Liberatory Adornment is curated by Jillian Hernandez, PhD.

Hair care as protection and display of power, pink as the color of radical politics, consumption as relational practice… Liberatory Adornment explores how contemporary artists mobilize femininity to claim beauty, care, and abundance for Black and Latinx people. By departing from the masculinist aesthetics of U.S. militarism and the Black and Chicanx movements of the 1970s, artists Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, and Kenya (Robinson) generate alternative visualities to address the urgent social issues of the contemporary moment. The works in this exhibition invite us to appreciate the paths for personal and collective freedom that are available in the everyday via beauty rituals, domestic decor, confection, glitter, gold, and rhinestones. Junk culture transforms into sacred symbology and girlhood memory is tapped for political consciousness, creative self-healing, and cultural/ancestral homage.

Beyond their shared aesthetic modes, what brings the works in Liberatory Adornment together are their playfully dead-serious investigations of nation, sexuality, consumer desire, and violence as they manifest in the context of U.S. racial capitalism. The politics of how perceived difference shapes social, cultural, and economic value is implicated at every level of these artists’ practices and is investigated via (often bodily) materiality, domestic and personal adornment, and consumer/object relations (mass-marketed toys, brand name sneakers, beauty products, and “urban” fiction). Rather than articulate appeals for representation and inclusion, the works in this exhibition transform the meanings, economies, and iconographies of racialized gender through femininity and generate new imaginings of freedom.