From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom

Abstract

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works.

Repository attribution: Ada C. M. Thomas. From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom. Religions, 14(10), issue year 2023; article page publication date 2023-10-12. Original: source article. DOI: 10.3390/rel14101285. Original PDF reproduced without changes under CC BY 4.0. No endorsement is implied. Copyright 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/