shero’s personal journey to see oneself. This is no small thing. This is perhaps the only visibility that actually matters, because to see yourself as sexy, strong, right and left, sky and ground is the thing that keeps you alive when the same world you seek to save wants to tear you out by the root. This is the demand of Sproles’ work--to cultivate an intimacy and a tenderness with oneself in pain, without shame, to be planted in love of self.

 

The queer femmes in each image--inspired by close friends, the viral nonbinary, the internet, the networks of the realest daddies, queens, siblings, and kin--do not need others to see them as human. They defend a universe of perversity and love coexisting, and they do not need to remind you that they matter. Wild and fragile queer women of color who speak for themselves often fight for others at our own expense and without remorse.

 

We know visibility and hypervisibility. We acknowledge the tight spaces, the endless walls we climb before we are killed by our own taming, the treacherous path between Olympia and Venus we often tread in our attempts to be seen. Sproles’ images have no problem being both desperate and confident. They are your younger self wishing you had the ability to speak up for yourself. They are the adult telling you no one deserves what happened to you. And then they take the split wound and place unknown pleasure in it.

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Sproles’ characters, their colors and their attire, their defensive shoulders and large lips, collaborate with other Black women in the live, not with Fenty’s marketing team nor CGI influencers’ endless selfies with friends i.e. marketing partners. In that way, they operate in fugitive modes of reversing the claim for visibility, and instead they draw attention to the limits of images. They refuse to be dignified in a claim for humanity.

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Each leg, each torn limb, asks for the Black femme to be free to evacuate this body, because it is not hers. She is a fugitive body, like Sojourner Truth selling her likeness, and she is a person we know “nothing” about, and she does not matter--insofar as “Black lives” do. She is not a thing insofar as she is not-a-thing, but a human blossom. She is free to evacuate respectability’s demands when she is the only audience that matters.

 

Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an “undisciplinary” artist-scholar, creating visually poetic and emotionally engaging artworks with a deeply critical eye towards knowledge, medium and audience. RMB’s work and words have been featured in Art Forum, Artsy, Chicago Magazine, Hyperallergic, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Performa Magazine, Prospect.4 New Orleans, Radical Presence (CAM Houston), and the cover of the Chicago Reader.