"Of Black Wombhood"
Da Vinci Art Alliance
704 Catharine St.
Philadelphia
Showing June 5 – 22, 2025
Seen June 19
Portraits of "Marla," "Hattie" and "Rennia," respectively, made by Kara Mshinda.
In Da Vinci Art Alliance’s current art exhibit “Of Black Wombhood,” mixed-media portraits are suspended around the room, while a third wall showcases behind-the-scenes screen grabs of the collecting, cutting, gluing, and photoshopping that went into making each piece.
The project, curated by Tanya Latortue, features a collection of interviews with “Black, womb-bearing people” conducted by visual artist Kara Mshinda, who visually rendered ten narratives about culture, health, sexuality, identity and the politicization of Black bodies into expansive photographic studies of her subjects. The works are surrounded by shrines of local herbs and perfumed by a soft soundscape composed by JL Simonson, creating a cushioned belly in which visitors are invited to reflect on both the hard and sweet stuff of being both Black and a woman.
While reproductive biology is the show’s springboard, the conversations and portraits are all shoulders-up and person-forward. Mshinda uses flowers, regal gift wrapping, quotes and old photos to decorate her head-on photographs of each subject. Every piece is accompanied by the muse’s first name alongside their one-word and paragraph-length responses to the question: “Black Wombhood is…?”
“A sanctum,” says Vashti.
“Unbridled joy,” says Marta.
“Reclamation,” says Rennia.
“Liberation” and “Empowerment,” say Hattie and Mahalia.
Their longer responses touch on the hardships underlying these positive outlooks. Hattie, for example, recalls using what money she had in her youth to “run away” from North Carolina to Philadelphia after getting abandoned by a man who got her pregnant out of wedlock.
“I don’t regret nothing that I ever done,” she reflects. “Because I did it my way. I have loved every minute of my life since I’ve gotten grown.”
Members of younger generations spoke about divorcing maternity from femininity. Others named the fear, anxiety, ambivalence, and disinterest that can come with debating whether to have children. One woman calls her womb “the only place that really does belong to me.”
The collages are layered illustrations of each subject’s life, conveying the outstretched generosity of the group who agreed to be interviewed. Their collective positivity — displayed through their priceless sense of hope for themselves, for the audience, for some kind of future — is an implicit theme of the exhibit.
The showstopper is the literal fourth wall that Mshinda breaks by including photos of her creative process. She puts on view all the artistic options she tried out in attempts to convey each person’s personality and opinion: the colors, shapes, photographic superimpositions, slices of material and illustrations she adopted and ditched before calling her work complete.
The result is a mural of incomplete collage pieces representing how life is a work in progress — and that the labor that goes into determining one’s own fate, let alone future generations’, should be shared.
