California-based artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s multimedia practice explores what she describes as the “historical present”: the residue of history and its effects upon our contemporary world perspectives. She focuses primarily on the black female body and how it has been perceived and distorted within visual cultures of the past and present.

For the California African American Museum, Hinkle produced a new body of work called The Evanesced that brings attention to a painful subject: missing black women in America and the African diaspora, historically to the present day. To “evanesce” literally means to disappear gradually, vanish, or fade away—an apt description for how Hinkle feels society so often renders black women invisible. Hinkle’s abstract “un-portraits” of elusive figures—the artist draws them with handmade brushes while improvising dances to blues, hip-hop, and Baltimore Club music—pivot between real and imagined narratives representing thousands of black women who have disappeared due to colonialism, human trafficking, homicides, and other forms of erasure.

Hinkle was particularly moved by the case of convicted serial killer Lonnie D. Franklin Jr., a former sanitation department mechanic, dubbed the “Grim Sleeper,” who was convicted of murdering nine black adult women and a teenager over the course of two decades in South Central Los Angeles. After slaughtering several women in the 1980s, Franklin seemed to take an extended break, only to revive his killing spree in 2007. While investigators now suspect that further victims exist (they found more than one hundred pictures of unidentified women in his home), one reason he was able to terrorize Los Angeles for so long was that he targeted vulnerable black women in particular.

For Hinkle, this horrifying case is compounded by the mainstream media’s reporting of a seemingly endless stream of stories about African American men being killed by police; one could be forgiven for thinking that black women are not victimized to the same degree. Yet such a contention would be tragically misguided and would be complicit in black women’s public invisibility. Though Sandra Bland’s arrest and subsequent suicide made national headlines—as did the shooting of nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride when she sought help at a white family’s door after crashing her car—few Americans have heard about the many other black women who have been killed in recent years, including Yvette Smith, Malissa Williams, and Rekia Boyd.

On April 27, 2017, Hinkle will perform The Evanesced: Embodied Disappearance in the gallery, during which she will evoke various female characters navigating historical and contemporary contexts. The work includes a soundtrack of whispers, shuffles, and snippets of popular and underground music, and it adds another dimension to Hinkle’s emotional examination of a fraught part of the black female experience. The Evanesced is an expression of the #SayHerName movement of mourning, awareness, and healing.

This exhibition was curated by Naima J. Keith, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Programs.