“Black Pin-Up Queens”
GirlrillaVintage Honors the Original Hang Her on the Wall Girl“These are my custom made, wearable-intervention-art pieces, featuring vintage and vintage style black pin-up girls. Women who occupy a forever space of belonging in my heart. This is an ode to them and for the people who love them. Unlike white pin-up models of the time, praised for their beauty, black pin-up models were fetishized for their sexual prowess and curvaceous attributes. Black girls who weren’t cherished by soldiers overseas, pinned on walls, or lockers, but were hidden under mattresses, cloaked in secrecy, dirty little secrets, fetishized in private. Black pin-up girls were not idealized versions of what was thought of as beautiful or attractive. And despite the fact that Josephine Baker, Dorothy Dandrige, Lena Horne, and Eartha Kitt were all categorized as “burlesque” and “pin-ups” of the time, black pin-up models in general weren’t as widely distributed as white women of the same time period. This art is to honor, not overshadow to those black women, disempowered, abused and unrecognized like Sartje Baartman taken from Africa to England and placed in a freak show because of her “disproportionate” body, to those that bore for the love of art and self-expression. To the women in these images, thank you for letting me find you. Thank you for giving me permission to honor you this way.”
Love and Light,
Thee Amazing Gracie
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