Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

In Hinkle's drawing series, Tituba, she was inspired by Maryse Condé’s novel "I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem" and relating to Tituba's experiences of being accused as a witch while recalling her own experiences of ostracization as a pregnant black woman.[15] Her goal is to merge the experiences of inhabiting a black, pregnant body and the thought of the otherness that Condé depicted by expanding on the background of Tituba's life.

"It is this body that people don't know what to do with and so some of that discomfort [is] important to keep in there."[25]

In Hinkle's The Kentrifrica Project, her goal is to create a collaborative space to examine Diaspora and cultural visibility. She invites communities to aid her in "reconstructing" the Kentrifican identity. The project is centered on the fictional, utopian continent of Kintifrica, described by Hinkle as "a contested geography/continent located between South America and Africa."[26] The project is highly collaborative, developed through Hinkle's leading workshops and discussions that further expand its concept. Drawing on the collective histories of the artist, her collaborators, and participants, the work includes objects of Kentrifican culture, such as recipes, instruments, clothing, hairpieces, and maps.[27] Cultural concepts that Hinkle has emphasized within Kentrifica include the absence of property ownership, gender equality, and a collectivist culture.[26]

"Through the embodiment of various voices and modes of address, Hinkle examines what happens to bodies in transit and how they are contextualized culturally depending upon historical hegemonic signifiers of race and culture."[15]

In Hinkle's work The Evanesced, she creates amorphous representations of bodies, some feature dashes of color to accent certain parts of them.[13] Hinkle offers a social commentary on missing Black women in American and the African Diaspora. She tries to give them voices through her work. She uses minimalist imagery yet is provocative, which further represents the meaning of the series. "The women [...] are surrounded by brushstrokes and lines that seem to slide them onto the canvas, like ghosts that happened to materialize within her paintings".[20] She has an ability to use certain dualities in order to get the most out of her audience. Here she is very confrontational with the issues of sex trafficking, kidnappings, murder and other reasons for these disappearances, but at the same time she is creating sympathy and a call to action for these women.[13] This call to action connects Hinkle's work to social justice movements by tying in The Evanesced to the #SayHerName Movement.

The series also includes a performance entitled The Evanesced: Embodied Disappearance. The performance draws on similar themes, and has a similar impact:"The Evanesced: Embodied Disappearance centers the death and ever-present afterlife of Black women to hold space for pain, remembrance, and healing".[20] The performance piece, featuring Hinkle and her son, includes "a soundtrack of whispers, shuffles, and popular and underground music".[15] The performance piece adds to the visual series a multi-dimensional examination of erasure and violence within the Black female experience.[15]

In Hinkle's series The Uninvited, she attempts to reclaim the subject's humanity and fights against objectification. Using the ephemeral, mass-produced medium of postcards, "Hinkle creates disruptive counternarratives by drawing and painting on top of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century postcards of West African women taken mainly by French colonists. These ethnographic photos sought to brand Black women's bodies as dehumanized figments of hypersexualization and conquest, triggering both repulsion and desire".[21] These postcards were once used as a tool of French colonists to further the objectification of the women shown and thereby strengthen the power of the viewer, implied to be white and European. Hinkle challenges this power dynamic by covering up the women and giving them the power to dictate what is shown.[28] She therefore exposes the harsh subjugation of women by men. At the same time, she obscures the women's bare bodies from the viewers. Hinkle "reconstructs and reimagines the women [from the postcards] through vivid drawings and unique placements on the canvas - in a sense restoring their loss of power".[19] The role and obligation of the viewer is put into question here. It is said that photography is inherently violent, and yet many people indulge in this medium. Hinkle is also calling for people to face the horrific consequences of subjecting someone. There is a discomfort in the women's faces, but they are being seen as objects, and objects don't have voices. Hinkle is trying to get her audience to see the wrong that is being committed.[29] Others have seen the drawn on lines as a representation of disease, meant to be a metaphor for colonialism.[12]

Similarly to The Evanesced, The Uninvited dwells in history but connects to the present, furthering the notion of a "Historical Present" which is so central to Hinkle's work. In this series, she has connected the way West African women were treated in the French colonies with how Black women are treated in America today. Explaining the effect she hoped to create with the series, Hinkle stated in an interview: "Working with these women and having them transform me and me transform them, the whole body of work has literally been healing. I do a lot of my work [with] that idea of turning trauma into art".[19] In all of her work, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle uses the "Historical Present" to turn past trauma into current healing through art.