Started in 2012, the Red Bull House of Art Fellowship has traditionally honored Detroit-area artists. This year, however, the fellowship was granted to a diverse groups of three tremendously talented artists from across the nation, including Tschabalala Self ’15MFA. The Detroit News writes, “The black women in Tschabalala Self’s painted and stitched collages look out at the world with cool, sometimes highly sexualized, independence, daring you to criticize them.”
“These woman, unlike their counterparts in ads and the mass media, are free agents, dependent on no one.”
“Confronting what she calls the ‘narrow representations of black women,’ the Harlem native and Yale MFA presents ‘women with the ability to be however they want to be, and to show a huge variety of aspect and possibility in their movement and personality.'”
“And in a nice flip on conventional gender roles, men, when they do appear, are there to define the woman — not the other way around.”