Zaire Love’s “Ghetto Girls Deserve Good Things” is a vibe. On display at Christian Brothers University’s Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery, the exhibition takes the typically quiet and “look-don’t-breathe” feel of white-walled galleries and makes the space at CBU a place you won’t want to leave. Love’s catchy “She So Ghetto” plays on a loop, the walls are pink and purple, and multi-colored wigs hang from the ceiling. Like I said, it’s a vibe.
“‘Ghetto Girls Deserve Good Things’ is an ode to Black women who have created the colorful, creative, and carefree style that has influenced the trends of popular culture without the proper credit,” Love says in an email interview. “It is also an extension of my narrative short film, ‘ETTO.’ [Indie Memphis award-winning] ‘ETTO’ is about an unapologetically ghetto Black woman who has to choose between her ghetto peace and her proper paycheck.”
As loaded as the word can be, “ghetto,” to Love, is about creativity. “Some folks make it synonymous to ratchet,” she says. “However, … these styles and folk inventions society calls ghetto are actually very creative, innovative, and resourceful. There’s a special alchemy about it. I wanted to highlight the ghetto girl and her story because the narrative has been distasteful, [but] these women birth the taste of popular culture with their eyes closed.”
This exhibition, Love says, “exists to ensure ghetto girls have a chance to pull their seats up to the table and tell their stories.” It’s part of a movement that began with her short film, and it’s a movement about “embracing your uniqueness and loving yourself in the face of a world that continuously wants to humble you.” A gallery, in a sense, is one way for these girls and women to take up literal space and be seen and heard — a thought that is not lost on Love, especially with this being her first visual arts show.
“Radical representation,” Love says, “is necessary for activism and radical imagination to result in liberation, so we can all have a seat at the proverbial table. Amen.”
Within the show, viewers will be treated to stunning photography of “ghetto girls from Memphis and the U.S. [whose], I think, influence ain’t credited enough.” Love also experimented with sculptural elements for the exhibit, bedazzling Styrofoam cups of pink ramen, pressing nails onto a sculpted hand, draping wigs across the wall and from the ceiling, and building pedestals for painted mannequin heads adorned with wigs, beads, jewelry, and lashes. “Hairstyles in the culture are the main calling card,” Love says on the plethora of wigs. “So, for the hairstyles I created I wanted to put them on pedestals to show they are indeed art.”
Love will give an artist talk on Wednesday, December 13th, at noon. The exhibition closes on Friday, December 15th.
“Ghetto Girls Deserve Good Things,” Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery, Christian Brothers University, 650 E. Parkway S., On display through Friday, December 15th.