Janyce Denise Glasper will draw on Alice Walker’s concept of womanism, a term Walker coined in 1982 in a series of articles about Black feminists and feminists of color. Walker has used the term to refer to “outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior.” Glasper will consider the work of painters Somaya Critchlow, Danielle McKinney, Kudzanai Violet-Hwani, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and specifically their use of figuration and abstraction to reconceptualize Black women’s experience as an amalgam of art history semantics, pop culture, Black identity, and shared ancestries.
Janyce Denise Glasper is an artist, writer, and independent scholar whose work primarily focuses on marginalized, underrepresented communities. Her writing has appeared in publications including Lucy Writers Platform, The Black Youth Project, Decorating Dissidence, midnight & indigo, and RaceBaitr. She has spoken on panels at SXSW Festival, Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (PASC), and Black Portraiture[s]. Currently she is a contributing arts writer for the Philadelphia-based criticism platform Artblog and runs the personal blogs femfilmrogue and Black Women Make Art (BWMA). Glasper holds a BFA in drawing from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and a post-baccalaureate and MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has exhibited her art in several US cities.