Posing Beauty

I visited the museum to see the “Posing Beauty” exhibit on Thursday October 3, 2013 and Tuesday October 8, 2013. The atmosphere of the museum was tranquil, and allowed for a freethinking and free-flowing environment to create ideas for the argumentative essay. The title of the artwork I chose is Venus, which is a self-portrait taken in 1994. I was immediately attracted to the piece of artwork because of the position of her body and her nakedness jump out of the portrait. It is not often that curvaceous black women are photographed, let alone naked for anybody to see. I feel extremely close and personal to the image because I am not the socially acceptable model figure. I too have curves and have learned to embrace them despite societies constant reminder that I am not a size 0.

True Beauty Exposed
“Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” has been coined
Young girls need role models to admire and aid them in making decisions to better their life as well as their self-esteem. Displaying hypervisability, William’s can see how sensual, yet beautiful the body of Venus is. As a piece of artwork, Venus provides young girls with an outlet to begin to embrace their own shapes, and denote their personal beauty. They will acquire the resistance of the media’s portrayal of women, and continue to pass the positive body images through out the African-American culture. Although women can empower one another, they still have to deal with intersectionality, which deals with women encountering multiple and overlapping oppressions. Dr. Beverly Tatum references Audre Lorde when describing various forms of discrimination that women have faced. For example, “ ‘forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two’, ”(Tatum 108) provides evidence that African-American women can fit into a number of categories that separate them from the socially acceptable idea conveyed by the