AUNTY! AFRICAN WOMEN IN THE FRAME, 1870 TO THE PRESENT
2019-01-14Curated by photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, this exhibition from the collection of Catherine E. McKinley, centers images of African women and engages with the nuances of the “Aunty” as both a colonial construction and honorific of African womanhood.
This exhibition takes up the idea and figure of the Aunty and the duality of this naming. At once an expression of love and affection, Aunty is an honorific across most Black world cultures, a recognition of a feminine power rooted in indigeneity. As powerfully, it connotes the violence of the original colonial construction of the word: the corporeal, dark, servile figure, buffoonish in her role of colonial nurse. It is also a name burdened by African and Diaspora grapplings with gender and often troubling constructions of motherhood, sexuality, etc.
Opposite – Abderoumane Sakaly, “Two Young Ye-Ye girls with sunglasses,” Bamako, Mali, 1965
Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2019
United Photo Industries
16 Main Street
New York
11201 NY
