Zanele Muholi: Portraiture and Poetry

Zanele Muholi, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness and Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance 

Zanele Muholis’s recent exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance brought together photos, poems, sculpture, and recent painting work to a space that typically is unchanging and unmoving. Quite literally, breathing life into the Museum through ink Black walls and lingering gazes, Muholi allowed visitors to revel in intimate black and white portraits that allude to the self, Blackness, and queerness. Experiencing the exhibition felt full and as I immediately came to reflect upon it against the backdrop of their exhibition at the Spelman Museum, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, the first exhibition during my time at Spelman College. Similarly, that exhibition emphasized identity, concentrating on the effects of Muholis’s darkened skin, which was darkened further through editing. The two exhibitions speak to Muholis’s continued journey as they explore their own identity. They also spoke to me as I considered how my own relationship with Blackness and queerness has evolved during my four years at Spelman. 

My trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner was the fruits of the course Art, Craft, and Theory: Simone Leigh, a year-long intensive focusing on the work of Simone Leigh, a sculptor centering Black femme identities and the first Black woman to represent the U.S Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. As part of the course, students visited Boston to speak to directors, educators, and participants at the Institue of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Boston to better understand the ICA’s role in hosting the U.S Pavillion. 

Muholis exhibition at the Spelman Museum was the first exhibition I attended during my time at Spelman as well as the first exhibition I volunteered at as a Spelman Museum ambassador, the first exhibition I photographed, and my first museum talk at the Museum. Muholis’s work instantly spoke to me. Though they are South African, I immediately resonated with their deep questioning of self; as a dark-skinned Black person, I felt drawn to their piercing eyes in their photos. I self-identified as bisexual at the time, and I felt a curiosity towards Muholis’s relationship to queerness and gender. Their body seemed to be so free but inaccessible to anyone but themselves. Seeing their work in my home city, Boston, at an institution that has historically centered whiteness and further as a Black queer person, seeing how another Black queer person took space felt full circle. When I entered Spelman, Hail the Lioness taught me that there were spaces and artists centering on Black femme identities, which led me to pursue curation and art education, my first internship being at the ICA. Being Muholi taught me that even when I depart my HBCU, I will be able to make space wherever I go. One of their works was coupled with a poem that spoke to my journey through Spelman, particularly the last two lines

 “a gaggle of girls un-gendered, a sovereign daughter moving through the chorus of some devilish god.”