Performance by
Jessica Ann Peavy & T.I. Williams

Background information
Since colonization, the black female body has been subject to European-inspired scrutiny and critique. In response to the psychological trauma of North American conquest and slavery, African-American culture transformed the hyper-curvaceous (thick) physique, deemed grotesque by European aesthetics, into an object of consummate desire and celebration. Ironically, attempts to save the African-American female form through embracing the thick, has given rise to an African-American diet-influenced lifestyle plagued by morbid obesity, heart disease, cancer, hypertension and other preventable diseases.Fatback doubles as the layer of fat along the back of a pig often used to make lard and the reference to the large bottom of a black woman.

The Fatback Series satirizes the spaces and contexts of food in the African-American tradition and the effects of food on the African-American female psychology and physiology.