Patricia Ekpo

Patricia Ekpo’s dissertation utilizes Black postminalist sculpture, including site-specific works and land art, to interrogate the role of Black aesthetic production in the spatial re/production of White hegemony. It argues that Blackness’s aesthetic, social, and gendered/sexual laboring capacity must exist in order to be destroyed, and that this process constitutes White subjective and spatial expansion. This ongoing process of production and destruction, capacitation and incapacitation, was instantiated in chattel slavery and inheres in the continuing system of racial capitalism that emerged from it. The project thus argues that Blackness as a property is a foundational ordering force in the modern world, serving not just as a historically and ontologically subjugated object to a White subject but, further, as the capacitating and re/productive drive structuring subject-object relations.

Sculptural and architectural artworks by Black women, including Maren Hassinger’s highway sculptures, Senga Nengudi’s fleshy water and sand-based installations, and Beverly Buchanan’s derelict architectural sculptures illuminate this cycle in their forms, material histories, and animating desires, enabling a critique of the hegemonic White spatial order. The dissertation employs art historical methods to analyze this Black aesthetic production, but also utilizes Black studies and gender and sexuality studies to intervene in art historical discourses around postminimalism, site specificity, and land art. It aims to illuminate the haunting presence of Blackness in these discourses and, in doing so, enact more robust approaches to the study of art.