“zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal’s work offers an alternative to societally imposed, static notions of gender and race and instead explores the revolutionary praxis of self-fulfillment. to render the infinite (2021), a continued meditation on the concept of radical autonomy, investigates the multimodality of Black womanhood. Conceptualizing the contributions of famed writers such as Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, Lucille Clifton, Dionne Brand, and Ladi’Sasha Jones, dumas o’neal elicits the theory of ‘elsewhere’; “a more expansive state of being, that exist beyond our lived and systemic conditions.” These Black women are both source and subject of the artist’s ongoing quest for self-realization and sovereignty. to the east, so divine, it never entered my mind (2019-23), melds landscape imagery with the legacies of Black, women, intellectuals.

Through these series, dumas-o’neal implores the viewer to abolish archaic tropes and myopic narratives and adopt the multiplicity of Black women.”