#JAY Z BEYONCE VIDEO LOUVRE SERIES#

Harper is picking out Stewart’s hair, an intimate scene that Drew believes references photographer Deana Lawson and Carrie Mae Weems. One of the closing scenes in the “Apesh-t” music video doubles as the Everything is Love album cover the scene shows two of the ensemble dancers, Jasmine Harper and Nicholas “Slick” Stewart in front of the Mona Lisa.

Beyoncé and these other artists aren’t assimilating, but instead, staging this embodied intervention that disrupts more than it conforms to the logistics of Western art and Western museums.” The Album Cover YouTube I think what really stuck with me was the juxtaposition of subject portraits of white womanhood…the Mona Lisa with the Negress painting and then we have Beyoncé intervening in this narrative and also being so unapologetically black about it too. She continued: “Black women and black women artists are excluded from the history of Western art, but their bodies, particularly sexualized or desexualized in domestic labor or sexual labor, are there. The Louvre now offers a tour about Beyonc, Jay-Z, and the Apeshit video. It’s meant to symbolize what it means for a black person to not see their culture reflected in the history of Western art, but still seeing their bodies in it, which makes me think of the Negress portrait, where her breast is exposed and she’s hyper-sexualized,” Thomas says. Beyoncé and Jay-Z in 'Apeshit&39 Beyonc/YouTube.

#JAY Z BEYONCE VIDEO LOUVRE SERIES#

“Carrie Mae Weems has a series called Museums 2006, where she’s standing in front of Western museums and she has one where she’s standing outside of the Louvre. Beyoncé’s nude bodysuit and her pose in the “S curve” of the statue draw an obvious parallel to the statue, but Thomas said it wasn’t a surprise since Bey’s birth announcement drew many an Aphrodite comparison.

The Venus de Milo, an ancient Greek statue of the goddess Aphrodite, has long been held up as a standard of awe-inducing beauty. Beyoncé is a part of a tradition of not only black artists and performers, but activists too who find power in imagery like that because it connects them to an African past where there is a narrative of innovation and power.” Venus de Milo YouTube Museums are very deliberate about not considering Ancient Egypt within the history of African and black art instead, it’s often put together with ancient Greece and Rome, even though ancient Egypt is part of Africa. “I think one way that black artists and performers try to re-narrativize that is with imagery that we associate with ancient Egypt.

“Part of the way the museum represents white supremacy in Western art and Western dominance is through a tracing of the past that sees ancient Greece and ancient Rome as the birthplace of civilization and democracy,” Thomas said.

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