Courtesy the artist

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, still from "sometimes I answer" (2005). Digital photo animation on two monitors, 1 min 36 sec.

October 2008 Field Guide

Firstenberg Curates California

Eugene Carchesio

Dark Continents

Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

Rivane Neuenschwander

Franz West

Open

Lois and Franziska Weinberger

Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center

Le Futurisme a Paris

The Tropics: Views From The Middle of The Globe

Nam June Paik Art Center

Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings

Kara Walker Adrian Piper Lorna Simpson Carrie Mae Weems Howardena Pindell Kalup Linzy in New York Nigel Freeman on Selling African-American Art Sliced and Diced

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In the 1970s, a group of black female artists—including Adrian Piper, Carroll Parrott Blue, Howardena Pindell, and Julie Dash—began making films and video-art pieces that explored the prejudices and preconceptions foisted on the black female body. They were responding in part to what Mary Frances Stubbs described in 1995 as motion pictures’ “tragic history of stereotyping and a steady procession of mammies, maids, and miscegenists, matriarchs, madams, and assorted ‘make-it-for-money’ types.” Accordingly, films like Dash’s Four Women (1975), an experimental dance piece inspired by Nina Simone’s eponymous song, exposed the limited roles allotted black women. (Later, Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust would be the first full-length feature made by a black woman given general release in the US.) Likewise, in Free, White and 21 (1980), Pindell recounts racist incidents at school, work, and at a wedding party in Kennebunkport, Maine, while intermittently portraying a white woman who scolds her black self for being paranoid: “But then,” says white Howardena, “you’re not free, white and 21.” Both videos are on view this month in “Cinema Remixed & Reloaded,” an expert survey featuring works by more than 40 artists and spanning three decades—including Dash and Pindell’s many successors, among them Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker. The show, which was first exhibited in two parts at Spelman College last year but is presented in its entirety in Houston, is a corrective in itself—underscoring the overwhelming omission of black women artists in the annals of American video-art history. "Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image since 1970" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.