This series takes its name from the book by Alice Walker where she writes… “what did it mean for an [othered] woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ day? In our great-grandmothers’?”

This ongoing series is a consideration of the potential art histories, and lost artistic legacies of enslaved and indentured women. Using colonial era images of subaltern women often used as postcards which fetishized “othering” by using dehumanizing or classification type titles, I disrupt both the flattening of the women’s lives and cultural identities as well as western art historical narratives by recuperating two art techniques that were known and practiced by women prior to capture. Uli is from Igboland Nigeria and Madhubani is from Bihar India, both areas from which my own female ancestors were brought to the Caribbean.

I began overlaying images of women of West African descent with uli and women of East Indian descent with Madhubani, eventually converging the two techniques to represent my own mixedness.