Ja’Tovia Gary’s Superlative Surrealism

Abstract: Throughout her œuvre, multidisciplinary artist Ja’Tovia Gary uses artifices unique to surrealism to foreground the aesthetic and political value of Black womanhood against the backdrop of ongoing racial and gender violence in the United States. This essay examines the ways in which her automatic writing, deployments of collage strategies, and of doubling and camouflage also place Black female embodiment at the center of surrealist practice, bridging the early history of the avant-garde with the present and future of racialized, gendered experience in the Black Atlantic world. The camouflage and veiling, the unstable images and figures, and the repeated visual and sound motifs that disappear and reappear in her latest short film Quiet as It’s Kept all coalesce into a picture of superlative surrealism that refuses resolution. In its focus on the “irredeemable Black woman,” her latest film articulates a Black radical feminist tradition that, from Suzanne Césaire to Toni Morrison to social media influencers and everyday Black women on the streets of Harlem, reveals a queer negative thread that defies the norms of Black representation. Ultimately, this essay argues, Gary’s work excavates a distinctively Black presence in surrealist art practice and aesthetic philosophy whose generative capacity exceeds canonical revision.