Vicki Meek, “Go,” 2022, gicleé print on Rives. Photo courtesy of Vicki Meek and Talley Dunn Gallery.
A solo exhibition of work by East Dallas artist Vicki Meek is on display now at Talley Dunn Gallery.
The exhibition, Meek’s first at the gallery, is titled At What Point Do We Disappear? Black Women’s Obsession with White Femininity. It is on display until July 2.
Meek said in a statement that the idea behind the exhibition is something she’s been thinking about for decades. Once in the 1980s, a Black woman asked her why she was wearing her hair natural. Meek said her hair was “a full embracing of my natural self.” And she realized that the concept of Black beauty shifting to an African aesthetic was a fad soon replaced by a Eurocentric idea of beauty.
Here’s Meek’s statement about the collection:
“Skin bleaching, hair straightening, eye and body altering all have provided tangible examples of the erasure of Blackness from our concept of beauty. Not surprisingly, 400+ years of cultural indoctrination has taken its toll on concepts of beauty in the Black community. The proximity to whiteness has become the gold standard in determining beauty, so Black women have been chasing that standard in a myriad of ways for generations. Enslavement and colonization produced a culture of self-hate that often manifests in ways sometimes not even perceptible by the Black community.
“I am exploring in At What Point Do We Disappear: Black Women’s Obsession with White Femininity how deeply ingrained this self-hate is, not only here in America, but also in Africa where women sport long, straight haired wigs and bleach their skin in attempts to “lighten up” their complexion so that they can be more appealing to African men. This fascination with whiteness extends beyond simply skin color and hair texture. It manifests in obsessions with light colored eyes, thin bodies, as well as altered noses and lips.
“Clearly, all women, whatever their racial group, are constantly faced with standards of beauty that are unreachable thanks to media images replete with idealized models. But in the case of white women who aspire to attain this idealized beauty, they need not change the basic physical qualities of their racial group to realize this standard of beauty. Black women must reject their fundamental physical being if they are to attain this standard. Even the so-called natural movement exhibits an inability to totally reject white femininity as we witness countless examples of how to have curls not kinks by using a variety of hair products. The message is clear: curls=desirable, beautiful; kinks=undesirable, ugly.
“I liken the inculcation of white femininity in the Black female psyche to the diminution of our souls. We erase aspects of ourselves in the process of creating a beauty aesthetic that has so many roots in white femininity. At what point do we simply disappear?”
The gallery is open noon-5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and by appointment.
