Kensise Anders

Kensise Anders prods us with her crochet needle to confront the reality of Black people's lives. Born in Haiti, she was adopted by a pastor and his family from northern Germany when she was two and "raised" by force. She escaped their violence and abuse for a psychiatric hospital, then a boarding school, and eventually found art. Since then, she has used crocheting to work through the oppression and discipline she suffered. She creates masks with which she ironically appropriates white identities and play carpets that show the world of her childhood-apartment blocks, streets; the "hole," as she calls this environment. She also arranges crocheted threads on the canvas as though they were brushstrokes. One series of pictures is dedicated to a Black doll; another, to naked female bodies, including the artist's own, with references to Courbet's L'Origine du monde (1866). The works are acts of resistance to the prudishness of whites. Black dolls became popular in this country during the colonial era and never quite went away, like the racism in our society and in our heads. Anders's weapon against that racism is the crochet needle, which she wields patiently and with flair as well as the necessary radicalism.