Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

For In Real Life: Studio at the Hammer Museum I will be workshopping a performance that to present during my upcoming solo exhibition at the California African American Museum in February of 2017. At CAAM I will present a new body of work focusing primarily on the concept of disappearance  and erasure as it pertains to the current 64,000 missing black women in America and historical disappearances of Black women throughout the African Diaspora. I will create un-portraits of elusive figures that cannot be codified or exist only as entities and presences stemming from historical and contemporary acts of disappearance via homicide, colonial entities, the current human trafficking trade, and other forms of erasure. With this new body of work titled The Evanesced I want to create a new space to visually reimagine mourning, awareness, trauma, and exploring the demonic landscapes that pose danger to the Black female body. I will continue my existing aesthetic practice of working with layering and figurative abstraction, oscillating between visual sources from the 1980s and early 1900s. My interest in disappearance as it pertains to Black women in the Historical Present has shaped all of my bodies of work to date. I am haunted by the disappearance of Black women being accepted as the norm; society has come to know it so intimately that we are desensitized. Fraught with intense layers of intersectionality, societies form perpetual blind eyes to the treatment and the threat of violence upon Black women. As a Black woman I am fascinated with how we are taught to value and de-value our presences within American society and abroad. In light of so many black women being killed at the hands of the police (Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Shereese Francis, Kathryn Johnston, and countless others).

The Evanesced is an investigation embracing a collective, #SayHerName mentality of mourning, awareness and healing. Through my research and connections with the Historical Present my studio practice is inclined to explore work that is a collective cry for the disappeared, the misunderstood, mispronounced and misused women of our past, present and future if we continue on the current paths concerning the hyper sexualization of, the usage of language about, and the perceived criminalization of Black women. I am reminded of my grandmother telling me when I was in high school not to wear a silk scarf around my neck if I was walking down the street alone, because someone could come up behind me and choke me with it. While on a class trip to Spain in 2007 I had a firsthand encounter with my blackness as a woman being synonymous with prostitution and the human trafficking trade; I could have easily been harmed by the four men who visually and verbally sexually assaulted me throughout the landscapes of Spain. This collective and generational violence embedded within our social fabrics is something that is both a lived experience and also a theoretical entity that follows our bodies perpetually. During my performance I will embody various types of women navigating historical and present situations in which I become a shape shifter morphing in and out of presences. I will experiment with a soundtrack that will include whispers, shuffles, snippets of blues music, reggae, jazz, bluegrass, hip-hop and R&B that will create a indecisive sonic portrait transitioning into various realms of being and unbecoming that  will create tributaries of emotions informed by the Black female experience.

—Kenyatta A.C. HInkle

In Real Life: Studio is a Public Engagement project organized by January Parkos Arnall, curatorial associate, Public Engagement.

The Hammer Museum’s Public Engagement program is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.