Living the Funk: Lifestyle, Lyricism, and Lessons in Modern and Contemporary Art of Black Women

Abstract

The proceedings of the conference, “Funkativity in Black Culture” affirmed the concept of “funk” as a performative category of artistic, cultural, and political expression.¹ If “funk” can be construed as an unapologetic, relentless, and deliberate pursuit of rebellious individual expression—one that manages to liberate the artist from the restrictive conventions of popular art—such a concept might provide an appropriate framework for considering the work of postmodern and contemporary black women artists. The rejection of conventional practices and expectations associated with popular approaches to creativity in the form of black-identified expression is further complicated by increasingly sophisticated technology. One could argue that visual culture realized through electronic media continues to have the most immediate impact on the ways in which contemporary audiences interact with and consume images of black life. Music videos and the Internet have become visual, dialectic mediums not only meant to complement and assist in the marketing of an artist’s material, but also to provide another context for the explication of racial, sexual, and gendered boundaries of expression. Ultimately, consumers are informed by and indeed buy into images that commercialize black life.