Artwork Image
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Woman with Tiara
Object Details
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Date
2019
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Object Type
Drawings
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Medium
Conté, charcoal, and gold leaf on coffee stained paper
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Dimensions
Image: 84 x 60 in.
Sheet: 84 x 60 in. -
Credit Line
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchase with funds provided by the Paper Forum
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Accession Number
2021.15
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Copyright
© Robert Pruitt, 2019
Object Description
“Black bodies occupy a contentious space in Western minds, media, and art, and I try to complicate that space,” writes Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt, whose charcoal portraits rework iconography from science fiction, history, and popular culture. Woman with Tiara takes as its subject a craniometer, a 19th-century tool used in the racist pseudoscience of phrenology, which claimed to measure intelligence and personality through cranium shape. Clasped gently around the woman’s head, supported by her own hair rather than the hands of an oppressor, the craniometer becomes a tiara, a symbol of ornamentation, beauty, and power rather than subjugation. Her stature is reinforced by the monumental size of the drawing: Seven feet tall, it rivals full-length portraits of kings and queens, leaving the woman to preside with all the grandeur of royalty.
—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)
Additional details
Location: Off view
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