Tschabalala Self (born 1990) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the construction and perception of Black identity through a dynamic synthesis of painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Drawing on a visual language shaped by art history, popular culture, and personal memory, Self builds her figures from layered materials such as paint, printed imagery, sewn fabric, and found textiles, resulting in bodies that are at once fragmented and emphatically whole. Her practice centers on the tension between stereotype and self-definition, reclaiming and reconfiguring the visual codes through which Black women’s bodies have been historically represented.

The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise. I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.
- Tschabalala Self

Self’s engagement with printmaking, including her collaborations with Two Palms, has expanded her vocabulary into cast paper and sculptural forms. In projects such as Bodega Run, she translates iconography of everyday life in New York City into tactile, materially rich objects, collapsing distinctions between image and object, representation and embodiment.

Self’s work has been shown at the ICA Boston, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Kunsthalle Duesseldorf, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Philadelphia Museum of Art, New Museum in New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She received her MFA from Yale with a focus on Painting and Printmaking and was selected for the Studio Museum AIR Program in 2019.