Missing, not forgotten
Ghost army of black women conjured into 100 ‘unportraits’
The number startled Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle when she first came across it a couple of years back: 64,000 black women missing. At the time, she’d been reading up on men like Lonnie Franklin Jr., a serial killer in South Central Los Angeles who had killed a still-uncertain number of black women and left their bodies in alleyways. She’d been researching human trafficking hubs, including the Bay Area, where black women would simply disappear. But still that number gutted her. There were 64,000 missing black daughters, mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces.
“It just became this wound that spread through my archives,” Hinkle says. “It’s just such an immense loss.”
She wanted to paint these women, wanted to create space for them. Find them, even if in the smallest of ways. But there were some things to consider.
“How do I talk about this intense, persistent erasure, but not focus on keeping people shrouded in victimhood?”
And also, how would she paint people she’d never known? How could she paint the face of a woman without knowing her voice or what she liked to eat or her favorite color?
Hinkle presents her answer in a series of “unportraits” — abstract, ghostly representations “inspired and channeled from my subconscious” — at the newly renovated San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery in a show called “The Retrieval.”
In these unportraits, some of the figures have barely visible features, boldly and in the deepest of blacks taking up space against a translucent plastic canvas. Others touch their own bodies, fingers on their nipples, acknowledging their own presence even if they’re lost to others. Some are frightened; some are joyful. Some are split in two or three or four, figures that border on body horror, extra limbs and heads all bent the wrong way. Some have edges; some do not. Some are done in fine lines, others broad smudges.
“Each person that you see,” Hinkle says, “they have their own mood and attitude and motion — that’s really important to me.”
Each painting is given a number, as though it were a case waiting to be solved, and a mural of smoke, painted on the wall behind, connects all the pieces together. There’s a sense that thousands more “unportraits” remain unseen in those faint curls.
While creating these pieces, she listens and dances to music from the African diaspora. She uses leaves and twigs and other found objects as brushes — a reference to the resilience and resourcefulness of black women. She spills India ink onto the canvas and then walks away. Part of her work is letting the figure emerge.
“I do these sporadic brushstrokes, set it aside, then come back and look for the faces and figures and the hands,” Hinkle says. “I don’t know who is coming through. I don’t judge it. I don’t critique it.”
These pieces, in particular, are a continuation of a body of work that Hinkle has been working on since she came across the number 64,000. Together they’re called the “The Evanesced.” Previously, Hinkle has shown a different set of 100 of these portraits; they were smaller, on brown paper and included, at times, colorful accents.
What is on display in the Main Gallery, however, is all new, created specifically for this show. Again, Hinkle created 100 pieces, but due to space restrictions, not all of them are present. Hinkle isn’t even sure how many made it onto the wall (some of the pieces lie on top of one another), though it’s likely around 80. Still, the ambiguity there serves the subject of the missing and uncounted well.
Also included as part of the exhibition is a figure at the center of the room, shrouded in a colorful, many-patterned costume based on those used in Nigerian Egungun masquerades. Hinkle pairs the piece with documentation of her wearing it out and around the strips and the boulevards where women go missing, “just trying to transform the energy.” She also plans a performance in it for the closing. The figure, part of an ongoing world- and culture-building project called “Kentrifica,” for Hinkle, is a force for possible healing.
Up till now, Hinkle has preferred to keep her projects separate. But more and more, the bodies of work are blurring in theme and necessity.
“This show is about how we ghost people,” Hinkle says. “Homeless people, people who are mentally ill, people who are seen as other historically. How do we deny their presence?”
But that question is not enough or the end. Hinkle is looking, in all truth and honesty, for these women and for answers.
“How can we retrieve people? How can we retrieve ourselves and make ourselves instruments of change?” Hinkle asks. “I’m not interested in defining what my art is. I’m interested in what it has the power to do.”
“It just became this wound that spread through my archives. It’s just such an immense loss.” Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle