Noisy Methods: Thinking With and Through the Flesh

What can we say about the sphinxes, sculpted by Black women—Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, and Lauren Halsey— during pivotal moments of their ascendancy to the status of art world celebrity? While it might feel tempting to attribute these coincidences to Egyptomania, given the diverse stylings of these sphinxes, which range from Walker’s invocation of the mammy to Leigh’s ode to the feline to Halsey’s phaoroanic (by way of Los Angeles), Musser sees less of a coherent attachment to ancient Egypt and more of an invitation into other ways of being. More specifically, each of these sphinxes, she argues, immerses visitors in multiple felt dimensions of black life, swerving around the contemporary demands of racialized representation, to explore the impact of racial capitalism and to find ecologies of care and collectivity. This is to say that these sphinxes activate worlds, inviting us to reconsider who or what the sphinx is now.