Very Red Buds 2017

Monica Ikegwu painted “Very Red Buds” with oils in the twenty-first century. It presents us with two young Black women in matching red T-shirts, set against a patterned backdrop. The backdrop is significant. The shapes evoke both seeds and, more explicitly, vulvas. What does this foregrounding of female sexuality mean? In recent years, Black women artists in the West have sought to reclaim agency over their own image, to push back against centuries of exploitation and misrepresentation, and to challenge both the art establishment and society at large. This is achieved through a self-conscious artistic progressivism. To understand this artwork better, we need to know about the artist’s intentions. What does this combination of images, colors, and figures mean to her? A historian would want to know what the artist herself says about the painting. What has she said about it in interviews or on social media? And how does it relate to other artworks and movements of our time? By researching this, we can gain more insight into the image’s cultural context.