Paintings celebrate the beauty of black women
Aesha Lee has heard the line countless times: “You’re pretty for a black girl.”
The phrase, spoken by both black and nonblack people, evokes the racism woven into societal standards of beauty, the colorism that still persists within the black community, the often negative representation of dark-skinned women in popular culture, the scars left by segregation and slavery.
It hurts. Every time.
So, a few years ago, when a man Lee was dating noted, almost casually, that he had never gone out with a dark woman before “because none were pretty enough,” she didn’t just get angry.
Lee, a Houston artist and college instructor, realized how ingrained such attitudes are. She thought about the damage inflicted by those offhand comments. She ached for all the little girls who, like her, grow up feeling that their dark skin keeps them from being beautiful.
Then she reached for her paintbrush – and channeled her pain and frustration into her art.
The result was a portrait inspired by Sudanese-born model Ajak Deng, whose dark skin tone and Dinka features upend the European ideal of catwalk beauty. In Lee’s painting, her subject has close-cropped hair, a chocolate complexion and piercing, defiant eyes.
Lee, who studied art at the University of Houston and University of St. Thomas, dubbed the piece “Untitled” because it was meant to encompass the scope of black womanhood. But she soon realized one portrait was not enough.
Over the past two years, she went on to create 22 oil-on-wood panels, a series she titled “The Beauty of the Black Woman.”
The paintings, 13 of which are on exhibit at the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) through April 7, are an ode to black women. Each one acts as a callback to the microaggressions and thinly veiled bigotry Lee and other black women encounter during the course of everyday life.