Kendra Boyd

These pieces are inspired by African American women’s history and the “culture of dissemblance” Black women have long utilized for self-preservation. As Darlene Clark Hine explains, this “cult of secrecy” was needed to “protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.” Black women needed to hide intimate aspects of themselves, particularly their sexualities, at a time when they were regularly faced with the threat of interracial sexual violence and scrutiny from mainstream society. Self-portrait (Dissemblance #1) and Dissemblance #4 incorporate the themes of masks and layers to tell a story of Black women’s concealed identities, while Church Lady evokes the “respectability politics” that many Black women embraced. As noted by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Black women’s respectability “emphasize[d] reform of individual behavior… as a strategy for the reforming the entire structural system of American race relations.”