Clotilde Jimenez

Region: Midwest

As an artist, I find it my duty to candidly critique the culture I’m living in and form part of. My work is generated in that way, and it has become a tapestry of my life that transcribes and reconstructs the societal idée fixe of the black body in popular culture, while also undermining the notions of gender normativity within black subjectivity.

I equate queerness and the raced body at the same time by critiquing the notions of “Black is/Black ain’t” (rigid definitions of “Blackness” that African-Americans impose on each other) and the inherent set of rules and standards governed by our cultural hegemony. It is my own quest for self-definition and analysis of what I know as black masculinity, and what it means to just be.