Tsedaye Makonnen’s Art Addresses Reproductive Healthcare Inequalities Affecting Black Women

“We understand what it means to enact collective care for each other,” the artist Tsedaye Makonnen told me this past Wednesday afternoon via Zoom while taking her five-month-old out for a stroll. “When we benefit and are taken care of, everyone benefits,” she added, referring to Black women’s historical cultural practice of supporting one another across reproductive healthcare. “I don’t know any other group that knows how to do that.”

Based in Washington, D.C., Makonnen works with performance and sculpture to honor Black women’s legacies across the diaspora. She specifically foregrounds the inequitable access to safe abortion and childbirth services available to Black women in the United States. That inequality will be further exacerbated if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer.

Makonnen’s artistic practice is shaped by her experience as an Ethiopian American, a doula, and a mother. Her multidisciplinary work provides alternative—outside of what Makonnen describes as “the medical industrial complex”—resources for Black women to take care of themselves and support one another in accessing reproductive care. This includes going to the clinic with one another and offering tips and remedies for abortion and childbirth aftercare.

Makonnen conveys this work and wisdom in her textile pieces and light sculptures, as well as through performance collaborations with other Black women artists, like Alisha B. Wormsley, Ayana Evans, and Dominique Duroseau. Makonnen has performed rituals of remembrance for fallen Black women with Duroseau and Evans; and recently curated with Wormsley “Black Woman as/and the Living Archive” (2020), a series of performances and talks that foregrounded Black women’s reproductive healthcare needs, for Washington Project for the Arts. Makonnen’s body of work prioritizes the communal care of Black women in environments where their needs are ignored and routinely erased.

Black women disproportionately account for the majority of childbirth-related deaths, according to a recent study by the Washington, D.C.–based Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC). The MMRC’s chairwoman Aza Nedhari trained Makonnen as a doula.

“I feel like there is no separation in my practice between my work as a doula and an artist,” Makonnen said. “I feel that the training that I received as a doula, supporting Black families and supporting Black moms in very hostile hospital environments and clinics, is always in the back of my head when I’m in the studio.”

Her body of work “The Crowning Series” (2017–present) involves performance, sculpture, and photography revolving around a gilded cast of pelvic bones that Makonnen wears as a crown. By wearing the pelvis as a crown, she elevates, in her words, the “womb as wound.”

That phrase refers to the large number of comorbidities affecting the womb that Black women experience, from fibroids to cervical cancer. “My use of pelvic bones is not just about birth,” Makonnen said, “it is about reproductive health, which includes abortion. Why is it that Black women have the most womb issues of all people? What the fuck is that about?”

Makonnen is obsessed with pelvic bones because of how they are abused in the West through work—resulting in back issues that arise from either physical labor in service industries, or from sitting in a chair for extended periods of time. In foregrounding the pelvic area in her work, Makonnen reminds audiences to consider the daily strain we cast upon ourselves through our jobs.

In the performances of “The Crowning Series,” Makonnen highlights how Black women are routintely denied post-case follow-up for both abortions and chidbirth. In this aspect of the series, Makonnen draws inspiration from the historical spiritual practices enacted by Black women to perform rituals of healing for others. “We have historically had to be our own doctors because we are not being taken care of in these environments,” she said.

Even in her more abstract work, like the “Astral Sea” series (2019–present) and her recent light sculptures, Black women’s generational labor remains the driving source of her inspiration. For example, the light sculpture Senait & Nahom | ሰናይት :: እና :: ናሆም | The Peacemaker & The Comforter (2019) features 50 light boxes encased in mirrored, polished stainless steel. Carved into the steel are Ethiopian coptic crosses that distill the light from the boxes within.

The 50 boxes, which are stacked to make seven towers, are each named after 50 individual Black women who died by police brutality in the United States or while crossing the Mediterranean Sea as refugees from Libya in 2019, referencing the ship that capsized that year and claimed the lives of 1,000 Libyans. The work was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art earlier this year, and a new iteration of it will debut in Providence, Rhode Island, after it was chosen as the 2021 Landmark Public Art Commission by the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.

Elsewhere, Makonnen has incorporated her firsthand responses to the trauma she witnessed as a doula into her performance practice. “There was this one traumatic birth where I almost watched one of my moms die,” she recalled. “It could have been prevented and I tried during the two days when she was in the hospital to prevent what they were doing. They railroaded her into so many unnecessary interventions where she ended up in the ICU.”