Beauty Is Not a Luxury

Aliyah Bonnette

About the Exhibition

Beauty Is Not a Luxury takes its title from Saidiya Hartman, whose writing reflects on the lives of Black women in the early twentieth century, for whom beauty was not excess, but a necessary practice of survival, self-making, and possibility.

This exhibition extends that understanding into the present, exploring beauty as a form of care, resistance, and interior life. Drawing on themes of African diasporic spirituality, sensuality, water, and divine rest, the works position softness and rest as powerful, intentional acts. Domestic space becomes sacred space—holding intimacy, ancestral presence, and the often unseen spiritual labor that shapes Black women’s lives.

Together, these works reflect the depth and complexity of Black womanhood, where beauty is not ornamental, but essential to memory, identity, and becoming.

“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure…”
— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments