Name: The Divine Feminine

The Divine Feminine is a spiritual concept that represents honoring feminine energy as sacred,
and celebrating the female body, as well as sexuality and relationship. Each of the six women
featured in the festival manifests the Divine Feminine in her art, embracing her unique identity as
a woman, and just as often challenging what is expected of women in our society.

Theme: The theme revolves around embracing femininity and diverse female identities. Every
woman has been on her own journey with her femininity, and womanhood in general. The six
artists in The Divine Feminine represent many different experiences, but they are beautifully
connected through these very experiences and the art they have produced as a result of them.

Location: The festival will take place in Central Park in Manhattan. The park is a peaceful hub
in the middle of a bustling city, and I want the festival to be here because I feel as though it is the
perfect vessel to hold the meaning of the art that will be featured. There will be a stage set up for
musical and dance performance, as well as large, movable walls on which art and photographs
can be mounted and visitors can walk on all sides of. And of course, there will be plenty of open
space to just sit down and enjoy the experience.

Music: Solange Knowles (Masterpiece page)

From “a seat at the table,” 2016
Solange will do a live performance of “Don’t Touch My Hair,” an anthem where Solange
embraces black femininity, specifically about being proud of her hair and what it means to her as
a black woman. The song is for black women who have ever not loved their hair, who know
what it’s like to have an unwelcome hand reaching toward their hair, and who can now see that
the crowns on top of their heads have always been there. Solange’s album is entitled “A Seat at
the Table,” and this song is so significant because it truly does give black women the seat at the
table and the voice that is constantly being kept from them in our society.

Don't touch my hair

When it's the feelings I wear

Don't touch my soul

When it's the rhythm I know

Don't touch my crown

They say the vision I've found

Don't touch what's there

When it's the feelings I wear

They don't understand

What it means to me

Where we chose to go

Where we've been to know

You know this hair is my shit

Rode the ride, I gave it time

But this here is mine

What you say, oh?

What you say to me?

Don't touch my pride

They say the glory's all mine

Don't test my mouth

They say the truth is my sound

Dance: Katherine Dunham (20th century)

1909-2006. American dancer, choreographer, social activist. One of the most successful dance
careers in American and European theater of the 20th century. “Matriarch and queen mother of
black dance”, owned the Katherine Dunham Dance Company (only self-supported black dance
troupe of her time), choreographed more than 90 individual dances, innovator in African-
American modern dance.

Ballet Creole. Dunham performs to West Indian Creole music in a way that captivates her
audience. In the performance, she removes her headdress and moves freely.

Visual Art: Mickalene Thomas (1971-) (Saw in person)

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American artist best known for her complex
paintings made of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Mickalene noted that when she became an
artist, fashion was always "in the back of my mind" as a source of inspiration. Her depictions of
African-American women explore notions of black female celebrity and identity while
romanticizing ideas of femininity and power. The subjects in Thomas's paintings and collages
radiate sexuality. Women in provocative poses sprawl across the canvases and are surrounded by
decorative patterns.
She presents a "complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common
definitions of beauty."
Thomas’s subjects are always women of color; a means to portray and empower the women and
celebrate their culture and beauty. The subjects have assertive and unapologetic poses and gazes,
which serves to challenge the dominance of the male gaze in art. Her subjects look directly at the
viewer, staring at them as they pose nude or partially naked. This assertive portrayal indicates
that the models are at ease in their own skin, thus challenging the stereotype of the silent and
inferior woman objectified by the viewer's gaze. In addition, seemingly insignificant decisions
(like not straightening the figures’ hair) have the important effect of encouraging women of color
to accept themselves as they are and not conform to a particular ideology of beauty imposed by
society.

A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007

Moment’s Pleasure #2, 2008

Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010

Theater: Anna Deavere Smith (Cultural literacy list)

American actress, playwright, and professor. (1950-)
Smith will be giving a talk about the creation of her famous one-woman play, Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992 (1993, adapted to film in 2000), and the way that by herself, she took on nearly
four-dozen characters directly based off of real people she interviewed from the L.A. riots.

Photography: Hannah Wilke (20th century)

Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance
artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Her sculptures, first exhibited in New York in the late 1960s, are often mentioned as some of the
first explicit vaginal imagery arising from the women’s liberation movement, and they became
her signature form which she made in various media, colors and sizes, including large floor
installations, throughout her life. Some of her mediums included clay, chewing gum, kneaded
erasers, laundry lint and latex.
In 1974, Wilke began work on her photographic body art piece S.O.S — Starification Object
Series in which she merged her minimalist sculpture and her own body by creating tiny vulval
sculptures out of chewing gum and sticking them to herself. She then had herself photographed
in various pin-up poses, providing a juxtaposition of glamour and the scarring on her body,
which she related to an awareness of the Holocaust. These poses exaggerate and satirize
American cultural values of feminine beauty and fashion.
Her use of self in photography and performance art has been interpreted as a celebration and
validation of Self, Women, the Feminine, and Feminism.Conversely, it has also been described as
an artistic deconstruction of cultural modes of female vanity, narcissism, and beauty.
In photographs of herself, she takes the production of the female image from male hands and
puts it in her own.
Sweet Sixteen (1977)

S.O.S.- Starification Object Series (1974-1982)

(Labia-like shapes made of gum are stuck on her body, “I chose gum because it’s the perfect
metaphor for the American woman — chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out
and pop in a new piece.”)

Writing: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977-) (Triangulation)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist, writer of short stories, and nonfiction.

Reading parts of Americanah and her We Should All Be Feminists essay

Much of Americanah takes place as Ifemelu sits in a salon getting her hair braided. For Ifemelu
personally, her hair represents her struggle for confidence and an identity as both a Nigerian
immigrant and a black American. In Nigeria, Ifemelu always braided her hair, but when she
comes to America she learns that she is supposed to relax (straighten) her hair with chemicals or
else people will think she is unprofessional. She does so, and feels that a part of herself has died
with her hair’s natural curl. Thus the cultural pressure for black women like Ifemelu to
straighten, dye, or somehow make their hair look more like a white woman’s hair becomes a
symbol of the racism inherent in American culture. Racism is not just explicitly racist acts, but
also social hierarchies like the fact that most popular women’s magazines offer no hair-styling
tips for black women.

I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all my femaleness.
Because I deserve to be. I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas. I am
girly. I am happily girly. I like high heels and trying on lipsticks. It's nice to be complimented by both men and
women (although I have to be honest and say that I prefer the compliments of stylish women), but I often wear
clothes that men don't like or don't "understand." I wear them because I like them and because I feel good in them.
The "male gaze," as a shaper of my life's choices, is largely incidental.