Pharrell Williams’s third curatorial outing at Perrotin stages a celebration, commemoration and exploration of Afro-descendent women
The most peculiar thing about FEMMES (Women), Pharrell Williams’s third curatorial outing at Perrotin, are the two works showing only men made by men. Henry Taylor’s painting of his brother Randy and friends in boy-band formation, I got soul and I’ll soon be out of sight (2024), and Cinga Samson’s nefarious nighttime ceremony of men, Andibonanganto (2025), are marvellous pictures (especially Samson’s precisely painted spectral mystery), but what is their place in this celebration, commemoration and exploration of Afro-descendent women? Why is Jay-Z’s Girls, Girls, Girls (2001) – lyrics: “I love girls, girls, girls, girls… You better R-E-S-P-E-C-T me” – on the exhibition’s Spotify playlist?
Putting aside these incongruities, what Taylor’s buoyant I got soul… gets is the sprawling exhibition’s subtheme of joy. It’s an old-fashioned word that has spiked of late (the Palais de Tokyo just closed a show called Collective Joy, for instance). FEMMES reminds us that long before this upwelling of spiritual, defiant, desperate exuberance in our embattled present, there has always been ‘Black joy’, a take-no-shit majesty that crackles through the exhibition.
A pair of abstracts, Theresa Chromati’s Growth Cycle and Flesh Sprout – All that I Become is all that I Am (woman budding scrotum flowers) (both 2025), and Mequitta Ahuja’s more figurative Strum (2024), Nina Chanel Abney’s pop maternity painting Marabou (2024), Thandiwe Muriu’s jet-ink print A Constellation of Power (2023) and Lauren Kelley’s seductive video True Falsetto (2011): these works jump with energy and rhythm, colour and comedy. So does Robert Pruitt’s hilarious Figure Crowned in T.S.U. Ceramic Headdress (After Roy Vinson Thomas) (2024). There’s a Wile E. Coyote violence to the triple heads with glimpses of galaxies within, as if the lady’s noggin had been blown off with a shotgun and then erupted back into a Martian Cerberus. The Afrofuturist branch of Black joy is represented in Eden Tinto Collins’s I Will Twerk on Your Graves (2024), which vibes with intergalactic sauciness and ‘we will prevail’ optimism. In Mickalene Thomas’s December 1976 (2024), the joy to behold is, reliably, Beyoncé. One of Thomas’s two mixed-media collages in pinup mode (the other is December 1971, 2024), the superstar is pieced together in paint and shards of blown-up magazine print. Some jags are outlined in paillettes, the glitter a call and response between Thomas’s two calendar girls and Chromati’s sequin-ejaculating scrotum flowers in the front room.
Sometimes the joy is cooler, testier. Earned in the teeth of society, its underlay is struggle. Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s thickly textured female nude is one who suffers no fools. She levels a double-barrelled gaze from the couch in Sunflower (2022). And if there is joy in homecoming in Finally, I’m Home (2025), painter Emma Prempeh’s mother isn’t letting on. Her untucked shirt and cheekbones are painted in hurricane strokes, slashing diagonally like the storm-whipped palm trees in the background. The turbulence in the painting is more than meteorological, but the mother’s face is impassive. FEMMES has its share of venerable heavy-hitters: Carrie Mae Weems’s Black icons in soft focus, Esther Mahlangu’s Ndebele house painting reprised on artist’s canvas, Glenn Ligon’s teachable civil rights colouring-book paintings. While Boys with Basketball, Harriet Tubman, Salimu, Letter B #5 (2001), which Williams selected for the show, is distinct from Ligon’s more text-heavy works, he included another artist who explicitly ‘writes’ her portraits: Kenturah Davis’s Planar vessel XXII (rhea) (2023) is a fugitive ink pictogram, a visual Doppler effect of a woman rubbing the back of her head. Doubly encoded with carbon-pencil-rubbing hieroglyphs and in Japanese paper and cotton weave, the picture telegraphs a code but does not give us the key – there is no Ligon-style lesson here. Of the show’s 54 works, the only one that squarely articulates joy is Joana Choumali’s I AM JOY (2024). But does it? Wreathing trauma with sisterhood, Choumali stitches sunrays that shoot out from the head of the central figure, a dancing Shiva. The radiance obliterates a face oblivious to the unfolding tragedy: the line between struggle and joy is a fine one.
FEMMES at Perrotin, Paris, through 19 April 2026
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
