“Black bodies occupy a contentious space in Western minds, media, and art, and I try to complicate that space,” writes Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt, whose charcoal portraits rework iconography from science fiction, history, and popular culture. Woman with Tiara takes as its subject a craniometer, a 19th-century tool used in the racist pseudoscience of phrenology, which claimed to measure intelligence and personality through cranium shape. Clasped gently around the woman’s head, supported by her own hair rather than the hands of an oppressor, the craniometer becomes a tiara, a symbol of ornamentation, beauty, and power rather than subjugation. Her stature is reinforced by the monumental size of the drawing: Seven feet tall, it rivals full-length portraits of kings and queens, leaving the woman to preside with all the grandeur of royalty.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)