 One of the things I love most about being a writer is that I'm entitled to endless hours of solitude. If I tell my friends I'm writing, their demands upon me cease and I'm allowed to disappear for days on end. Being a writer allows me in a curious way to be safely invisible. I become by choice disembodied and it is only my voice that connects with the reader. At least this is what I like to believe. My closest friends are also writers and all of us create across genres, across borders and between fields. We are poets, playwrights, intellectuals, dancers, fine artists and full-time academics. We consciously design and embody our multiple identities as a way of resisting pressure from the dominant society that reduces all black women to type. Yet when two of my friends ventured into the world of performance art, I lag behind. I have never been as daring as my friends and though I applaud and support their determination to insert their black female bodies into traditionally closed or hostile public spaces, I fear for them as well. My research has focused primarily on literary representations of lynching and rape. So for me, black bodies are always already in jeopardy. Before I begin to consider the work of Mickalene Thomas, I feel an obligation to share with you both my personal and professional anxiety around the display of black women's bodies. In the fall of 2006, I invited my good friend, Gabrielle Savelle, to give a performance at Mount Holyoke College where I was a newly appointed visiting assistant professor. In my course Introduction to African and African American Studies, my students and I were discussing Susan Laurie Park's display Venus, which is a fictionalized account of the life of Sartre Bartman. As you probably know, in the early 1800s, Bartman was taken from South Africa and exhibited as a freak or scientific curiosity in England and France. When she died at the age of 26, an autopsy was performed and Bartman's skeleton and genitals were put on display in the Musee de l'homme in Paris until 1974. It was not until 2002 that the South African government successfully petitioned to have Bartman's remains returned for proper burial near the place of her birth. Gabrielle's visit to Mount Holyoke began with a guest lecture in my class. She arrived wearing a zebra print dress with a plunging neckline and her favorite red Chanel lipstick. The students were intrigued, as they always are when they see someone else like me, someone who doesn't look like a professor. They immediately responded to Gabrielle's request for several volunteers to stand on top of their desks. Gabrielle then led us through an exercise in perspective whereby the students who were seated were forced to observe and comment upon those who were now up on display. Afterwards, Gabrielle asked the students to describe the experience of watching and being watched. Many expressed discomfort, but one or two young women admitted they liked being the center of attention. Later that day, in a much more intimate space in the theater department, Gabrielle reproduced the exercise, but with a twist. I introduced her to the small group of about 10 students and faculty members, and then, after just saying a few words, Gabrielle took off her dress and mounted the low-round coffee table around which the attendees were seated. Behind her, on a flat-screen TV, scrolled the definition of the word display. My white female, excuse me, my white male colleague, Roger, stood in a corner of the room and called out, step right up, step right up. And then, every 30 seconds, he barked, turn. Gabrielle immediately obeyed his order, assuming another position in her black-brown panties until the performance ended three minutes later. Roger said, next, and then sat down. Gabrielle stepped down from the table, pulled her dress over her head, took up her notes, and led us through a discussion of Sartre Bartman, Adrienne Piper, and her own work as a black woman performance artist. Gabrielle explained that one of her objectives was to expose the preponderance of very fair slender women exposing their bodies as or in performance. She questioned the subversiveness of women artists displaying bodies that the dominant culture already deems beautiful and desirable. I remember feeling a number of emotions during my friend's provocative presentation. I was then, and continue to be, awed by Gabrielle's intellectual and artistic audacity. Yet I must confess that there have been many times when I've been tempted to throw a blanket over my friend and drag her from public view. Whether she is teaching, performing, or simply walking down the street, Gabrielle wears her sexuality on her sleeve, so to speak. Though I identify as a feminist and don't generally think of myself as a prude, I fail to fully appreciate the rationale behind so much exposure. When I asked her if wearing animal print clothing is intended as a taunt, Gabrielle generously elaborated on her deliberate decisions regarding self-representation. In her email, she wrote, quote, when I wore that zebra print dress for your class, yes. I was aware of bringing a visual association with exoticism. So I would say I was using it as a taunt, but also a right tease or point of contrast that the professor could be in animal prints, that the feminist can wear lipstick, that we can be many things at the same time. Gabrielle, who is currently in Mexico City as a Fulbright fellow, then went on to interrogate herself, quote, but also, why did I have that dress in the first place? Some black women won't wear animal prints because they think or fear that the prints will reinforce negative stereotypes, but then I ask, negative stereotypes for whom? That's giving those crazy white people a lot of power if I choose what to wear or not based on how they might respond or understand me. I have a zebra print dress because I like it, because I think the print is daring or inventive, because the pattern is both spare and dynamic. I don't need to wear it, I want to, because I like how it looks. It's not the only look I like, but I get to have everything. Having everything isn't a concept to which I generally subscribe, yet I do envy Gabrielle and other black women like her who dare to self-direct and self-define without regard for the dangers I see lurking around every corner. When I catch myself wanting to safely contain my friend's voluptuous body, I recall Audrey Lord's admonition, your silence will not protect you. As a writer, I would resist any efforts to censor me and I'm learning that my impulse to hide my friend's body is a way of not confronting the power of the visual as a mode of self-expression. Denying this power will not protect her. Avoiding it will not protect me. And yet when Gabrielle insists that I show an image of Sartre Bartmann for this presentation, I refuse. Why not, asked Gabrielle, you show her image in your classroom, why not in a museum, at a conference filled with feminists? To these reasonable questions, I make no reply. For me, there is more power to be had from what I choose to conceal rather than reveal. One of Gabrielle's recent performances in Mexico City was called In and Out of Place, to celebrate the inauguration of President Obama. She stood on a busy street corner wearing a strapless, flame-colored gown and sang the Negro National Anthem and Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud, accompanied by seven mariachis. Gabrielle's performances disrupt everyday routines and upset people's expectations. She embraces the confused conversations that may follow and is undeterred by the possibility that her actions or appearance might confirm or compound racist, sexist ideas about African-American women. I too feel in this particular moment that I am in and out of place. I have no background in fine arts or art history, yet I am a Black feminist with something to say about the art of Michelin Thomas, which in this museum hangs just outside the Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I am here despite the fact that there are two competing events happening on this day. A few blocks away at Medigar Evers College, the National Black Writers Conference is paying tribute to the late Octavia Butler. At Brooklyn College, Angela Davis and other leading scholars are gathered to celebrate Black women and the radical tradition. As a Black feminist, I know all about divided loyalties, but I hope that I can bring into this space some of the issues sure to be discussed at those other venues. I first saw Michelin Thomas' work as I was heading towards the new feminist wing. The exhibit 21, Selections of Contemporary Art, was still being installed, and so a large piece of canvas had been draped across the room, leaving exposed only the head of the Black woman featured in Thomas' large portrait. Arrested by the woman's serene brown face framed by a soft black cloud of hair, I paused and made a mental note. That's for me. Later, I would return again and again to stand mesmerized before the glittering, reclining nude. The nine by 12 foot portrait dominates the space and commands immediate attention as soon as one emerges from the period rooms of the Decorative Arts Gallery. Unabashed, this Black woman appears totally at ease. The model was Thomas' girlfriend at the time, and perhaps this explains her relaxed pose and the respectful, almost caring way in which she's represented. Thomas invests her Black female subject with a calm, self-assured eroticism. There is none of the frenetic gyrating so often accompanied, that so often accompanies hypersexualized images of Black women today. Determined to share my exciting discovery, I brought my students to the museum and listened with satisfaction to their murmurs of awe and admiration. I showed them a small reproduction of La Grande Oralisc. They noted the similar pose, the languid nonchalance of the two women, and the rich fabrics and jeweled accessories surrounding their naked bodies. The students were less valuable when I asked them to consider the reasoning behind Thomas' provocative title, A Little Taste Outside of Love. I didn't tell them it's a song by Millie Jackson from her 1977 album, Feeling Bitchy. Yet overall, I left the museum that day confident that I had achieved something important by sharing Thomas' work with these feminist cultural critics in training. When I later read their art reviews, however, I found reason to question my achievement. For some of my students, Thomas had ruined a perfectly good portrait by deliberately invoking the exotic primitive with her leopard, tiger, and zebra print panels. Though some read defiance in the model's direct gaze, others felt her power was diminished by the title's implication of her availability for sex only and not for love. Most appreciated the illuminating effect of Thomas' application of rhinestones, but some students felt such bling, reduced the black woman to the level of a mundane commercial object, a watch or shoe, made into a pseudo-luxury item for consumption. One student in particular expressed her frustration that the artist had not provided an explanation of her work. Despite taking several courses with me, she was tentative in her critique, unsure of her own ideas, and deeply troubled by Thomas' decision to frame the black female body in a way that seemed to confirm, rather than counter, stereotypes about black women's sexuality. When I shared two of the reviews with Mickalene Thomas, we met a month before at a print show, she responded by saying she found them highly inspirational, and then added, I still have a lot of work to do. So do I, I told her. What didn't I teach my students that might have helped them to interpret Thomas' work with less apprehension? Am I to blame for passing on my own anxiety around the display of black women's bodies? For me, Thomas' portrait plays with time. Her model's bejeweled body harkens back to the jazz age, and the use of rhinestones immediately brought to my mind the blues women of the 20s and 30s. In their promotional photos and onstage, performers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith dazzled audiences with their beaded gowns, elaborate headdresses, exotic feather fans, and ropes of pearls. For the average black woman who likely worked long days for low pay as a domestic and a white household, the blues women were a vision of glamour, luxury, and opulence, ordinarily reserved for wealthy white women. With their booming voices, no nonsense attitudes, and daring lyrics, blues women claimed the titles and trappings of the rich, but discarded their elitist pretensions in favor of raw disclosures about love, life, and loss. Angela Davis calls blues women pre-feminist and suggests that their music, quote, was a space in which the coercions of bourgeois notions of sexual purity and true womanhood were absent, end quote. Alongside the blues women, however, plumage and sparkling jewels were also embraced by performers like Josephine Baker, who served up fantasies of the exotic primitive to French audiences of the same era. Jacqueline Bobo explains that the myth of the exotic primitive relies upon these characteristics, quote, black people are naturally childlike, thus they adjust easily to the most unsatisfactory social conditions which they accept readily and even happily. Black people are oversexed, carnal, sensualist dominated by violent passions, and black people are savages taken from a culture relatively low on the scale of human civilization. Wearing very little besides feathers and fruit, Baker danced at the Fouley-Bergère in an erotic manner that confirmed ideas of the hypersexuality of African women who, 100 years after the death of Sartre Jabartmann, still figured as a distortion in the minds of many whites. Baker's Danse Sauvage was not based on her knowledge of African dance, but as Brett Berliner explains, quote, exoticism is escapist. It is less about reality than about ideals and fantasies. Integral to exoticism is ethno eroticism, the state of sexual arousal and desire for a specific people solely because of their racial or ethnic identity, end quote. Authors of a recent study of Josephine Baker suggest that Baker, quote, responded to and modified her own images. She expanded and exploded these stereotypical images through recordings, film, photography, and fashion, end quote. Baker embraced and manipulated various types available to her at the time, and perhaps, by doing so, also managed to have everything. Josephine Baker went on to become an icon in France. She was admired for her beauty, talent, and philanthropy and was decorated for her participation in the resistance of World War II. Yet in 2006, when contemporary performer Beyonce paid tribute to La Baker, she went straight for the bananas. Cultural critic Bell Hooks contends that, quote, popular culture provides countless examples of black female appropriation and exploitation of negative stereotypes to either assert control over the representation or at least reap the benefits of it, end quote. I'm not sure Beyonce understood or even considered the implications of donning a skirt made of bananas. She dances provocatively in nearly every ensemble, so perhaps for her the connection to exotic primitivism was unclear or irrelevant. And what did the banana skirt signify to the mostly white audience at the fashion rocks event? Hooks contends that, quote, desire for contact with the other, for connection rooted in the longing for pleasure, may or may not one day act as a critical intervention, challenging and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical resistance, but as of yet, that remains an unrealized political possibility, end quote. When I met Mickalene Thomas at that print fair last November, she expressed her disgust at searching the web for images of Michelle Obama and coming up with representations of the now first lady as a chimpanzee. The recent New York Post cartoon depicting President Obama as a bullet-ridden rampaging chimp confirms the persistence of the racist association of black people with savage, unevolved beasts. So how do we understand Thomas' use of animal prints in her work? Is she asserting control over exoticism and its attendant hypersexuality, or is she reaping the benefits? Is it possible to do both? Perhaps Thomas' clear rejection of the politics of respectability mirrors the defiant stance blues women of the 1920s took in opposition to middle-class morality. Thomas doesn't seem to care that her work potentially invokes age-old stereotypes, and in the 21st century, should she? Perhaps it is my line of questioning which is out of place and better left to my 19th century school-marm predecessors. As Michelle Wallace points out, quote, we still credit and discredit black feminist creativity according to a mechanical concept of negative versus positive images on the theory that such an evaluation will indicate who was doing more or less for the race or the cause, end quote. When asked in a recent online interview whether she had ever been accused of objectifying women, Thomas responds, quote, yeah, I get that. But my work is about a sense of empowerment and celebration of self, beauty, sexuality, and sensuality. These are the components of how we feel about ourselves, end quote. Thomas insists that she does not ask her models to disrobe, but merely allows the women to express a self-directed, organic sexual identity, which ultimately serves to counter the Huchi-Mama images, splayed on magazines and music television channels. Yet how do we know that these images are being consumed any differently? Does Thomas' work serve as a corrective to the problematic history of misrepresentation of the black female body, or is it to borrow the words of Stuart Hall, a kind of difference that doesn't make a difference of any kind? Thomas reproduces the 1970s aesthetic with wood-paneled rooms, gaudy flower, floral prints, and afroed women dressed in polyester. Her subjects intentionally mirror black exploitation shero, Pam Greer, who aroused audiences with her avert and often dangerous urban sexuality. Hillary Noroney notes that, quote, the heroines of these films are characterized by their independence, toughness, violence, and intelligence. They are also glamorously beautiful, neither virtuous nor vicious, a complex combination of the desiring woman and the upstanding detective or community protector, which does not mean that she is immune to the female stereotypes of the time, end quote. This description recalls Gabrielle's earlier assertion about having everything, rejecting some realities of that gesture and disembodiment, which cuts us off from sensual ways of knowing, end quote. She ends her email by asking me, what does it mean for a black woman to be embodied as a way of centering her own knowing rather than perceiving her body only as a site of potential or actual response from others, end quote. I confess, I still don't know how to answer that question. I can't see how that looks, can barely wrap my mind around it because self-perception or intent is only half the issue. There's the body you see in the mirror, and there's the body you occupy when you go out into the world. I'm missing something. I know I am. Bell Hooks regretfully admits that, quote, this is certainly the challenge facing black women who must confront the old, painful representations of our sexuality as a burden we must suffer. Representations still haunting the present, end quote. Yet Hooks concludes with a fairly optimistic mandate, quote, we must make the oppositional space where our sexuality can be named and represented, where we are sexual subjects no longer bound and trapped, end quote. Michelin Thomas strikes me as an artist who is neither trapped nor bound by the legacies over which I obsess. Perhaps that is why she, like Gabrielle, is able to have everything. Thank you.