# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxk8HHGjG0U
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16044675-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/c6e12226d3.jpg
- **Posted:** 2019-05-17T20:32:29.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction.
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Tschabalala Self (b. 1990) is an American portraitist whose multimedia works explore the cultural significance surrounding the black female body. “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise,” Self explains. “I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.” Self’s abstract collage-like canvases include painted, drawn, and sewn elements to construct multidimensional renditions of her subjects. “The images all start from a drawing. And from that drawing I try to build a body or build the features of the subject I’m creating...I think that they are really sincerely built bit by bit.” The accumulation of different shapes and material textures express the disparities that exist within individuals. In Self’s words: “One individual having many parts. One individual being made from lots of different distinct elements. So the way the work is actually made forms how it is meant to be understood. A lot of the hope contained by the figures comes from how they are made as compositional decisions, and their scenarios add more complexity.”
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#TschabalalaSelf tschabalalaself
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Image: Photography by Cyle Suesz. Courtesy of W Magazine, 2018.

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## Tags

artistinaction, tschabalalaself

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