S[h]e

The classic works of black male twentieth-century artists such as Romare Bearden, Archibald Motley, Jr., Eldzier Cortor, William H. Johnson and James Van Der Zee support this observation. Granted, the art of these men was among the first to consistently exalt the black female body as an object of beauty and loveliness at a time when society considered it to be neither. By contrast, women artists do not generally view, or portray themselves as objectified recipients of male attention or victims of male aggression. A student of Lois Jones's who studied with her at Howard University in the 1930s, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) dedicated a lifetime to portrayals of the black woman. Active representations of the nude were usually reserved for male figures. Mistaken beliefs that African women were sexually promiscuous and, like animals, fit only for breeding, formed the foundation of the Jezebel myth. Mequitta Ahuja has devoted much of her art to multimedia self-portraits which she describes as ‘auto-mythic’.