“Hard Edged” featured an early work by Bey that she produced when she was still a graduate student at Cal State Northridge, where she received her master’s in fine arts in 2014. The piece, “Picky Head,” consisted of a wall covered in images of Black men and women wearing their hair in natural styles. Over this wallpaper, Bey used gallons of relaxer to spell out the words “PICKY HEAD” — Caribbean slang for someone with unkempt hair — in large white capital letters. The project was part of a series Bey did as a graduate student exploring the politics and aesthetics of Black hair and the natural hair movement at a time in which she herself was ditching the relaxers and growing out her natural hair.
--The Los Angeles Times
Clip Category
Alumni