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.