Abstract: This article navigates the journeys, voyages, and odysseys of Black women’s creative power, as the Louvre becomes their point of inquiry. The article explores their practices of looking; how they reimagine ways of seeing, and reinvent a world that centers their experiences. The Louvre becomes a metaphor, a space that allows world-making and self-making based on their terms. The Louvre is also a space of resistance and confrontation, as Black women evade the gatekeepers, by dismantling the structures that exclude and efface representations of the Other. The article also examines the ways that Black women reformulate practices of curating inside and outside the museum, creating exhibitions and cultural spaces which are less foreign, more human, and more welcoming. Faith Ringgold, Toni Morrison, Beyoncé, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and, more recently, Alice Diop, have journeyed there in their work, in their imaginary. Other women have excavated the museum from a distance such as Robin Coste Lewis, in her poetry. The article follows their paths, crossings and peregrinations as they interrogate art, language, race, gender, class, the body, belonging, and the foreigner.
Beti Ellerson (Sun,) studied this question.