Artist Tschabalala Self Upends Our Perception of the Female Form

Tschabalala Self arrives nearly a half hour late for our appointment at her New Haven, Connecticut, studio, sipping a concoction of fresh lime slices and honey from a mason jar. “I didn’t have any tea bags, so lime was my tea bag for today,” she says. She’s a compact beauty in a black watch cap, red sweater, navy pants, and hiking boots, her superlong fingernails painted lavender. To enter the studio, which is located in a converted factory building on the outskirts of the Yale campus, I have to sidestep a huge, unstretched canvas.

A work in progress inspired by Matisse’s 1908 sculpture Two Negresses, Self’s creation is titled Two Girls and features entwined figures made up of a collage of stitched-together fabrics. Laundry baskets filled with scraps, some of them rescued from her childhood home, are everywhere in the fifth-floor workspace, and her sewing machine is front and center—a crucial component of her art. “Her expressive use of sewing introduced a lot of new elements into the language of figurative painting,” says Ellen Tani, who curated a show of Self’s work at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “I’m drawing with the sewing machine,” the 29-year-old says. “I love having this machine as an extension of my hand.”

The process that Self has worked out for herself is fiendishly complex, a combination of sewing, printing, and painting to build black bodies that verge on the grotesque and can conjure intense sexual images—vulvas, cartoonishly large bottoms, the occasional penis. “Sexuality makes people uncomfortable,” Self says. “And if you’re dealing with women of color and their sexuality, it compounds all those anxieties.” Across the hall, Self works on her sculptures, structures that look as though they’ve stepped right out of her paintings—voluptuous physiques with often discordant body parts, made of wood, chipboard, plaster gauze, mirrored plexiglass, welded steel. “I figured out how to build my sculptures by watching plastic-surgery shows on TV,” she tells me.

In a generation of young black artists whose work is centered on the black body, Self offers a uniquely broad vision, one that embraces Rubens and Romare Bearden as warmly as vernacular craftwork and a corner bodega in Harlem.“Tschabalala is bold and fearless in her rendering of the female body,” says Jeffrey Deitch, former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “At a young age, there’s already a mastery of the medium—she is a brilliant colorist.” The exaggerated bottoms of some of her subjects have drawn accusations that she is perpetuating racist stereotypes like the Hottentot Venus. But what annoys her more is when people tell her “it reminds them of Kim Kardashian,” Self says. “Kim Kardashian’s body is like a build-out of a Hottentot Venus . . . I would like to reclaim that body for the community it comes from.” Reviewing a 2016 show, The New York Times’s Roberta Smith wrote, “Clichés about the black body as exotic, athletic, and sexually powerful are turned to advantage, partly through the intense psychic connection between the figures.” With their backs turned and their faces obscured, Self’s figures, Smith wrote, are “indifferent to the (white) gaze, even when they float on a field of eyes.”

Born in Harlem in 1990, Self was the youngest of five children. Her father taught high school English, and her mother ran a vocational training program at Bronx Community College. When she was around 13, her parents divorced, but they remained friends, and for the next five years or so her dad lived across the street. All the siblings were given unusual names: Sayida (Arabic), Kolikwe (Aztec), Ramogi (East African), Princetta (“black Americana,” as Self puts it), and Tschabalala (South African); her friends call her “Tschaba.” “My parents have conventional American names, Charles and Glenda. But I think they thought of themselves as socially conscious and cultured, and so they wanted to give us all ethnic names,” she says. Her surname contains a story as well: A great-grandfather who was supposedly a Texas Ranger (“I know this isn’t true—there were no black Texas Rangers then,” she tells me, laughing) changed his name to Self after he was freed from slavery. Tschabalala attended schools on the Upper East Side and took after-school classes at the Harlem School of the Arts. All through high school, she pitched for a Harlem Little League softball team. “When you’re a pitcher, everyone’s looking at you, and if you fail, you just have to keep pitching,” she says. “So I don’t have anxiety about something not going well.”

In her second year at Bard College, where she immersed herself in printmaking, she realized she wanted to be an artist. Deciding to be an artist, she says, is mainly about “whether you feel comfortable in the whole lifestyle. I knew I would be mediocre in most other fields, but I figured that in this one I can maybe stand out.” After Bard, she went back to New York City, planning to find a way to earn a living that would leave her time for art-making, but when she was fired from a job selling specialty salts and olive oils, she decided to go back to school. Her portfolio was strong enough to get her into Yale’s Graduate School of Art.

In Self’s first semester, her mother died suddenly. “My mother was never sick,” she tells me. “It felt like she just left, and that was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” The siblings inherited their mother’s Harlem brownstone, and they have managed to hold on to it ever since. Self wanted to take the year off, but her siblings persuaded her to go back immediately to Yale. In her last term, in 2015, Self flew to Berlin for her first solo exhibition, and from there, things took off at warp speed: two more solo shows, six group shows (one at the Studio Museum in Harlem). The real breakout came when she exhibited at London’s prestigious Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art. “Her ‘characters’ display . . . an extraordinarily strong presence,” wrote Parasol’s founder and executive director, Ziba Ardalan, in the catalog. The past year saw a cascade of prominent exhibitions, including solo shows at the Hammer in L.A., the Frye in Seattle, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She recently joined the prestigious Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and her debut show is scheduled to take place at its New York space this September.

The avalanche of recognition has not prevented her from maintaining interests outside the art world. She divides her time between New Haven, Harlem, and the small town of Hudson, in upstate New York, where her boyfriend, Michael Mosby, a DJ and community organizer, lives. When not working, she visits her sisters and brother at their Harlem homestead or goes hiking, freshwater swimming, and dancing with Mosby at a local bar in Hudson. Once a year, she, Mosby, and artist Shanekia McIntosh throw a party for about 350 people (they call it Free Range) at a venue in Hudson. The idea is “to bring artists of color from different parts of the nation to this pastoral region,” she says. Mosby thinks she watches too much “frivolous” TV—The Wendy Williams Show and other celebrity-soaked programs. (He was, however, hooked by She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s prestige-TV series for Netflix based on his 1986 film, especially after Self appeared in an episode.) She’s highly attuned to the way fame operates; celebrity culture, she says, “takes the temperature of society by understanding our idols.”

Self recently reread Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and she’s currently engrossed in Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, by Sabrina Strings, which informs her thinking about the uninhibited physicality of her own work. But if she engages with a sometimes oppressive history, it doesn’t fully color her perspective: “I don’t feel any shame about being black,” she tells me. “I would actually say I’m proud to be black—proud that my ancestors survived. For me to be alive in America today means someone had to survive that trip on the boat. Someone survived every year in captivity. They survived Jim Crow. Someone in my family had to survive every one of those moments for me to be here today.” She pauses. “It can be so scary to accept the realities of sexism and racism and homophobia in this country. But you have to understand what it is, understand those are not things that can be corrected. You have to just move on and build something new.”