Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s The Evanesced at CAAM

Promotional image for Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s ‘The Evanesced.’ | Image courtesy of CAAM.

Multi-disciplinary artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Art-Writing MFA 12) has a powerful show at the California African American Museum (CAAM). Titled The Evanesced, the show opened on March 2 and is on view until June 25.

Combining archival photographs, original drawings and a performance, Hinkle’s new work is the result of her exploration of the traumas and tragedies surrounding 64,000 missing black women in America and the African diaspora. The artist draws from a deep well of collective ongoing violence to focus our attention on the darker undercurrent of imaging the Black female body, and how contemporary perspectives are continually affected by the historical residue of Black female hypersexualization.

On April 27, the artist will perform The Evanesced: Embodied Disappearance in the museum’s gallery. Before the show in January 2017, Hinkle workshopped the performance as part of the Hammer Museum’s program, In Real Life: Studio. She invited the public to participate in a movement performance to collectively fight against the erasure of Black women. In the artist’s project statement for In Real Life: Studio, Hinkle says “The Evanesced is an investigation embracing a collective, #SayHerName mentality of mourning, awareness and healing.” In conversation with the movement Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName is an initiative created in February 2015, by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) to ensure Black women’s stories of police violence are heard and included in demands for justice.

Hinkle also writes in her statement that her performance “experiments with realms of being and unbecoming that will create tributaries of emotions informed by the Black female experience.” Portraying various women, Hinkle morphs in and out of different historical and contemporary situations. The soundtrack for The Evanesced: Embodied Disappearance follows a similar pattern of weaving in and out, moving between whispers, shuffles, snippets of blues music, reggae, jazz, bluegrass, hip-hop and R&B.

Read an interview on Ebony’s website about Hinkle’s process in creating The Evanesced.