Sisters, 2021

Velvet, felt, tulle, marbleized cotton, craft paper, fabric, and digitally printed, hand-printed, and painted canvas on canvas
© Tschabalala Self

The large multimedia composition, Sisters, depicts two sisters, a young woman and a child, standing side by side and embracing affectionately. The elder sibling looks down in a manner that is both adoring and protective, despite the fact that her young charge is stepping gently on her foot. As Tschabalala Self began to explore figuration—always her focus—while studying painting and printmaking at Bard College and the Yale School of Art, she decided that it would be “most sincere to start with a narrative with which I had a lived experience.” Black women have remained her most frequent protagonists, and Self, while granting that her works “are not about real people,” insists that they “are about real ideas.” The figures that occupy Self’s compositions are treated less as literal subjects than as “avatars,” as she terms them, enabling the artist to reclaim “interpretative authority” over Black women’s bodies.