Doreen Lynette Garner

Medically sanctioned racial violence is not a distant history. It is an active influence on contemporary medical practice — one that Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986, Philadelphia) is invested in exposing. Garner's sculptures and performances engage the history of medical experimentation on Black women's bodies in the U.S., portraying their brutal humiliation and objectification, while clearly identifying the white perpetrators who enacted this suffering. Informed by deep research, her experimental and accumulative approach combines a wide range of materials — silicon, glass-fiber insulation, plastic, Vaseline, artificial hair, crystals, pearls — in anthropomorphic forms resembling fragmented or amputated body parts and human remains.