Blackness Thirteen Ways

Art, Life, & the Revisions of a Mulatta Lesbian

De: J. Vanessa Lyon

The art historian and romance novelist close-reads images, moving and still, canonical and lesser-known, that have influenced her evolving identity as an American “mulatta” lesbian now entering middle age in this innovative hybrid of life-writing and cultural studies.

The daughter of the WASP mother who raised her and a Black father she never knew, Lyon delivers a candid memoir across thirteen uniquely structured chapters in conversation with enduring, often damaging, “mis/representations” of so-called “racial mixing” in fine art and popular media. Reflecting on a lifetime of being dis-read, she examines insidious cultural tropes of “white passing” beginning with art dating from the transatlantic slave trade—from Rembrandt and Rubens, Gentileschi and Stubbs to Manet—before moving on to Br’er Rabbit, Louise Nevelson, fifties melodrama, and Adrian Piper. Original analysis of a broad chronological range of visual art parallels the unfolding of Lyon’s sense of self animated by the interiors and geographies—not to mention powerful and challenging women—that have shaped her life. In the course of her explorations, she comes to terms with long withheld information about her heritage, and with the seemingly unchangeable reality of being an out lesbian who, legally considered Black, is rarely seen by whites or other African Americans as she experiences her own raced and gendered identity.

By turns scholarly and intimate, Blackness Thirteen Ways reveals surprising connections between the art Lyon teaches and the woman she has become, challenging history to accommodate a newly unapologetic image of herself and other “impassably” Black women.