truths. And they keep turning up in personal archives. Truth printed her copyright on the back, something that was rare at the time, as usually it was the photographer who claimed the rights to an image. She also had printed at the bottom on the card, “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance.” Sojourner Truth sold images of herself to make money. She claimed ownership of her self such that she could sell representations of her self. She constructed and she controlled this representation.

In the introduction by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith to Pictures and Progress, they write of the chapter on Sojourner Truth written by Augusta Rohrbach:
“For Sojourner Truth … photography was part of a broader set of self-representational strategies she used to claim an authorized voice and an audience for her work. Augusta Rohrbach examines the ways in which the famous orator crafted her photographic portraits to signal self-possession. Rohrbach shows how Truth utilized the photograph to claim her embodied presence for an audience, a presence she also celebrated in her commitment to orality over print culture. As Truth promoted herself through print, and through the writing of others, she announced her ultimate control over those representations by marking her presence in photographs. However, as she drew upon the indexicality of the photograph to mark her presence, she also cannily manipulated the pose to produce a persona, playing with both the constructed nature of the photograph and its associations with unmediated representation. According to Rohrbach, Truth utilized a variety of representational forms to create a marketable persona over the course of her life, but her self-fashioning is most evident in her photographic portraits and her shrewd use of the photograph’s varied cultural meaning and power.”

SOMETHING SHE SAID
There is a lot to say about Sojourner Truth’s most famous speech, delivered on May 29, 1851, in Akron Ohio. It is mostly transcribed in the newspaper, Anti-slavery Bugle, of June 21 (“I am a woman’s rights.”) It was changed considerably (“And a’n’t I a woman?”) by Frances Gage and published in 1882 in History of Woman Suffrage. The first transcription is thought to be the most authentic. 

I was always getting stuck on the first point, when she says “I am a woman’s rights.” It just didn’t make sense to me, almost like it wasn’t really in English. How can you be “rights” since they aren’t something you are, they are something you have. They are a potential. After this statement, Truth talks about how she can do the same work as any man: she’s talking about physical labor. 

It occurred to me that she may have meant “power,” which is, after all, related to rights. You likely don’t have the legitimized power to do something if you don’t have the right to do that thing. So if she’s saying, “I am a woman’s power” it makes sense that she would talk about the physical power she has, and other things, that make her as good as any man.

Furthermore, what does it mean for a Black woman, a former enslaved person, to say to a gathering of mostly white women, “I am a woman’s power”? I don’t think it means what is said in the later rewrite, that goes: “A’n’t I a woman?” That later version implies that Truth is asking to be included in the white women’s fight, to get the rights and privileges that white women have and will yet receive. That she is worthy to be included. As if they will represent her. But I propose that the first (more authentic version) implies that Truth is representing them, and their potential for strength, for power. She is presenting her self and her story to be a model for them. But I’m not sure her audience knew how to hear that. To them she becomes a magical “other,” a sibyl.  Even if Truth was not saying that (how can we be sure—we weren’t there) that is what I am hearing now. That the multiply-marginalized Sojourner Truth represents the power of all women, that she is a model for me. We know how to hear that now.

Her physical presence and her speech have perished, but her autobiographical stories and her carefully constructed photographs persist. As Suzanne P. Fitch and Roseann Mandziuk write in Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song
“[T]he power of Truth’s rhetoric came from her successful construction of an autobiographical character that coincided precisely with what audiences actually saw when she spoke before them. In her unadorned dress and turban, with her strong voice and haunting singing, Truth challenged audiences to consider the worth of herself and her experience. She asked them to broaden their perspectives, to mend their ways, and to be God’s servants in order to ensure justice and equality. She was not afraid to speak forthrightly and to answer a heckler with a stern admonition or to profess her faith and values through the performance of a song. In all, her narratives and her personal character blended seamlessly, such that Truth herself understood the correspondence and its persuasive force: ‘I will shake every place I go to.’ …
…she entreated women to be bold and assertive: ‘Be strong women! blush not! tremble not!’ Truth often implied that if women wanted their rights, they should just take them, rather than beg men for them.”

BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

She was born enslaved, perhaps in 1797. Her original name was Isabella Baumfree. She was born and grew up in upstate New York.

She spoke Dutch as her first language, and although she later learned to speak English, she always spoke with a Dutch accent.

She never learned to read and write.

She was probably thirteen years old when she was sold by her first enslaver in 1810 for a hundred dollars (sheep were included in the sale) and separated from her parents.

She was beaten as a slave; she also lost a portion of her right index finger in a field accident. There are implications in her accounts that she was raped while she was enslaved.

She bore five children between 1815 and 1826, one of whom died.

She walked away from her last enslaver in 1826, at the age of thirty, after completing work that she felt she owed him, although he reneged on his promise to free her after she completed the work. Her freedom, and that of her babe-in-arms, was bought by the Quaker family who were sheltering her.

She felt a call to be a preacher, and participated in religious communities and preaching circuits during a time of great religious ferment in Western New York as part of the “Second Great Awakening” in a region later called the “Burned-over district” (set ablaze with religious fervor). 

She renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 at the age of forty-six.

She chose to go to court three times and won all three cases. In 1828 she litigated to recover her son Peter who had been illegally sold into slavery. In 1832 she filed a slander suit. In 1865 she brought assault charges against a Washington, DC, streetcar conductor who tried to throw her off his car; he was dismissed from his job.

She wrote an autobiography with the help of two different women friends and paid for its first printing in 1850 on credit; she reissued the book in 1875, 1878, and 1881.

She campaigned on behalf of the abolition of slavery, the right of African Americans and women to vote, the right of emancipated slaves to education and property, the desegregation of streetcars, and the elimination of capital punishment.

She was a moving speaker. According to a Quaker abolitionist, she “poured forth a torrent of natural eloquence which swept everything before it.” A large part of her effectiveness was her physical presence: she was very tall and thin, and she had long bony fingers that she would point with rhetorical power. We do not have definite texts of her speeches because they appear to have been improvised, but we do have transcriptions and reports.

Her most famous speech was delivered on May 29, 1851, in Akron Ohio. It is mostly transcribed in the newspaper, Anti-slavery Bugle, of June 21 (‘I am a woman’s rights.”) It was changed considerably (“And a’n’t I a woman?”) by Frances Gage and published in 1882 in History of Woman Suffrage. This later publication has Truth’s voice rendered in a “Southern Colored” slang that is an inaccurate representation of the way Truth likely spoke.

She worked tirelessly from 1864 to 1867 on behalf of the thousands of emancipated Southern slaves refuged at the Freedmen’s Village in Washington, DC.

She filed petitions with Congress and paid to have petitions printed.

She tried to vote several times in advance of female suffrage, but was turned away from the polls.

She posed for photographic portraits, primarily cartes de visite, at least eleven different times, mostly during the years of the Civil War when she was in her late sixties, but also in the years immediately prior to her death in 1883.

She had a copyright filed in her name for her cartes de visite in 1864, which was unprecedented for a portrait sitter: usually copyrights were filed in the name of the photographer. The copyright appeared on the backs of her portraits; at the same time, she added her name and a caption to the front, “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance.” She sold her photographs at her lectures and through the mail in order to support herself.

She died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, November 26, 1883.

SOURCES
Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song (Great American Orators) by Suzanne P. Fitch, Roseann Mandziuk

Enduring Truths by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Pictures and Progress edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith 

https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/resources

https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/04/sojourner-truths-most-famous-speech/

https://bampfa.org/program/sojourner-truth-photography-and-fight-against-slavery

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

I’M SPEAKING, another one for Kamala Harris

I’M SPEAKING — for Kamala Harris, perSISTERS digital original print in the Female Power Project

During the October 8 vice presidential candidate debate, the current Vice President repeatedly interrupted Harris. Harris managed to communicate her insistence on her right to speak while walking an extremely narrow tightrope of expectations. I cannot express it better than this, from Maiysha Kai of The Glow Up:

“And yet, while many will report on the moment, fewer will recognize or appreciate the tightrope she walked on Wednesday night. Teetering precariously between white disdain, male dismissal, and Black distrust, Harris was tasked with neither being too angry, nor too reactive, nor too…much. Arguably, this also includes being burdened with the restraint of not being too brilliant or dynamic, so as not to upstage the man she was there to represent and support (whom she had also previously trounced on the debate stage).”

https://theglowup.theroot.com/the-significance-of-im-speaking-1845313016

DESIGN NOTE
The text in the background behind Harris expresses the constrictions she experienced: “Keep Smiling, don’t be too smart, don’t act angry, not too strong, not aggressive, not too black, use simple words, don’t be too girly, be feminine, act motherly, don’t speak too loud, not too black too strong too angry.” Behind this text, on the print but not the magnet, is a kolam design, a winding knot-like drawing that women in some states in Southern India draw every day in flour on the ground outside their front doors. People walk on it and by the end of the day it is destroyed and swept away, to be replaced anew the next day. It is a woman’s art that has interesting mathematical properties. It reminds me of the winding calculations many women have to run in their minds while they are speaking, in order to avoid the many traps women can fall in to just by speaking with power. It is truly exhausting. But Kamala is very powerful, indeed.

Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) is the junior Senator from California and the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in the 2020 election. Before she was a senator, she served as Attorney General of California. Harris was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of an Indian mother—a cancer researcher who emigrated in 1960—and a Jamaican-American father who is an economics professor. (Wikipedia)

This print is up on my shop now at FemalePowerProject.com and a magnet is coming soon.

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

HOLD SPACE — perSISTERS design for the creatrices of Black Lives Matter

A digital original print design showing three women who started Black Lives Matter. "#BLACKLIVESMATTER" in the background; the largest type says "HOLD SPACE", and the smaller type says "In 2013, three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called #BlackLivesMatter." which is a quote from blacklivesmatter.com/herstory. The smallest type is the photo credit: "Photo credits, top to bottom: Alicia Garza, Citizen University, 2016; Patrisse Cullors (May 2015) and Opal Tometi (August 2015), The Laura Flanders Show" and the project credit and artist's website and the creative commons license.

Did you know that Black Lives Matter was started by three women? It was a hashtag at first, a technology for rhetoric, a verbal key that makes a place for an idea to aggregate. And what a large and multitudinous, profound and simple idea it is! The message I distilled for this artwork is “Hold Space.” These words come from the text on the Black Lives Matter website. You should all go there and read all the words there. They are clear, beautiful, powerful. Perfect.

“Hold Space” I think points to the openness that #BlackLivesMatter allows. It is a coalescing medium, a place that is not occupied the way Rosa Parks performed her rhetoric, whose message I stated as  “Take Up Space” in another perSISTERS print. I think it is interesting to contrast “Hold Space” with “Common Ground,” another phrase that seeks some kind of reconciliation between differences. “Common Ground” implies a defined space between determined territories, and I submit that this phrase claims space for the privileged, whereas “Hold Space” implies, among other things, a holding back of privilege. Clearly, this message is about history from within history — which is not clear — and time will allow us to name it.

You can find this design for sale on my Etsy site, here is the listing. For this piece I am donating my creativity, time, and materials, so what you pay goes to Black Lives Matter DC and the US Postal Service (and to Etsy for fees).

The following words come from blacklivesmatter.com/herstory:

“In 2013, three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called #BlackLivesMatter. It was in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.

The project is now a member-led global network of more than 40 chapters. Our members organize and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

As organizers who work with everyday people, BLM members see and understand significant gaps in movement spaces and leadership. Black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender men — leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. As a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people. To maximize our movement muscle, and to be intentional about not replicating harmful practices that excluded so many in past movements for liberation, we made a commitment to placing those at the margins closer to the center.

As #BlackLivesMatter developed throughout 2013 and 2014, we utilized it as a platform and organizing tool. Other groups, organizations, and individuals used it to amplify anti-Black racism across the country, in all the ways it showed up. Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Mya Hall, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland — these names are inherently important. The space that #BlackLivesMatter held and continues to hold helped propel the conversation around the state-sanctioned violence they experienced. We particularly highlighted the egregious ways in which Black women, specifically Black trans women, are violated. #BlackLivesMatter was developed in support of all Black lives.

In 2014, Mike Brown was murdered by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. It was a guttural response to be with our people, our family — in support of the brave and courageous community of Ferguson and St. Louis as they were being brutalized by law enforcement, criticized by media, tear gassed, and pepper sprayed night after night. Darnell Moore and Patrisse Cullors organized a national ride during Labor Day weekend that year. We called it the Black Life Matters Ride. In 15 days, we developed a plan of action to head to the occupied territory to support our brothers and sisters. Over 600 people gathered. We made two commitments: to support the team on the ground in St. Louis, and to go back home and do the work there. We understood Ferguson was not an aberration, but in fact, a clear point of reference for what was happening to Black communities everywhere.

When it was time for us to leave, inspired by our friends in Ferguson, organizers from 18 different cities went back home and developed Black Lives Matter chapters in their communities and towns — broadening the political will and movement building reach catalyzed by the #BlackLivesMatter project and the work on the ground in Ferguson.

It became clear that we needed to continue organizing and building Black power across the country. People were hungry to galvanize their communities to end state-sanctioned violence against Black people, the way Ferguson organizers and allies were doing. Soon we created the Black Lives Matter Global Network infrastructure. It is adaptive and decentralized, with a set of guiding principles. Our goal is to support the development of new Black leaders, as well as create a network where Black people feel empowered to determine our destinies in our communities.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network would not be recognized worldwide if it weren’t for the folks in St. Louis and Ferguson who put their bodies on the line day in and day out, and who continue to show up for Black lives.”

The print says “#BLACKLIVESMATTER” in the background; the largest type says “HOLD SPACE”, and the smaller type says “In 2013, three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called #BlackLivesMatter.” which is a quote from blacklivesmatter.com/herstory. The smallest type is the photo credit: “Photo credits, top to bottom: Alicia Garza, Citizen University, 2016; Patrisse Cullors (May 2015) and Opal Tometi (August 2015), The Laura Flanders Show” and the project credit and artist’s website and the creative commons license.