The Brooklyn Rail

Many contemporary visual artists are interested in race due, in part, to their lived experiences, as much of today’s art is an expression of self and identity, but they are also interested in the complicated, intimate relationship that race has with the visual itself. Many are additionally attuned to the history of art and its institutionalization in museums and the academy, and the ways in which these practices and forums have been exclusionary and damaging. Art does, in fact, have a lot to say about racism, and in its critical positioning and ability to speak without words, can hopefully move us towards a more equitable, empathetic society.

In Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Fabiola Jean-Louis’s photographic print, They’ll Say We Enjoyed It (2017), a beautiful, opulently dressed woman with brown skin, brown eyes, and rosy cheeks gazes with melancholy into the distance. A powdered gray wig is piled atop her head and adorned with pink blossoms and green leaves. She crosses her arms at her cinched waist while gently cradling one forearm and balancing a fan between the fingers of her other hand. She embodies the trappings of eighteenth-century royalty in this gown with its ruffles, the voluminous hips of its silhouette, and its flower-patterned, gilded fabric catching the light. A small, white dog—a symbol of fidelity, purity, and leisure—sits by her side, next to her dainty foot. Jean-Louis’s composition is a remake of the English portraitist and landscapist Thomas Gainsborough’s Queen Charlotte (ca. 1781). (Queen Charlotte, of possible African descent, is also a newly popular figure in the public imagination thanks to Shonda Rhimes’s “Bridgerton” series and its spin-off, in which the queen is played by Black actresses.)

Just beyond this woman’s shoulder, a very different, disturbing scene of sexual assault, not in the original painting, plays out in a moonlit garden that Jean-Louis styled, Gainsborough-like, with a loose, light, painterly finish. One half-dressed white man in britches points to another who has in his grasp a naked, cruelly caricaturized dark-skinned woman gesturing and struggling in protest. Their dynamic may evoke the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, a subject of Renaissance and Baroque painting, of a woman who resists the advances of two lascivious men, or the many scenes of rape or abduction that European history painting—grand works depicting biblical, historical, or mythological tales—returned to again and again, often as an exploration of the nude, female form.

Jean-Louis orchestrates photographic compositions such as They’ll Say We Enjoyed It to underscore omissions in historical narratives and visions of the past promoted by painted portraits of the wealthy and powerful, their reproduction in canonical art history, and their reification in traditional museums in the Western mode. In Jean-Louis’s oeuvre, this work’s background scene and the animalistic treatment of the female figure by her attackers therein is particularly confrontational regarding the dehumanizing brutalities of slavery, colonialism, and racism, and their imbrication with sexual violence perpetrated against Black women.

Jean-Louis fashions her leading-lady sitters’ elaborate costumes by hand, out of paper. The ephemeral nature of paper as a material used to mimic silk and other luxurious textiles suggests the falseness and fragility of representation itself. The artist’s dynamic use of Photoshop signals how representation can be deeply distorting. The Old Masters whose compositions and visual language she recasts worked at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Her point of view is important both because it confronts what has been left out or aestheticized and because it centers self-possessed, regal Black women. She is tapped into the methodology of critical fabulation to reimagine Black life within and beyond the archive. She also reminds us of the magnitude of the history of the Haitian Revolution, which is coeval with the history of the paintings she quotes in order to critique. Across “Rewriting History,” the series from which this photograph is drawn, Jean-Louis points to the complicated ways in which race has been and remains culturally constructed, partially through artists’ images, and tied into class, gender, and colorism.

Historically, visual representations have helped enshrine racist systems and the beliefs, hierarchies, stereotypes, and disadvantages these systems rely upon. The title, They’ll Say We Enjoyed It, is drawn from Zora Neale Hurston’s quote, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” In breaking that silence, works like Jean-Louis’s should help dismantle racism by fostering critical thinking, self-recognition and/or cross-cultural awareness, and sheer artistic appreciation.