BLACK CAMERA - Black Women at the Louvre, Practices of Worldmaking, and the Rehabilitation of Disfigured Images: Reflections on Alice Diop's Fragments for Venus by Beti Ellerson (Spring 2026)

 

Black Camera: An International Film Journal Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring 2026)

 

Black Women at the Louvre, Practices of Worldmaking, and the Rehabilitation of Disfigured Images: Reflections on Alice Diop's Fragments for Venus

by Beti Ellerson

 

https://doi.org/10.2979/blc.00109

 

Abstract

This article navigates the journeys, voyages, 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, 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 crash the gatekeepers, by dismantling the structures that exclude and efface representations of the Other. The article examines as well, the ways that Black women reformulate practices of curating inside and outside the museum, creating exhibitions, cultural spaces, less foreign, more human, 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 without, 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, the foreigner.

Introduction
African American Women and the Louvre: A Site of Inquiry
- Faith Ringgold: Dancing at the Louvre
- Toni Morrison: Foreigner’s Home
- Beyoncé: I Can’t Believe We Made It
- Barbara Chase-Riboud: When a Knot Is Untied, a God Is Set Free
Louvre Grounds: An Enduring Space for Black Women’s Self-Making
In Search of Black Venuses
Alice Diop’s Journey