Body for a Black Moon
© Angela Hennessey

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Body for a Black Moon

2019

Angela Hennessy

Not on view

Based in Oakland, Angela Hennessy is an artist and an associate professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches courses on contemporary art and the visual and cultural narratives of death. Her practice explores the fundamental human experiences of life, death, love, and belonging through the lens of Blackness—as a personal reality, an ancestral legacy, and a construct shaped by history. Through writing, studio work, and performance, Hennessy examines mythologies of Blackness embedded in metaphors of color and cloth.

Using abstraction as a space for exploring Black and queer identities, Hennessy’s sculptures invoke a sense of rest, contemplation, and respite. By incorporating real and synthetic hair, she disrupts Eurocentric frameworks of contemporary aesthetics and abstraction, instead centering Black women’s self-care practices, conveying themes of joy, survival, resistance, and commemoration.
Body for a Black Moon consists of three tiers of layered, unevenly cut, straight synthetic hair, resembling a skirt topped by a sphere wrapped in coiled, chignon-like braids. The work embodies the celestial phenomenon that shares its name—an event linked to the occurrence of a second new moon in a single month, although the term defies strict scientific classification. With this piece, Hennessy invites viewers to reconsider our relationship with life and death, the cosmic and the ordinary, and everything that exists in the liminal space between them.

Artist
Angela Hennessy
Title
Body for a Black Moon
Date
2019
Place of Creation
Oakland
Object Type
Sculpture
Medium
Synthetic and human hair, artist's hair, hair foundations, foam, wood spools, felted wood ball, athletic tape, twist ties, wire, gold leaf, and plumbing parts
Dimensions
78 x 24 x 24 in. (198.12 x 60.96 x 60.96 cm)
Credit Line
Museum purchase, a gift of The Svane family Foundation
Accession Number
2022.26.25

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