Suntrust

Shani Crowe is an interdisciplinary artist who received her BFA in film production from Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications in 2011. Her work centers on cultural coiffure, adornment and beauty ritual, as they relate to the diasporic African, and how these practices function as tools to foster connectivity. She is most known for creating intricate corn-rowed hairstyles, then capturing them as large photographic portraits. Suntrust is a print from Shani Crowe’s BRAIDS series (2016), in which she photographed Black women with braided hair sculpturally shaped in the form of culturally significant symbols. The braids of the model in Suntrust evoke the headdress of the Egyptian goddess Hathor (cow horns and a sun disk), reflecting the popular African diasporic identification of ancient Egypt with Black empowerment and aesthetics.