The Fantastic & Divine Southern Black WomenThe Artwork of Shanequa Gay

By Isadora Pennington

What does fantasy look like from the perspective of a strong, confident, southern Black woman? That’s just one of the questions that multimedia artist Shanequa Gay asks with her work.

Inspired by her family history and African American traditions, Gay embraces a sense of play when conceptualizing her colorful works. Using a range of materials that include oil paints, acrylics, photographs, watercolors, fabric, spray paint, vinyl, and even hair weave, she crafts figural works that pose open-ended questions and entice the viewer to consider their own perceptions.

Hybridity is a theme that Gay explored in her work for more than a decade. Her first body of work that involved hybridity was called “The Fair Game Project” and dealt with social issues surrounding the African American male body.

Ultimately, Gay began experiencing outrage fatigue and moved away from the theme, though she never abandoned the concepts behind the work. Later, when pursuing her MFA from Georgia State University, she found herself reevaluating the work she produces. “Hybridity wasn’t something I wanted to let go,” she said, and she found ways to explore that theme in new ways.

Gay’s current body of work features Black women’s bodies topped with otherworldly animal heads often in celestial settings. She explained that by combining two figures that are sometimes villainized in popular culture to create whimsical and wise characters she was able to grant them an ethereal majesty.

“I began to develop these figures called the ‘devouts’ by kind of pulling from the women in my family and ancestors and those who are living: my mom, my grandmother, my aunts,” Gay continued. “They all have these characteristics of strength, of elegance, and of beauty.”

The animals she chose also exhibit those same virtues, and by uniting them she magnifies their significance.

“Currently they have these kind of gazing ancestral eyes, and all sorts of tropes of what it means to me to be African Atlantan,” said Gay.

Gay is also inspired by a conversation between Gloria Steinem and bell hooks in which Steinem talked about how, over the course of 3,000 years, Egyptians began to take divinity away from women and animals. Hooks then talked about how African Americans cannot ever truly decolonize their minds if they can’t imagine themselves as divine.

Gay’s portrait subjects have a majestic air about them, observing, celebrating, and uplifting icons of Blackness. She wants to grant women and girl-child figures a “language of divinity” as well as celebrate native animals.

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