The Brooklyn Rail

“A tool or an object, within one’s grasp, not speculative, not a proposal for black female genius. The use of the body as tool or instrument.”— Saidiya Hartman, “Manual for General Housework” in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)

The entrance to Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch is flanked by two objects that shape the narrative arc of the exhibit: Prophet’s toolbox, which she used to make countless sculptures throughout her expansive career, and her diary documenting twelve years living as an expat in Paris. The diary, as a material symbol of (personal) history, and the tool, a reminder of the laboring hand of the artist, guide the viewer through the show.

The first comprehensive museum exhibition of Prophet's work, I Will Not Bend an Inch takes a historiographical, biographical, and archival approach in bringing to light Prophet's impressive oeuvre. Paying particular attention not only to the process of making, but also the conditions of it, the show is an act of historical recuperation that highlights Prophet's ongoing legacy in the present while illuminating traces of her work and life. 

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960) was born in Warwick, Rhode Island to parents of Narragansett and African American descent. She was a student in the Department of Freehand Drawing and Painting with a concentration in portraiture at Rhode Island School of Design, where she graduated in 1918 as the school’s first known graduate of color.

After graduation, Prophet attempted to work as a portrait painter, but was unsuccessful and unable to support herself, and returned to domestic work. The exhibition includes a number of Prophet’s works on paper—including graphite drawings and expressive watercolors, featuring vibrant landscapes and swirling trees—alongside the wood reliefs and busts for which she is more widely known. Around this time, according to Prophet’s friend and correspondent Countee Cullen, she also withdrew her work from a Providence exhibition when it was accepted on the condition that she not attend the opening. Faced with racism and her lack of success as a painter, Prophet left Rhode Island.

In 1922, after a brief stint in New York, she moved to Paris to pursue sculpture, guided by an abiding belief in a calling to create in this medium. As she details extensively in her diaries, Prophet’s time in France was marked by extreme poverty and near starvation. The exhibit’s title is a direct quote from a 1929 journal entry, in which Prophet expresses her resolute determination to continue making and showing her work despite the formidable conditions. Eventually, Prophet returned to the US, where she co-founded Spelman College’s art program and later settled back in Rhode Island.

In recent years, Prophet’s work has regained visibility through the curation and artistic production of contemporary artists, especially the sculptor Simone Leigh, who locates Prophet within an archive of overlooked Black woman sculptors. Leigh included Prophet’s bust Silence (ca. 1926) in her multimedia installation for the RISD Museum's 2019 exhibition, Raid the Icebox Now with Simone Leigh: The Chorus. Leigh’s The Chorus put Prophet’s work and diary in conversation with writer-scholars Saidiya Hartman and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, in a reflection on the experience of Black women engaged in various forms of manual labor. Leigh's recent work, Conspiracy (2022), made in collaboration with filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, is also featured in the current Prophet exhibition.

Many of Prophet’s figurative sculptures shown in I Will Not Bend an Inch—a historically significant and long overdue celebration of the artist’s work—depict specific moods or states of feeling, all of which have a quality of quietude, perhaps even stoicism, about them. Discontent (1929), true to its name, features a somber face swathed in cloth that appears resolute in the face of hardship. Then again, it’s hard not to project onto the smooth, shiny surfaces of the busts the affective states documented in Prophet’s diaries, which frame the works themselves through their inclusion in wall text and exhibit labels.

Here, Silence, displayed as a pair in marble and bronze respectively, appears withholding and recalcitrant to the viewer’s gaze. The subtle and opaque expressions of Prophet’s works raise questions about what qualities of interior experience are hidden, concealed, and revealed across their surfaces. This is perhaps most exaggerated in the case of Head in Ebony (1926/29, altered later), which was owned by W.E.B. Du Bois, a longtime supporter and correspondent of Prophet. At an unknown date, Prophet chipped away the nose, ears, lips, and parts of the forehead of this work, leaving behind a genderless, raceless form, apart from the overdetermined and overt signification of the bust’s gleaming ebony “skin.” In the emphasized absence of a face, Head in Ebony directs our gaze to surface, to skin. The piece is reminiscent of Leigh’s iconic, eyeless busts, some of which appear in the film Conspiracy.

In addition to the marble, wood, and bronze busts, the exhibition also displays an array of photographs of lost or destroyed sculptures. Due to monetary constraints, most of them are models made of cheaper materials like plaster, clay, and alabaster. Many of the photographs, particularly of the full-figure statues, have the notation "to be executed in marble” or “to be executed in stone” inscribed on the back, indicating a future tense life of these sculptures, which, for most of them, Prophet was never able to realize in her lifetime.

Making these sculptures was an arduous process. Prophet was said to have cast her bronze sculptures herself because she couldn’t afford to hire help. This would have required lifting extremely heavy weights. An article from a 1929 issue of The Crisis reports, “Elizabeth Prophet has sacrificed both health and strength to her art. She has starved herself and gone almost without Proper clothing.” At the same time, in a diary entry from August 11, 1922, Prophet describes taking immense pleasure in the physical experience of working with clay:

I worked away on my first piece of sculpture with a calm assurance and savage pleasure of revenge. I remember how sure I was that it was going to be a living thing, a master stroke, how my arms felt as I swing them up to put on a piece of clay. I was conscious of a great rhythm as they swung through the air, they seemed so long and powerful.

Conspiracy is similarly occupied with labor, performance, and the art-making process. Shots of Leigh and her assistants sculpting, moving, washing, and cleaning are interspersed with intimate close-ups of hands. Audio from Jeanne Lee’s 1975 album of the same name plays over the video installation. What emerges is a feeling of layered time within an archive of Black women’s art and/as labor. Like the disembodied hands rhythmically shaping clay in Conspiracy, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch plays with the plasticity of time, lending an ongoing quality and presentness to Prophet’s work and legacy.