Using furniture-based installations that include writings and mixed media, I imagine the voice of Sara Baartman, the South African Khoikhoi woman who became known as the “Hottentot Venus” in early 19th-century Europe. Baartman is represented by fictional diary entries that cross time and space and speak to other historical and contemporary figures such as Charles Darwin, the famous 19th-century French naturalist George Cuvier, Josephine Baker and Lil’ Kim. These installations seek to bring to light the ensuing complexity and complicity in the objectification of Black female bodies and the fetishizing of Black female sexuality.

This body of work was generously supported by The Artist in Residence Program at The School of Art+Design at Purchase College in New York, and The Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.