On a warm fall evening on October 7, 2021, Charica Daugherty’s solo exhibition, “Beloved,” opened at the Black Wall Street Gallery in SoHo New York. Joined by family, friends and colleagues, Daugherty gleefully introduced herself and her thirteen oil paintings to guests. The works consist of nude and semi-nude female figures against majestic landscapes, enclosed gardens, and other fantastical settings. They are also unabashed celebrations of women. The core message of the paintings closely aligns with Daugherty herself as an unapologetically modern woman, who is open, nurturing, and courageous.

The closed-lipped beauty with vibrant black hair in Beloved XIV (2021) defiantly looks directly at her audience. Her gaze recalls one of art history’s most famous modern era semi-nudes, Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). With her telltale heels hanging off her toes, Olympia was a known lady of the night who also looked out at her viewers while chastely covering her lap with her hand. Manet held up a light to the male gaze and critiqued the exploitation of the female form for male pleasure under the guise of personification. He rejects the reclining nude as allegory and contemporarized the genre in the 19th century. Daugherty similarly reproaches her public for assuming flagrancy or immoral conduct by the women in her work because of their nude form.

Women are often sexualized in art. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, feminist art historical scholarship has revealed the pervasive misogyny and the inherent imbalance of sex and race within the Western art history. There is not only a shortage of women artists and artists of color, but also often skewed and stereotyped representations of women and people of color. Daugherty injects herself as a biracial painter and many bold women of color in daring nudes into the contemporary art exchange. Through her female gaze, Daugherty desexualizes and recenters powerful bodies in her work.

Born in 1985 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Daugherty draws from the rich African American history there, from photographs to the available historical records. Along with her BA in History and MS in Education from Oklahoma State University, the artist also studied under contemporary impressionist Margaret Aycock between 2003 and 2007. Developing her own expressionistic style since, Daugherty is focused on invoking beauty and emotion through her visual language.

Growing up in the Bible Belt, Daugherty attributes her thinking to her religious upbringing a great deal. She is steadfast in her beliefs and openly praises the Lord. In fact, during her “thank you” toast at the opening, she quoted from scripture and explained that she uses three red dots on her paintings as her signature to honor Him. The dots represent the Holy Trinity and the Blood of Christ. It is therefore not surprising that her inspiration for the “Beloved” series was in part from books of the Bible, specifically Song of Solomon (Book 22), Numbers (Book 4), and Judges (Book 6), as well as known figures like Eve and less-known stories like the Daughters of Zelophehad.

As a devout Christian and a close reader of the King James Bible, Daugherty draws strength from compelling stories of women overcoming adversity, finding justice, and being in love with humanity and God. She demonstrates their essence through their nude form, as “an affirmation to women from the creator that women are powerful both in form and in intellect.” Their cast-off gaze looks into space, suggesting contemplation that asserts independent thought and plans that percolate within women. They are fully embodied beings and their chastity is not contingent on clothing. Shedding coverings are a return to Eden, before there was shame imposed upon the body.

In Beloved VIII (2021), a nude stands before a riveting red curtain, reminiscent of Renaissance mythical paintings like Titian’s Venus and the Lute Player (ca 1565-1570), and sets her in a surrealistic garden. With a light-pink rose crown, Daugherty based the figure on the heart of Bride of Solomon, the Shulammite, from the Song of Solomon, who is also known as the Rose of Sharon. The book was written from both male and female perspectives and offers an intimate description of love, desire, and longing between King Solomon and his bride (or allegorically between God and His church). Shulammite awaits for her king as she unconsciously stares off to the right of the canvas and touches her right collar bone. She is coming into awareness of her beauty, “I am dark, but comely.” (Song of Solomon 1:5. In other translations, “I am black, and comely.”) Daugherty is able to identify with and find representation of not just herself, but all women of color as beautiful in the Bible; and she is beloved and accepted by God.

“I am my Beloved’s, and my Beloved is mine” is also from Song of Solomon (6:3) and it inspired the title of the series and the exhibition as a whole. Through this love from God for women’s physical beauty and inner strength, Daugherty defines fortitude with each painting. The public witnesses her unflinching audacity to be true to her work at atime when being open about one’s religious inclinations could be cause for retribution or downright discrimination. Even with outside pressures to disassociate from her beliefs, Daugherty is able to find a way to gracefully wove her love of God with her love of art. For her, this kind of tapestry makes for an ideal form of expression.