Patience, 2022
Loosie in the Park, 2019

Tschabalala Self is an interdisciplinary artist, known for her evocative portrayals of Black female figures. Through a fusion of painting, printmaking, assemblage, and sculpture, Self highlights the tension between foreground and background, distorting traditional expectations of space, shape, and form. This distortion speaks to the nuanced complexity of Black femininity, mimicking stereotypical and exaggerated depictions of a gendered and racialized body.

For the High Line – Moynihan Connector Billboard, Self presents two works: Loosie in the Park (2019) and Patience (2022). Patience, featured on the north side of the billboard, is part of an ongoing body of work that explores the psychological significance of the home, domesticity, and gendered labor. The work depicts a Black female figure sitting at a dining table positioned within a yellow interior. Self’s flattening of space erases the differentiation in form between the woman and her furniture—the two meld together into a sole body, alluding to the phrase “become part of the furniture,” which describes someone who has been somewhere so long, it is hard to imagine the place without them.

Loosie in the Park, on the south side of the billboard, hails from Self’s Bodega Run series. Born and raised in Central Harlem, Self highlights the bodega, Spanish for “shop,” as an emblem of New York, particularly in Black and Latino neighborhoods. The work depicts a Black female figure sitting on a green New York City park bench while smoking a “loosie,” a colloquial term for a single cigarette, occasionally sold (illicitly) at bodegas. Another New York emblem, the pigeon, sits in waiting by her feet. Loosie in the Park depicts the Black female figure in a moment of leisure and independence, while paying homage to bodegas as pillars of the community, often both owned by and serving people of color.

Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.